Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public • Hacker News Board

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#141

Post by jwilliams » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 2:45 AM UTC

varjag wrote: post #130

jwilliams wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java and the JVM are in still in prolific use - the JVM is a terrific piece of engineering. It features prominently in a bunch of large-scale web architectures (be it as straight Java, Hadoop, Scala or whatever). Note of these are traditional enterprise or legacy environments. I've never seem a major schism in Java or the JVM on the scale of the split between Python 2.x and 3.x. All my installs require (_at least_) t…

JVM works, but let's not get carried away there. It still has method size limit of 64Kb here in 21st century, it is stack-based (reducing the possible optimization space considerably), and has no provisions for proper lexical scoping. People port languages to JVM for its ubiquity and massive amounts of library code, but I assure you none does it for some technical advantage.

Why do you think the use of a stack reduces the optimization space?

There are plenty of models for stack optimization. Even if you don't go down the purist track, plenty of approaches use register-allocation and optimize from there. Feels like an outdated CISC vs RISC argument.

People also use the JVM because of it's Memory Model and robust threading.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#142

Post by jaakl » Sun, Jul 14, 2013, 1:11 PM UTC

polymatter wrote: post #14

Lewisham wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there. Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't re…

the problem with e-voting is any single sys admin has hugely more influence than any single human ballot counter.

that can happen also with physical voting. I have personal experience (years ago) that I was sysadmin of voting result calculations machine, and I was asked to change some numbers to fit them to the calculation system, as some vote counters had messed or lost some ballot papers. You can verify individual physical votes, but in the big picture (which matters) you must also just trust some sys admins.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#143

Post by knqku » Thu, Jul 18, 2013, 1:28 PM UTC

ERRnews wrote: post #84

Original story at http://news.err.ee/politics/0233b688-b116-44c3-98ca-89a4057a... has been updated with some background - domestic controversy and such

Even more controversy:

* Release of E-Election Software Code 'Did Not Go Far Enough' http://news.err.ee/sci-tech/940d2015-ffe1-4c9f-98e8-6fc60935...

* Architect: E-Election Code Should Not Be a Free-for-All http://news.err.ee/sci-tech/7f244d47-86ee-41bd-a544-87bd756b...

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#144

Post by keymone » Fri, Jul 19, 2013, 2:51 PM UTC

Fargren wrote: post #78

yaddayadda wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once there is an easy online system in place then alternatives to an all or nothing vote could be established. For example, you may vote for a representative every X years and this representative would vote for you when you opted not to. Over the course of X years there are hundreds of votes, but you are passionate about 20 of them. You could directly cast a vote on those 20 issues, but your representative would cast…

What happens when there's a big decision that heavily affects media interests? They start using their sway on public opinion to make the decision important, and a disproportionate number of people become "passionate" about an issue they don't really know more than they were fed. There are probably other problems, but I don't think this one is small.

well that's exactly what happens every couple years and is called "president/parliament elections". and then people are locked up with shitty options for years and can do nothing about it.