IPs can easily be spoofed. Until someone hashes all IPs with physical GPS coordinates, this is simply not a proof.
Proof of location for online polls
61–70 of 89 posts
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#62There are a lot of valid critiques already, but here's another: This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections. This connection latency could be caused by over-provisioned office connections, torrents, bad gsm reception, cheap internet or a cheap device. What prevents a client from strategically delaying specific requests, to simulate a slow device in the target geography. AFAIT, this would be indist…
For example very slow ADSL connections or somewhere with poor phone reception.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#63Usefulness of proposed metrics aside, I can't wrap my head around proposed use cases there. If you don't require proof of identification for voting then one local voter can vote limitless times. If you do require it, why don't you trust it? Surely an identification is enough too choose if someone could vote or not. It could be a nice addition to some social networks like Mastodon, I suppose, if people wouldn't care e…
The idea is to make things like petitions or demonstrations easier on a global scale and to also make voting data accessible for independent analysis, where further manipulation attempts can be identified and excluded.
My guess is that it's much cheaper to create 10000 fake accounts on facebook etc than to send 10000 requests from unique residential IPv4 addresses in a target country, which are also evenly distributed across Internet Service Providers and IP blocks to evade detection.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a motivated attacker its not that hard to add a few thousand raspberry pis to a residential internet network in most countries. Its really a quite practical attack when the stakes are governmental control.
Or just compromise an entire ISP full of routers...
or just sell ISP the routers you made.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#65How would this solution differentiate a slow connection and a VPN?
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is covered on the page "Successfully manipulating a poll which employs this method would require following efforts and resources: Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices" So yes, it seems like it can be defeated via a remote desktop (or any proxy in the allowed area)
> Gaining control over a large number of devices in the target geographic region for submitting votes through those devices Does AWS Lambda count as a machine for these purposes? If so, you can get a nearly infinite number of them just by cycling a config param and casting another vote.
I assume they'd just ban the entire AWS IP block. And similarly for other cloud providers.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#67https://ipv4.games/ will show you who will win at your polls.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#68> Latency-based geolocation can help protect poll integrity by: > Detecting when poll responses originate from outside the intended geographic region > Identifying attempts to manipulate polls through elevated VPN/proxy usage Unless the user also needs to complete a reaction-time test, couldn't this be defeated by using a remote desktop connection to a machine that is physically located in the other geography? It jus…
Yes, and also, I'd argue that anonymizing your location is a sacred feature of the internet that anytime someone builds a better mousetrap we WILL build a better mouse. The internet is not a place where requiring proof of location is welcome. For online polls, it should never be necessary, either: My rights to vote somewhere should depend only on my membership status to that somewhere, and not my current physical loc…
This is similar to the argument the failed experiment 4Chan showed the internet. Being fully anonymous, the best arguments don't rise to the top, bad actors lie and lie and when confronted with their lies, they just pretend to be someone else and lie some more. All completely anonymous online polls are effectively useless. It's nice to have some research in helping them be a little less useless.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#69having worked on IP geolocation in the past, I don't think this works. Though it can do a pretty good job of getting you in the right continent. * Not all traffic goes through fiber - there are microwave links operating closer to the speed of light, though these are mostly reserved for high-speed trading. There's also satellite connections, but as long as they don't do satellite-staellite, they're slower. * There are…
I don't think microwave is "closer to the speed of light" than.. light.
Re: Proof of location for online polls
#70There are a lot of valid critiques already, but here's another: This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections. This connection latency could be caused by over-provisioned office connections, torrents, bad gsm reception, cheap internet or a cheap device. What prevents a client from strategically delaying specific requests, to simulate a slow device in the target geography. AFAIT, this would be indist…
> This technique will have to allow for over-all slow connections
I don't think the technique can accommodate that. But I would love to be proven wrong.