Why I bought a voting machine on eBay(bbc.com)
bbc.com
Why I bought a voting machine on eBay
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54378961
55 comments
[deleted]
Possibly raising the question, so what do people concerned with mail-in voting buy on eBay?
Ballots? Discarded US bulk mailsort machines?
All- or mostly-mailin ballots are concerning to me for many reasons which overlap with electronic voting: not secret, much easier for third parties to get involved in, etc. However at least the physical ballots have to exist and can be hand counted if necessary.
Then there's the possibility of selective sabotage of postal service in opposition areas ...
All- or mostly-mailin ballots are concerning to me for many reasons which overlap with electronic voting: not secret, much easier for third parties to get involved in, etc. However at least the physical ballots have to exist and can be hand counted if necessary.
Then there's the possibility of selective sabotage of postal service in opposition areas ...
You also have the possibility of a myriad of other issues with it:
The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections.
One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone.
The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.
Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess: https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disquali...
The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections.
One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone.
The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.
Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess: https://nypost.com/2020/08/05/84000-mail-in-ballots-disquali...
You do realize selective sabotage of physical voting locations also happens, right?
It isn't as if we're not replete with examples of voting locations being removed or relocated somewhere inconvenient in battleground locations controlled by the party that might lose an open election.
Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/2030/
https://xkcd.com/2030/
Until almost everyone can audit the software themselves computerized voting defeats the point of having a democracy.
So you audit the software. Then you enter the voting booth, and there's a voting machine in front of you. Bet your democracy it's running the same software?
Pretty sure they were advocating for using physical ballots, not voting machines.
I got a physical ballot last time I voted, but when I went to submit it, it was placed in to... an electronic vote counting machine.
This also defeats the point of democracy.
Machines can not and should not be trusted for voting, no matter what fancy schemes are dreamt up for to make them supposedly verifiable.
Voting can not be legitimate unless machines are taken completely out of the loop and humans are the ones doing all the vote counting by hand from end-to-end.
Yes, there can still be fraud, but it will of necessity be quite limited and relatively easy to detect than if voting and/or vote counting was done by electronic means.
This also defeats the point of democracy.
Machines can not and should not be trusted for voting, no matter what fancy schemes are dreamt up for to make them supposedly verifiable.
Voting can not be legitimate unless machines are taken completely out of the loop and humans are the ones doing all the vote counting by hand from end-to-end.
Yes, there can still be fraud, but it will of necessity be quite limited and relatively easy to detect than if voting and/or vote counting was done by electronic means.
A well known instance supporting your case:
https://www.ndi.org/e-voting-guide/examples/constitutionalit...
I concur with you both, I badly phrased what I was trying to say. Thanks for saying it properly.
My phone has NFC hardware. My national Id, passport and drivers licence has NFC chip. Most people have a bank card with NFC. It's a bit shit they didn't put a hardware button (like YubiKeys do) on them, but. That's pretty much blockchain as far as I am concerned.
> That's pretty much blockchain as far as I am concerned.
Elaborate?
Elaborate?
This is my new favorite quote.
Cryptographically signed transactions...
I've seen NFC cards the thickness of a standard credit card with built in capacitive touch keypads, 7-segment displays and even finger print readers. The only reason these haven't been rolled out is cost and that the current system is "good enough".
I don't think you need any of that. Just a capacitive sensor to enable the card is enough. Pure contactless was a mistake as anyone can use it remotely.
I'd honestly like a PIN for high value transactions, and the value of the transaction to be displayed on the card. The reason is that the terminal is untrusted hardware from my perspective, it would be easy for someone to sneak in a fake display for wrong values, or do PIN harvesting.
To be fair, they ask two specific kinds of engineer for the first two, then ask a "software engineer". hmm. they might as well ask a "hardware engineer" about aircrafts and elevators.
..but they fixed it with blockchain!!!!! xD
Can someone please make a browser add-in to hides any comment, on any site, that contains a xkcd link; they're almost always low quality.
