Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m so furious I’m willing to say she was a “woman” hire.
Look at the linkedin for the company. Almost all women in fact.
link?
The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
211–220 of 399 posts
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#212How long will it take our society to realize that democracy is threatened when machines are involved in voting or vote counting? Going back to voting exclusively by ink on paper and hand counting is imperative.
Last election cycle, the Bernie Sanders campaign insisted that the Iowa caucus should be changed so that more data was reported. Back then only the final number of delegates were reported. So it is entirely possible that the caucus always was a mess but that it only got discovered this year.
and that's being spun into "he got what he asked for" now.
yes, the general public now understands how bobo this operation is!
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#213I'm picturing the Dos Equis meme saying "I don't always test, but when I do, I test in production. Stay on call, my friends." At least now I don't feel bad about when I test in production. (just kidding, I didn't feel bad before).
The app was sent out through the free version of a beta testing platform. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-...
The Verge report says that the Android version was distributed using TestFairy beta testing free version, and that this is limited to 200 users. Assume 25% of the 1600 sites used Android and half of the users would be rejected.
But looking at the TestFairy pricing page, the free version is actually limited to 200 sessions per month. I would read this as every time a user logs on - definitely not going to work for 400 users logging on multiple times in one night.
The company who produced this app didn't just fail on development but on any procurement/contractual sense. How could they have imagined that relying on a free tier of a beta testing platform could be acceptable in a real life production environment?
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#214This should really be getting more attention, here is an alternative breakdown: https://imgur.com/gallery/ycOC0HX . The jest of it is one of the most important institutions in the United States (the Democratic National Committee) uses a highly nepotistic and incompetent system for managing IT which leads to colossal failures in marketing, canvassing, and security. Not to mention massive PII violations as millions of…
The DNC doesn't run the Iowa Caucuses.
Looks like that has changed:
https://mobile.twitter.com/kendallkarson/status/122481061735...
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm saying those in support of ostensibly neutral third parties should not be making tweets indicating strong bias for one of the parties they are charged with treating neutrally. Is it really so difficult to keep your public persona neutral and vanilla if you're a damn CEO? Wasn't this standard practice until recently? What, because Trump vomits on Twitter 24/7 everyone else needs to as well?
You think it’s OK for CEOs of companies providing services to political campaigns to have political opinions as long as they keep them secret? I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so here’s your chance: any particular reason we shouldn’t dismiss you as not being serious?
>You think it’s OK for CEOs of companies providing services to political campaigns to have political opinions as long as they keep them secret?
No, I think it's questionable when a CEO publicly discloses a strong political bias, receives private funds from the personally favored candidate, has cordial photos with the candidate at social events, and then is hired by the DNC and charged with being unbiased in a secret, electronically controlled ballot.
There are tens of millions of dollars changing hands in the ramp up to the election. This is not a complex scheme involving millions of mouths to keep shut and olympic mental gymnastics to justify. A handful of politically leaning and/or paid off devs add a package to the code and you have whatever results you want.
Ask yourself, do you really think corruption only exists outside of the United States? The bottom line is there are many discrepancies which happen to align toward a possibly calculated malicious intent. This feels like a "conspiracy theory" because there are so many tenuously linked components and no hard proof - but that's how any real life unfolding event looks until people have poured over it for months post facto and sorted through everything.
In any case what I'm saying is that there's plenty of incompetence and bias here to at least be prudently suspicious.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#216Are we irrigating our crops with Brawndo yet?
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really difficult to believe that a group of people in charge of something may be biased? Calling it a "conspiracy" theory is just dismissive slander at this point. People have conspired successfully to achieve far greater and more malicious goals.
That would be an awful lot of work for such a tiny gain. And it doesn't scale. AT ALL. What moron would go to the trouble? Iowa picks corn, not presidents.
What hard work? How many devs do you have to pay off to write a handful of lines of code manipulating a secret ballot, especially when they may be willing because of personal bias? We know electronic voting in its current implementation is severely vulnerable to tampering, both external and internal.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why they can't just do a https website with login is beyond me. Why an App? We all know there's nothing in it but boilerplate.
By being an app, they can easily advise the user "download it in advance and register in advance" by that verify they have it installed. Then they can make sure the app will work to collect the data in case of wifi/mobile network issues so that the user enters the data on the caucus site and if that building for whatever reason has no network go outside to upload. Making sure that average Joe preloads a webapp and to…
Why is downloading a native app easier for Average Joe than clicking a link to a web app that's served with appropriate Cache-Control headers and uses localStorage?
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
The career path of prep cook -> software certification mill -> wrecking american democracy is the best thing I've ever seen.
For most software development work a bootcamper is just as likely to be a solid team member as someone with a CS degree after a few years of good industry experience. They key issue isn't that they are bootcampers but that they are fresh bootcampers with no more senior people around to guide the project or mentor them. (similarly a fresh CS grad is fairly worthless in serious production work and will not improve much…
That might be true, but if I get to choose between someone with no industry experience, and another person with no industry experience whose mind has been poisoned by a certificate mill, I’m taking the former. Those boot camps are, literally, worse than useless.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the relationship between the Iowa DNC and the “main” DNC?
There's no such thing as an "Iowa DNC". You presumably mean the IDP, the Iowa Democratic Party. They're separate organizations. The DNC and the state parties are often at odds with each other. There's a good series of "Reply All" episodes about this, focusing on the Alabama Democratic Party.
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