> the problem is that you usually don't have guarantees that the updates you get are genuine
A point of order: you do have that guarantee for most Linux distro packages. All 70,000 of them in Debian's case. And all Linux distro distribute their packages anonymously, so they can never target just one individual.
That's primarily because they aren't trying to make money out of you. Making money requires a billing relationship, and tracking which of your customers own what. Off the back of that governments can demand particular users are targeted with "special" updates. Australia in particular demands commercial providers do that with its "Assistance and Access Bill (2018)" and I'm sure most governments in the OECD have equivalents.
Yes, they can do that. But they can't select who gets the binary, so everybody gets it. Debian does reproducible builds on trusted machines so they would have to infect the source.
You can safely assume the source will be viewed by a lot of people over time, so the change will be discovered. The source is managed mostly by git, so there would be history about who introduced the change.
The reality is open source is so far ahead on proprietary code on transparency, there is almost no contest at this point. If a government wants to compromise proprietary code it's easy, cheap, and undetectable. Try the same with open source it's still cheap, but the social engineering ain't easy, and it will be detected - it's just a question of how long it takes.
You could try reading the Wikipedia article on the end to end voter veritable system called Prêt à Voter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AAt_%C3%A0_Voter It's not that hard to grok how it works because there is no complicated math involved.
It allows any voter to verify their vote was accurately recorded in the reported total. The usual argument against is you need a lot of people to verify, and most won't. That's probably true when everyone is confident in the outcome, but I'm not so sure it works be true if there was a wiff of fraud in the air.
> how can you prove that innumerable votes were added to the record, or that your vote is correct?
In Australia it's easy to prove no votes to the record because everyone on the rolls must vote, or they get fined. Ergo total votes must equal the number of people on the roll minus the number fined. As for "your vote was counted" - read the Wikipedia article. These systems do prove that, while keeping your ballot secret.
> You could try reading the Wikipedia article on the end to end voter veritable system called Prêt à Voter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%AAt_%C3%A0_Voter It's not that hard to grok how it works because there is no complicated math involved.
> It allows any voter to verify their vote was accurately recorded in the reported total. The usual argument against is you need a lot of people to verify, and most won't. That's probably true when everyone is confident in the outcome, but I'm not so sure it works be true if there was a wiff of fraud in the air.
There are a number of application details which wildly alters whether it's workable or not, where workable leans fairly close to current scalable cost, in which case the added benefit is minimal.
> In Australia it's easy to prove no votes to the record because everyone on the rolls must vote, or they get fined. Ergo total votes must equal the number of people on the roll minus the number fined. As for "your vote was counted" - read the Wikipedia article. These systems do prove that, while keeping your ballot secret.
Yes, but only by using as much verification as paper ballot casting, which is already provably robust and even more verifiable due to decentralization.
> Yes, but only by using as much verification as paper ballot casting
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. A voter can not verify their vote in the current paper systems. Using these systems they can.
There are two kinds of attacks: typically classes as retail and wholesale. Retail attacks happen at the front end: stuffing ballot boxes, coercion, vote buying. As the effort involved roughly corresponds to the number of votes altered changing a large enough volume of votes to alter the outcome will be detectable using robust social systems, which boils down to teams of people watching each other.
Wholesale attacks happen when the vote is processed after they have been cast. An example is altering vote counting machine to lie about the votes counted. As they can systemically alter large numbers of votes they can be very difficult to detect even using statistical megtods. They are impossible to pull off when everything is done manually as teams watching teams still works, and you have to corrupt a lot of people. But when you introduce automation and machinery they voting system becomes vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.
Yes, "just continue to do everything manually using pencil and paper" does mostly eliminate wholesale attacks. But the reality is we are ditching pencil and paper for more automated processes. A famous example is a Diablo voting machine in some USA state, failed before regurgitating it's vote count (the "Volusia Error"). A man with a screw driver duely arrived, modified things, and handed over what he said was the correct vote count.
We are automating voting with voting machines and vote tabulators for good reasons. They are easier to use, particularly for the disabled, they are faster, they are cheaper than redundant teams of people, and they more accurate than manual methods. They are already arrived, and their use will only grow over time. Pleas like yours to "just use paper" are having little effect on their inceasing adoption.
The other option is to insist these machines and systems are end to end cryptographically verifable. That makes wholesale attacks these automated systems facilitate detectable. Currently we are deploying these systems without such safeguards. IMO this is insanity.
> I'm not sure what you are getting at here. A voter can not verify their vote in the current paper systems.
In the current paper systems you don't have to, as you know what you put on it before it got anonymized and counted as one vote by the teams watched by teams.
> Using these systems they can.
In theory, yes. In practice, barely. If it was easy/practical it would be intrinsically susceptible to coercion.
