361–370 of 381 posts
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The only output of the machine could be a bit of paper that you can view through a window and verify. Doesn't really matter if it's closed source.
So we don’t have to trust that the company wrote it correctly. https://www.wired.com/2009/08/diebold-audit-logs
Not sure why you linked that?
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Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
This argument never really made sense to me, because it's already completely undermined by mail in voting in which you can not only sell your vote but even have the guy you sold it to turn it in for you so he can be 100% certain he's getting what he wanted. You can even give him a 'blank check' by filling out your personal data/signature, and leave the vote slots blank for him. And for context on the scale of this, i…
This keeps coming up but is not generally true. See my comment from another thread [0]:
I don't know how it's done in the USA, but in Germany voting by post has to be carried out before the day of the election. The actual postal votes are stored and only opened on the day of the election. After somebody send in their postal vote they can go to the public voting office and declare to invalidate their postal vote. The people counting the postal votes will get a list with invalidated votes and remove these envelopes before the votes are opened. The person who invalidated can then either do another postal vote or vote at the ballot box.
So in Germany postal voting is secured against selling votes.
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We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems! Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using…
> Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
And what were GCHQ, MI6 and NCSC doing to protect our prime-minister at this time? We have a problem in democratic nations. I've written about it here [1]. Bruce Schneier has also addressed it in his own way. Our lack of any framework for civic cybersecurity is a disgrace. People in future ages will look back on our time as a wild-west. A solution can only come from a ground-up awareness through education. [1] http:/…
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As it is right now, the UK has a mix of parliamentary supremacy and unequal representation which means that with ~40% of the vote, given you are courting the right people and are a more entrenched party, you can do essentially whatever you want as a majority in parliament is basically supreme.
As it is right now, the UK does not fit any definition of democracy.
The question is then what phone exists that is immune from this? A flip phone? A Nokia 1011? I might be completely misinformed but seems like SIM card and the underlying OS is vector. What happens if I use a cell phone from late 90s and early 2000s? What is there to hack with those flip phones? JavaME over the wire? What if the cell phone dates even further? Legitimately curious what options is there. Could If you ar…
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> Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating The zero-knowledge proof avoids that... Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know
The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.
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She is now Home Secretary of the UK. She got fired upwards.
The current Cabinet is suffering from a serious lack of talent in my opinion; several political purges related to Brexit has meant the only real qualifying characteristic for some of the highest offices in the land is being a yes-man for Johnson.
At least from an outside view, it's the UK now that is showing a good leadership in the current worldwide crises. While the US, France and Germany are completely lost, especially on how to deal with a "strong-man".
(Meanwhile nobody remembers Cameron or that guy that was a pure puppet of the US in the forced Iraq war, and they were the posh gentleman everyone was expecting)
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Every British government has been an ally of Israel. You don't turn down a relationship with a country with Israel's military, technical and intelligence capabilities, and worth $5bn in bilateral trade for nothing if you have any sense.
UK bilateral trade with Russia was ~$17 billion in 2021 (i assume that's imports plus exports right?). Russia was a very close friend twenty years ago, Iraq was a very close ally in the 1980s. I'm sure Israel realises how quickly the west can turn on friends and allies when it suits us and that this is why they spend tens of millions a year wooing US and UK politicians. Russia became a pariah over night and the momen…
We're a vassal state, there's no Brexit on the special relationship.
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"Britain is not a democracy in any modern sense of the word." Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ... I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We a…
Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest demo…
Democracy doesn't mean one person one vote per se - it means governance by "the people" instead of the tyrant. Ironically a tyrant might be deliberately installed in times of peril by the people and then removed from office later on. Politics were quite robust in those days. Politics - from politike I think (never studied Greek, only Latin) - people of the city, also "police" is derived from politike or perhaps polis, which is nearly how Police is pronounced with a Scottish accent - especially around Glasgow.
Let's face it when the Greeks came up with a functional democracy, slavery was routine and obviously women and servants and other undesirables were ineligible to vote. Times have changed somewhat since then but there is still much work to do to ensure full equality for all. One day we may all be able to cry "Liberty, equality, fraternity" and not frown at fraternity meaning brotherhood and hence is rather sexist.
Anyway, what we have here in the UK is a voting system which is called "first past the post". It does involve one person = one vote but it is designed to avoid close results meaning a hung parliament. I don't actually know anyone who is a fan of this system but then again voting systems are quite a niche worry at the moment. The US system for presidential elections "colleges" is even weirder than ours for parliament/PM.
Quite obviously the UK cannot be the oldest example of a democracy because the word itself is way older than the UK and the old Greeks clearly invented the concept and lived by it! The current boast I think is oldest parliament "Mother of Parliaments" but I think Iceland may have prior art on that with the Alþingi - "allthingi". That letter that looks like a p is a thorne and was also used in English until we unceremoniously ditched it a few years back. Thorne also has a form that looks like y so "Ye olde shoppe" which is literally pronounced as "the old shop" but most hereabouts will insist on as something like "ye oldee shopee". Bloody kids!
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> If not NSO, then someone else. There's a big difference between an underground group doing it in semi-secrecy, vs a state-sponsored company doing it publicly. With said company somehow not being sued into the ground or said country's action not being taken as an act of war in situations like this. > I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all The high value of what they offer comes from t…
NSO isn't the equivalent of NSA. While NSA is part of the US government and actively spied on allied countries with no repercussions, NSO is a privately held company employing ex intelligence. With mandatory service at 18 and the private sector paying between 8 to 10 times more, it's common to find these intelligence boys leaving the service asap and working in different private companies. Implying Israel has anythin…
While NSO isn't part of the government, their work and existence is obviously very much endorsed and allowed by their government.