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When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

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Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#341

Post by Dragonai »

fergie wrote: post #184
sorum wrote: post #94

Some Grade A zingers in there: > The man in question is Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s many former Prime Ministers. > For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites. > Harold Holt was another former Prime Minster and we… lost him? He disappeared while going for a swim one morning. This is not a joke. We named Harold Holt Memor…

"(Instagram, in case you don’t know it, is an app you can open up on your phone any time to look at ads)."

This was the line that made me audibly laugh. Couldn't not finish the article after that. Great read.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#343

Post by eru »

zerd wrote: post #317
eru wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know anything about the probability distribution of likely inputs, it's even easier to reverse with minimal loss. Eg knowing that the input was black text on white background or a natural image (instead of eg white noise) helps a lot.

Also if you have multiple pixelated/blurry images that helps you can reconstruct it more easily, e.g. if different newspapers print pixelated picture of the "suspect" you can reconstruct it pretty accurately. Machine learning can also do a surprising good job of it, especially if you know what the target is (e.g. a face) https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/4/20848008/ai-mach... Sample code: https://gist.github.…

> Machine learning can also do a surprising good job of it, especially if you know what the target is (e.g. a face)

Yes. Though that's just a corollary of doing better when you know something about the probability distribution of inputs.

(But a very useful and practical corollary. My formulation didn't give any hint how you might make use of that knowledge of the distribution.)

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#344

Post by eru »

aidenn0 wrote: post #301
eru wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, you just wrote a pretty good argument for (political) voting on paper instead of via machines.

I think the correct solution is a machine that prints out both a human- and machine-readable representation of the vote. The voter can confirm that the human-readable representation is correct, and you can randomly hand-count a few boxes of ballots to check that the hand-count matches the machine-count. An election doesn't need to be tamper- proof we just need to be able to detect tampering well enough to make tamper…

You could do such a hybrid system, but honestly purely paper based systems seem to work well enough in practice. Eg Germany uses paper and human counting, and the results are usually available fairly quickly.

The problem with randomly hand-counting a few boxes of ballots is that you then need to convince people that the random selection was uniform and fair and actually random.

There are methods to do that, but there are at least as complicated and full of cryptographic finesse, that they ain't simpler than vetting an electronic voting system in the first place.

Having said that: human counting isn't fool proof and is still open to abuse and tampering.

It's mainly that any village idiot can in-theory audit the human-run system, and that it would take a conspiracy with lots of people to engage in wide spread tampering.

The more people involved, the harder it is to prevent leaks.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#345

Post by MattSayar »

oefnak wrote: post #300
rocqua wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try some of james mickens articles: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens They are written in a similar style, I really love them.

Thank you for this. I ate the entire mango.pdf and was still hungry.

His presentations are also a fine quality

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#346

Post by chris_wot »

qdiencdxqd wrote: post #173
chris_wot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, this is the guy who knighted a prince and ate a raw onion. What did you expect? Abbott was Australia's Trump. Thankfully he lasted in office an even shorter time than the people he replaced.

He was a Rhodes Scholar, so he's probably pretty smart.

I’m not saying he is stupid. But he was fundamentally unsuited at being a Prime Minister. He left the government in absolute chaos.

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#347

Post by eru »

aidenn0 wrote: post #314
cesarb wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just tampering one needs to worry about with elections. There's also secrecy (to prevent voter coercion).

Right, otherwise the problem would be trivial. If it wasn't clear, the plan was the printed ballot would anonymously go in a box to be machine counted.

Someone could stuff the box with extra ballots?

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#348

Post by jgwil2 »

gropius wrote: post #180
zwayhowder wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the Simpson's 3D episode. Professor Frink's >"Well, it should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual, who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology..."

Professor Frink, Professor Frink. He'll make you laugh, he'll make you think. He likes to run and then the thing with the.. person...

That monkey is going to pay...

Re: When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number

#349

Post by aidenn0 »

eru wrote: post #347
aidenn0 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, otherwise the problem would be trivial. If it wasn't clear, the plan was the printed ballot would anonymously go in a box to be machine counted.

Someone could stuff the box with extra ballots?

Yup, but they can do so with old-fashioned paper ballots too. Any security measures for paper ballots will also work with my idea, and the machine could also do fancier things like printing out a timestamp and signature of the timestamp . I really want things to be simple though: if the system of voting is too complex, then it will be distrusted, and distrust in the voting system is toxic to democracy.

What they can't trivially do with any system including paper ballots is remove ballots, compared to digital voting machines where you can add e.g. -100 votes to candidtate A, 100 votes to candidate B, thus ensuring that the total-votes field is correct while advantaging candidate B -- this was actually demonstrated by a security researcher on a Diebold touch-screen machine.

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