I am not sure if in that particular case going with electronic/internet solution is really make any sense in view of potential risks. Voting happens once a few years only - it costs, but comparing to overall costs of running democracy (government, judicial system, the Police, etc.) this is nothing.
Not that traditional process cannot be altered - communists won election in Poland in 1946 by falsify it, however they had all secret police working on it backed by Soviet tanks - but this is much harder and doing it en mass is nor practical.
Not that traditional process cannot be altered - communists won election in Poland in 1946 by falsify it, however they had all secret police working on it backed by Soviet tanks - but this is much harder and doing it en mass is nor practical.
Notably, we know about the Polish falsification. Electronic systems have the potential to be subverted far more covertly.
This article seems well below the usual standards of the BBC. It devolves into a soup of disjointed quotes under strange headings (all H2s) towards the end.
There's almost nothing worth reading here.
There's almost nothing worth reading here.
Wow, you're not wrong. I couldn't help but look up the journalist's name as it's the type of name that you might give a fictional parody character.
I was surprised to see that the website of the BBC's first cyber reporter has so much horrible third party stuff on it - https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=joetidy.co.uk
I was surprised to see that the website of the BBC's first cyber reporter has so much horrible third party stuff on it - https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=joetidy.co.uk
Cyber reporter? People still use the word cyber? In 2020?
So - I know you're being mostly facetious (it does feel like an old-school word harking back to the 80s/90s era of Cyberpunk).
But in certain tech circles - Israeli tech in particular - "Cyber" has a very specific meaning and is very much used today. It refers to what we in the US call Security / InfoSec.
For example:
https://israelcyberalliance.com
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/israel_national_cyber_dire...
But in certain tech circles - Israeli tech in particular - "Cyber" has a very specific meaning and is very much used today. It refers to what we in the US call Security / InfoSec.
For example:
https://israelcyberalliance.com
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/israel_national_cyber_dire...
They're really good with the cybers.
Yes, and I'm sure people will be using it in 2077 as well.
Aside from using it in the word "cyberpunk", the word cyber has drastically fallen out of use, at least unironically. The only people who I've personally heard using it since the 90's are people who don't really know much about computers.
There is a field of US law called "cybersecurity law", which technically does not refute your anecdotal point. (I worked in cybersecurity law for a while.)
It is very common in government use. Don't confuse falling out of use among your peer group with falling out of use in general.
When I say "personally heard" I don't mean just my peer group, but media and whatnot too. Government use seems consistent with people who don't understand computers though.
The media you consume is part of your peer group.
sigh-ber
How else do you call a person writing articles in the cyberspace?
Maybe they're one of them cyber punker persons.
Agreed, something is seriously wrong with this article. Some of the images almost look like they were corrupted, others are very low-quality.
This is amazing! How does a draft of notes accidentally get published as the actual story? Do they use shared editing software? Or was there a (bizarre) human decision in there, intentionally pushing this content live??
And promoting it on cyber-Twitter.
After reading, I’m convinced that this must be a draft mistakenly published. Wow.
Same here, but then I looked up the author's Twitter, who's promoted the article two days ago: https://twitter.com/joetidy/status/1312654705781338112
Looks like this was really intended to be published. Weird, with all due respect.
Edit: And it's not been accidentally reverted to a draft - it already was this way two days ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20201004160433/https://www.bbc.c...
Looks like this was really intended to be published. Weird, with all due respect.
Edit: And it's not been accidentally reverted to a draft - it already was this way two days ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20201004160433/https://www.bbc.c...
I was ready to vote you down, but the article was hilarious at the end. Would read again, it's absurd comedy at the end.
Wife teases?
I could not believe that got left in there. Definitely a draft, and somebody had opened the wrong window when context switching!
I could not believe that got left in there. Definitely a draft, and somebody had opened the wrong window when context switching!
Equally strange is “Deer peering” as a tagline for a section. It Has zero connection to the actual subject matter, hacking and security.
It almost looks like they published the outline instead of the actual article! It's terribly written.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs