wired.com— A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.
Oct 23, 2009View in Crawl 4
My cynical prediction:The open code will be reviewed, as it should be, and one or more bugs will be seen, as is normal. The corporate supporting politicians will then treat the one or more bugs like it is the end of the world, and FOX news will declare it to be an attempt to destroy America. TV ads will air, and somehow we will end up with a cowardly bill being passed that makes it illegal to use.
The two candidates are far more invested than the voting companies. Even with free open source software and hardware, I have my doubts that an eleventh hour bug would result in delay of the voting.
But you made a comment with your opinion of how this would work out. So your opinion has no basis? Exactly what I was suggesting. Hacking doesn't work like you assume.What makes closed source code for voting secure, at ALL, from it being rigged to steal elections? Only by it being checked and its executable code recheckable by other programmers who know what it is supposed to do and what it's final image should be. In other words, by its being closer to open source code. The closer to open source, the more secure it can be from this kind of complete, devastating takeover (unless you assume real hackers are REALLY stupid and somehow couldn't get into a closed source system to do damage -- that would not be a good assumption at all!).Thanks, by the way, I have a life already. One in which I try to offer opinions only on what I think I know something about. Sorry if your feelings were hurt.
Linux is by far the most common Operating System on the planet. I know Linux is pretty cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything but you're just living delusion if you believe it to be the most common OS.
Actually, I believe it was based on public and private key encryption, but I can't recall the specifics of how the technology was supposed to work. Public/Private key encryption is one-way encryption/decryption, and you can look at Pretty-Good-Privacy(PGP) encoding for E-mail for an example, and historical usefulness of the encryption method.If it were me, I'd just supply the key to the vote, and let the voter decide whether or not to keep it. There would be no need to add personally identifiable information into the voting specifics information, as that would be insecure for the individual.Because of the encryption, one could reasonably make a retrieval system that grabs ~50 encrypted voting records at random, along with the person's actual request, and then only process(attempt to decrypt) the request made on the client side. This would make it about as secure as you could get without someone looking over your shoulder.I hope this isn't too technical in nature for you to understand, but there were some valid principles behind the idea that protected both the individual and the votes simultaneously.
inactiveuserOct 24, 2009
icfshop needs a good month of DOS.
langfordOct 24, 2009
My cynical prediction:The open code will be reviewed, as it should be, and one or more bugs will be seen, as is normal. The corporate supporting politicians will then treat the one or more bugs like it is the end of the world, and FOX news will declare it to be an attempt to destroy America. TV ads will air, and somehow we will end up with a cowardly bill being passed that makes it illegal to use.
robbothehoodOct 24, 2009
The two candidates are far more invested than the voting companies. Even with free open source software and hardware, I have my doubts that an eleventh hour bug would result in delay of the voting.
bwdiggOct 24, 2009
But you made a comment with your opinion of how this would work out. So your opinion has no basis? Exactly what I was suggesting. Hacking doesn't work like you assume.What makes closed source code for voting secure, at ALL, from it being rigged to steal elections? Only by it being checked and its executable code recheckable by other programmers who know what it is supposed to do and what it's final image should be. In other words, by its being closer to open source code. The closer to open source, the more secure it can be from this kind of complete, devastating takeover (unless you assume real hackers are REALLY stupid and somehow couldn't get into a closed source system to do damage -- that would not be a good assumption at all!).Thanks, by the way, I have a life already. One in which I try to offer opinions only on what I think I know something about. Sorry if your feelings were hurt.
a11yndOct 24, 2009
Linux is by far the most common Operating System on the planet. I know Linux is pretty cool guy and doesn't afraid of anything but you're just living delusion if you believe it to be the most common OS.
ugetabOct 25, 2009
Actually, I believe it was based on public and private key encryption, but I can't recall the specifics of how the technology was supposed to work. Public/Private key encryption is one-way encryption/decryption, and you can look at Pretty-Good-Privacy(PGP) encoding for E-mail for an example, and historical usefulness of the encryption method.If it were me, I'd just supply the key to the vote, and let the voter decide whether or not to keep it. There would be no need to add personally identifiable information into the voting specifics information, as that would be insecure for the individual.Because of the encryption, one could reasonably make a retrieval system that grabs ~50 encrypted voting records at random, along with the person's actual request, and then only process(attempt to decrypt) the request made on the client side. This would make it about as secure as you could get without someone looking over your shoulder.I hope this isn't too technical in nature for you to understand, but there were some valid principles behind the idea that protected both the individual and the votes simultaneously.
mattmeowOct 26, 2009
Actually I think this is the way to go. There are countless security / identification measures that could be put in place.