@trymas/ "IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies." <- I can only agree that they are in the forefront of using IT, not producing anything noticeable, with rare exceptions like Skype messenger, MikroTik routers and FlyZip algorhythm.
How Estonia became a leader in technology
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#62One little critique I have, is about Estonia's e-voting. That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing…
Which part of it would you consider a black box? The protocols are open (you can write your own voting application), the source code is largely open, there are numerous reports on it, you are most welcome to become an observer (and many do) etc. An informed critique of the system would actually be very welcome, just stating "random guys with flash drives are bad" is not that helpful
I wonder how any e-voting system could provide both anonymity of the vote and a secure access ("one person, one vote")? To provide the latter you've got to login somewhere, right? And to stay anonymous you can't leave any identity trace.
In Estonia the voter has to login using her/his personal ID card so there's no anonymity at all?
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a "little critique", we're basically talking about abandoning the fundamental principles of a functioning democracy here. If such an election was monitored by international observers, the way we often do with third world countries, the report could be summarised as "probably completely fraudulent, because we weren't allowed to verify anything". E-voting is election fraud. Period. Elections should be transpar…
How so? The electronic voting is modelled exactly based on mail-based voting that is widely used globally. You put your ballot into an envelope, add another one and off it goes. To a public mailbox. Transported, sorted and delivered along with open-back postcards. To be manually handled by volunteers in a way most voters even do not realise exists. We put your e-ballot into two envelopes making sure cryptographically…
Mail based voting is also extremely dubious. We allow it in some exceptional cases for a small minority. Personally I'm against the concept.
Also, I never mentioned "secure". That's a red herring when it comes to any form of electronic voting. It's about democracy, which includes the guarantee that each vote is cast in absolute freedom.
Nobody can hold a gun to a voters head, and no voter can be forced to justify their vote afterwards, because they and only they know what they voted.
We didn't build that guarantee into our democracies by accident, and taking it because we've invented some shiny new toys that bring us nothing but some minor convenience is an insult to democracy.
And like I said, it's ridiculous that we hold third world countries and new democracies to those standards, but have started to massively ignore them ourselves, because we are too lazy to maintain the very foundations of our democracy.
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part of it would you consider a black box? The protocols are open (you can write your own voting application), the source code is largely open, there are numerous reports on it, you are most welcome to become an observer (and many do) etc. An informed critique of the system would actually be very welcome, just stating "random guys with flash drives are bad" is not that helpful
I wonder how any e-voting system could provide both anonymity of the vote and a secure access ("one person, one vote")? To provide the latter you've got to login somewhere, right? And to stay anonymous you can't leave any identity trace. In Estonia the voter has to login using her/his personal ID card so there's no anonymity at all?
Read the spec, it's basically storing the vote in a completely encrypted state. Once counting starts, the personal information is destroyed (literally, i know the guy, he takes the hard drives and bashes them until they are completely powder pretty much), and the votes are unencrypted. Once you start counting, there is no way to know whose vote is who. (It's actually much more difficult, but it's based on mail voting. I'm a bad source on this, read the spec. Everything is open-source.)
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is racism.
Do you know what racism, or even race is? You can be white but not Estonian, how does racism apply there?
What is "white"? Why do you need do differentiate "Estonians" from other kinds of people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#Ethnic_nationalism
There is a history of racism in Estonia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is racism.
Nationalism is a distinct "ism" from racism.
It's a form of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#Ethnic_nationalism
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them via snail mail to the German tax office. And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and you need to…
This is probably because they haven't found a way yet to put a stamp on a digital form ;)
Really? Scammers could do that ten years ago.
I assumed Germany was more organized than that.
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
what about verifiable mix-net voting? wouldn't mix-net voting prevent from such things in the first place? if not, why/how? (*I'm learning about these stuff, and I want to know your opinions on them...)
One feature of traditional voting is that everybody interested can be a volunteer and inspect _all_ aspects of the procedure. There are few requirements (some basic reading, some math which is mostly addition and division up to 10 digits in the worst case). Once you start adding more complicated math to it, you lose this very desirable property. Once you add tech, you have a black box (what does the silicon in this c…
It's much easier to cheat on traditional voting system. You can just make a pre-made box filled with fabricated votes, turn off (or pause) recording, befriend(bribe) those inspection-related personnels, etc.
From what I've learnt, with methods like mix-nets, you can be probabilistically sure that a person has voted, and there are no 'false' votes
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#69(2013).
Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...
Re: How Estonia became a leader in technology
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
One feature of traditional voting is that everybody interested can be a volunteer and inspect _all_ aspects of the procedure. There are few requirements (some basic reading, some math which is mostly addition and division up to 10 digits in the worst case). Once you start adding more complicated math to it, you lose this very desirable property. Once you add tech, you have a black box (what does the silicon in this c…
It's much easier to cheat on traditional voting system. You can just make a pre-made box filled with fabricated votes, turn off (or pause) recording, befriend(bribe) those inspection-related personnels, etc. From what I've learnt, with methods like mix-nets, you can be probabilistically sure that a person has voted, and there are no 'false' votes
Pre-made box filled with fabricated votes: let every volunteer (typically at least one by every party, plus a couple independents) check that boxes are empty and in order, and that nobody stuffs them over the day.
Turn off / pause recording: no idea what you even mean, there's physical presence of opposite parties throughout the entire process.
Bribe inspection-related personnel: again, volunteer driven with volunteers from all parties plus independents - it will be hard to bribe your direct competitors (and enough of them).
The higher levels where numbers are tabulated publicize all numbers (in and out), so anything that's off can be verified locally in a distributed way.
The idea is that everything happens under public scrutiny. I don't see how that could work with fun algorithms and probabilities that only some experts can understand.
The main problem is that seemingly opposing forces collude secretly, but there won't be a fix for that in the voting mechanism.