91–100 of 148 posts
We started late so the results were out when we finished but I think it'll be a good idea to develop software that can parse the PDF results and display them faster than the electoral bodies can. In Kenya, and Nigeria, the delays cause a lot of anxiety
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This approach was part of their strategy: > Then we started showing some results we knew to the bots - if they entered wrong numbers, we would stop accepting the results.
It seems to me that when combating bots or hackers, the wrong approach is to provide immediate negative feedback. Giving an immediate error code lets them know that their current strategy is not working and to try something different. It seems like a better approach would be to make them think you were accepting the results, when in fact they were going to the bit bucket. Hackers trying to get into your corporate dat…
It seems one should record all entries, but only update a canonical db if all entries fail to trip automated tampering detections.
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> I was left with the impression that it is the paper records in this story that led to the unravelling of an attempt to forge the results. The manual tallying of paper records is what lead to the attempt to forge the results in the first place. If the results were electronically tallied to generate an official result, then they wouldn't need to recount the whole election to verify the result, just doing a statistica…
How do you recount electronic-only elections?
Ballot machines print either a final tally at the end of the day, or print every single vote and automatically drop it into a physical ballot, depending on the threat model of the country in question. Either way the you have partial or total recount.
Oh, and Mark didn't mention that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was indicted for heroin charges in the US in 2003, forfeited $460k & is just too old to run a democracy this size. Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption. There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter inti…
Ahem, somebody tell the U.S. that
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This approach was part of their strategy: > Then we started showing some results we knew to the bots - if they entered wrong numbers, we would stop accepting the results.
It seems to me that when combating bots or hackers, the wrong approach is to provide immediate negative feedback. Giving an immediate error code lets them know that their current strategy is not working and to try something different. It seems like a better approach would be to make them think you were accepting the results, when in fact they were going to the bit bucket. Hackers trying to get into your corporate dat…
There have also been funny defcon-talks about messing with attackers about this, by returning all kinds of messed up return codes, slow-lorry'ing the bot, ... I'm kind of wondering if you could SSRF (or rather, CSRF) a bot like this by returning a redirect to e.g. the AWS metadata API... could be a fun topic to mess with.
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these are just photos embedded in a PDF, which actually isn't that bad an idea, because it lets you scan multiple pages and join them together as a 'document' (not sure if the documents in OP had several pages, but if you've scanned/photographed a multi-page document, PDF is not that bad of a solution)
A better option would be to use the TIFF format. You can use it as a container format to store lossless and lossy image formats, and handles multiple images in a single container. It was the standard for scanners until PDF seemed to dominate the scene.
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On the contrary, eletronic voting doesn't create the paper trail necessary to dig up frauds like this. You can simply program or hack the system to report any vote total you want.
First of all, hacking the electronic system is much much harder than hacking the paper process. In the case at hand the paper tallying process was the one hacked. And second, electronic systems can create a paper trail, just make the electronic machine spit out a paper receipt. Then you have the best of both worlds, you can have instant electronic totals, and then do some random sampling recounts of the receipts to v…
Scaling an attack against a computer system is almost the same as doing an attack against a computer system. Few attacks don't scale.
But yeah, if you just print the vote and push it into an urn (while the voter can read it), you'll get the best of both worlds.
I know that OCR software is able to read stuff like magazine articles and figure out column layout, embedded charts, etc. It's weird if is nothing to do that with a pdf. Maybe I'll look around or see if I can hack up something.
Oh, and Mark didn't mention that Bola Ahmed Tinubu was indicted for heroin charges in the US in 2003, forfeited $460k & is just too old to run a democracy this size. Atiku Abubakar (second candidate) was a former VP and the president he served under (Obasanjo) still insists the dude remains a monument to corruption. There's been a coordinated campaign at all levels to rig this election massively and we saw voter inti…
From the looks of it, if he runs it, it won't be a democracy