In general, I agree with everything you write except for this paragraph:
> We are automating voting with voting machines and vote tabulators for good reasons. They are easier to use, particularly for the disabled, they are faster, they are cheaper than redundant teams of people, and they more accurate than manual methods. They are already arrived, and their use will only grow over time. Pleas like yours to "just use paper" are having little effect on their inceasing adoption.
The only "good" reason would be cost, but I wouldn't agree that it's a worthy trade-off. They could be easier to use, but it seems generally to be prone to UI issues making it unclear who/what you're voting for.
I'm sure their use will grow over time, but it won't be for any reasons that are good for democracy.
True. But the "secret ballot in a polling booth using paper" systems are disappearing. 32% of Australian votes aren't done that way now.
> In theory, yes. In practice, barely. If it was easy/practical it would be intrinsically susceptible to coercion.
It can be reduced to scanning a QR code in an app. It is a bit of a mystery to me why you think that isn't easy, practical or is susceptible to coercion.
> It can be reduced to scanning a QR code in an app. It is a bit of a mystery to me why you think that isn't easy, practical or is susceptible to coercion.
Because "scanning a QR code in an app" would lead to:
1) integrity loss, ie reduction of peers in the secret sharing concept.
and/or
2) privacy loss, ie vote coercion, "show me you voted for our dear leader or something bad happens".
You can either confirm your encrypted ballot is present, OR you can decrypt it before being cast, in which case it can't be cast anymore. Unless I'm missing something they're mutually exclusive. The entire premise of the mix net is not being able to verify what you voted for, only that your vote is there, right?
> Because "scanning a QR code in an app" would lead to ...
> 1) integrity loss, ie reduction of peers in the secret sharing concept.
> 2) privacy loss, ie vote coercion, "show me you voted for our dear leader or something bad happens".
Following your instincts instead of doing the work required to understand Prêt à Voter will lead you to that conclusion. Your instincts are wrong in this case. Neither of your claims are true. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page makes that plain. It says in part:
> In particular, Prêt à Voter enables voters to confirm that their vote is accurately included in the count whilst avoiding dangers of coercion or vote buying.
In case you haven't thought about it, vote buying is the hardest problem to solve for secret ballots. It is hardest because both the voter and a malicious third party are working cooperatively to corrupt the system. If you come up with a system that prevents that, you've pretty much solved all retail voting attacks. Prêt à Voter makes a vote verifiable, while ensuring votes can't be sold.
While you can't sell your vote with the typical implementation of Prêt à Voter, you can do it with your favoured paper ballot system:
1. Mallory obtains an authentic, blank ballot, and fills it in way he wants. Perhaps he does that by voting, pocketing the ballot paper, and putting the dummy in the ballot box.
2. Mallory gives the pre-filled ballot to a voter willing to sell his vote for an agreed sum outside the voting booth, where the transaction can't be detected. The voter isn't given his payment yet.
3. The voter goes into the secure voting place and is given a blank ballot. In the privacy afforded to him to cast a secret ballot he pockets the blank ballot, replacing it with the pre-filled ballot given to him by Mallory.
4. The voter casts the paid for vote.
5. The voter meets with Mallory in their secret spot, hands over the blank ballot and gets paid.
Rinse, lather and repeat all the way to winning the election.
If you haven't seen that little caper described before you will find it surprising. I did. But it is nowhere near the surprise you will get from spending the time to learn how Prêt à Voter achieves what appears to be impossible.
> Following your instincts instead of doing the work required to understand Prêt à Voter will lead you to that conclusion. Your instincts are wrong in this case. Neither of your claims are true. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia page makes that plain.
This is from the actual paper, not wikipedia:
> C. Audit of ballot forms
Voters may wish to check that the order of candidates
claimed to be encrypted on the right-hand side does indeed
correspond to the list printed on the left-hand side. If this
were not the case then a vote cast for one candidate may be
considered after decryption as a vote for a different candidate.
To provide such reassurance, voters may elect to ‘audit’ a
ballot form. This involves removing the left-hand side of the
ballot form, and asking the system to decrypt the candidate
list from the onion on the right-hand side. The voter can then
check that the decrypted list matches the list of candidates
printed on the left-hand side. In principle, this audit can
be carried out as often as the voter wishes. This gives the
voter confidence that the ballot forms have been correctly
constructed.
> However, the voter is not allowed to cast a vote on a
decrypted ballot form. Once the candidate list associated
with a onion is known, vote privacy, and hence resistance to
coercion and vote-selling, is lost. The audit process gives an
individual voter confidence that the ballot forms are correctly
constructed, but does not allow her to check the ballot form
that she is using to cast the vote.
What I said in GP is that you can't verify WHAT you voted for AFTER the fact, because the concept of coercion hinges on being able to threaten or pay for something the victim can provide. It's a logical proof, you can't design that away. I'm not saying it's not a valid trade-off.
> What I said in GP is that you can't verify WHAT you voted for AFTER the fact
Agreed, you can't prove you voted in a particular way in any system that prevents vote buying. I'm struggling to see why that is relevant to this discussion.
What Prêt à Voter does is allow you to confirm that your vote was counted accurately. Its magic is it does that without revealing how you voted. You've now read the paper and you didn't contest that, so I'm guessing you concede it's true.
My point above was the two claims you made, ie scanning a QR code in an app would somehow lead to integrity loss, and/or privacy loss in Prêt à Voter system are wrong. You don't seem to be contesting that either, so I guess you now concede they are indeed wrong.
You made those incorrect claims after I pointed out your earlier claim that checking your vote in a Prêt à Voter system is so difficult no-one would do it was also wrong, as it boils down to scanning a QR Code with an app. I guess you had to concede that is indeed pretty easy, so you invented those incorrect "facts" to prove scanning a QR Code couldn't work for other reasons. But it does work.
It's not a good track record, is it? One invented fact after another, all in an effort to prove end-to-end verifiable voting is somehow worse or less secure than our current paper systems.
That's also wrong of course, but worse than that many of our current systems aren't the "secret ballots cast in a secure polling place" system you are assuming we use. They are postal, or electronic, or worse the combination of the two we call internet voting. These electronic systems are particularly susceptible to wholesale attacks, and in my view they need something like Prêt à Voter to have a hope of being as secure as the old paper systems.
I will concede one thing. Personally I doubt in an election everyone thought was well run that many people would bother checking their vote was counted correctly, but that's not because it's hard, it's for the same reason we don't recount every paper ballot if it isn't close - why bother? But if there was a whiff of fraud in the air, it seems likely a lot of people would do the check, particularly if the Prêt à Voter receipt was recorded on their phone when they voted. That way they would not even have to scan a QR Code. They just feed the receipt to the checking app when the election results are published.
I haven't been inconsistent, nor invented anything, I would suggest getting a third party to read this thread if you believe so.
However, I would also suggest reading the guidelines, specifically these:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I actively avoid stuff made in the USA, precisely because they don't use metric. For example, you can get a USA bolt with all sorts of threads and dimensions, or you can buy a 100mm M8 that is compatible with every other M8 bolt / nut made in the world. That boils down to bolts made in any country, bar the USA.
Every time the USA manufacturers something that isn't metric, you've made it incompatible with the rest of the world. The USA got away with that when I was young because they were the world manufacturing powerhouse. Now, those powerhouses are based on Asia. They define the units most of the world sees, and they use metric. So if I buy a Chinese mower, all the bolts are metric and I'm guaranteed the local hardware store stocks them.
Time has moved on, the USA is now a follower, not a leader in most things bar digital services. If they want to return to selling those things to the world the speeds have to be in km/hr, weights in kg, sizes in mm or meters, the temperature in Celcius, pressures in Pascal's.
Exactly. The fixes that would go some way to restore my trust are changed to the mechanisms surrounding the democratic process. Things like no more gerrymander, get rid of allowing corporations influencing the voting by flooding the system with money, somehow fix social media every ad is seen by everyone rather than allowing personalised lies be shown to specific voters, fix your electronic voting systems to a maintenance man with a screwdriver can't make new votes pop into existence (as happened once), stop disenfranchising voters - even to the extend of implementing compulsory voting. The distortions the USA allows now to the democratic process are beyond belief.
Oh, and a system that allows a politician to incite a mob to attack the sitting parliament, and get away without punishment, then pardon the perps is a joke.
> I would love to see photos like these from Australia too one day.
You may never see them. Not because we aren't adding renewables, but because South Australia was at about 80% renewable last year (average, not peak) so if you were going to get those sort of pictures anywhere in Australia, you would be getting them from SA now.
You probably don't see them because while the countries are about the same size in land area, but China has 50 times the population so it needs about 50 times more power.
This is true, and I'm a big fan of SA leading the charge, having grown up there.
However, we could also build out more green energy technology to become a large energy exporter. (You could argue we are kind of that now, with the amount of coal we export.)
Especially given we have strong but complicated geopolitical ties to both China and the USA, it feels like guaranteeing our own energy sovereignty, plus gaining the ability to export power directly, would be a strong political as well as environmental move.
I only just learned about SunCable. I think using our vast swathes of empty, sun-drenched land to provide power to our Southeast Asian allies is a great idea.
A good example is trying to explain to someone from a car based culture (like the US) why they might enjoy living in a European city that eschews the car in favour of walking, bush bikes and public transport. The typical reaction is to explain why it would be impossible in their country, or that Europe was a historical accident, or 100 other reasons, most of which will be wrong.
You can try and explain the tradeoffs being made, but it seems mere words and video can't paint the picture. They have to experience it for themselves before they can truly understand, and consequently make sensible a judgement about whether they might like the lifestyle, or not.
I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too.
I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that.
I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
reply