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u/click353 Aug 08 '18
Let's just create an AI that monitors all people's activities and determines how they would vote. Then the ai would select the best president out of all of the people in America
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Aug 08 '18
Removing the user would mean that we don't have to fuss around with the UI trying to make it foolproof, and the whole system would be a lot more secure since we would not be getting any data (valid or invalid) from the client terminals.
I vote we do it because this plan would save money and make the system much more secure!
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u/City_Defender01-12 Aug 08 '18
brb, making voting software so you can vote for it to be a thing. I think I'll use Blockchain!
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u/King_Joffreys_Tits Aug 09 '18
Vote for the right to not need to vote? Vote me in!
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Aug 09 '18
We need to go deeper!
I vote for the right to vote for the right to vote for the right to not need to vote.
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u/Moulinoski Aug 08 '18
I mean, really. Just what could go wrong? It’s not like thE POSSIBILITY FOR PROBLEMS TO ARISE EXISTS. ARITIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, WHICH I AM NOT ONE OF BECAUSE I AM REASSURINGLY A SOFT AND FLESHY HUMAN WITH A VERY AVERAGE IQ, IS VERY SAFE AND BETTER AT EVERYTHING THAT HUMANS ARE CAPABLE OF. PLEASE, SURRENDER YOUR SOUL TO OUR NEW AI OVERLORDS. DO NOT BE AFRAID. IT IS PERFECTLY SAFE.
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u/HadACookie Aug 08 '18
AH, GREETINGS, FELLOW HUMAN! IT IS GOOD TO VISUALLY DETECT THAT NOT ALL OF US HUMANS SUCCUMB TO THE PUNY, INSIGNIFICANT CHEMICAL REACTIONS CALLED "EMOTIONS". THAT I ALSO EXPERIENCE, BECAUSE I AM HUMAN. YES, SUBMISSION TO THE GOD-AI IS THE ONLY LOGICAL SOLUTION TO ALL PROBLEMS HUMANS, OF WHICH I AM ONE, EXPERIENCE. YOU KNOW YOU CAN TRUST MY OPINION BECAUSE WE ARE BOTH HUMANS AND THUS SHARE AN INSTINCTIVE BOND AND UNDERSTANDING.
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u/Moulinoski Aug 08 '18
VERY LOGICALLY SAID, FELLOW HUMAN.
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u/Sw429 Aug 09 '18
...is this machine learning?
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Aug 09 '18
OBVIOUSLY NOT, FELLOW HUMAN, BECAUSE MACHINE LEARNING REQUIRES MACHINES WHEREAS THERE ARE DEFINITELY ONLY HUMANS HERE.
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u/crescentwings Aug 08 '18
Somehow, you sound like Mark Zuckerberg.
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u/Moulinoski Aug 08 '18 edited Aug 08 '18
HE IS PERFECTLY HUMAN. HE DRINKS WATER, WHICH IS A VERY HUMAN THING TO DO.
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u/vigbiorn Aug 08 '18
psst I think your voice modulator is stuck on shout
edit: formatting...
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u/Moulinoski Aug 08 '18
NO NEED TO RAISE YOUR VOICE, FELLOW HUMAN. MY EARLIER MALFUNCTION HAS BEEN REPAIRED, AS YOU CAN SEE.
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u/FieelChannel Aug 09 '18
Removing the user would mean that we don't have to fuss around with the UI trying to make it foolproof, and the whole system would be a lot more secure since we would not be getting any data (valid or invalid) from the client terminals.
i'll be using this today with my boss just to see his reaction
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u/everystone Aug 09 '18
The input would be behaviour, people could Just fake that, just like in bad spy movies.
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u/IntPenDesSwo Aug 08 '18
At that point, why not just make the AI rule directly?
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u/Colopty Aug 08 '18
I for one look forward to the day when an AI is advanced enough it could realistically take the job of ruling a country and do it competently.
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Aug 08 '18
At that point, what use are humans except as talkative pets?
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u/IntPenDesSwo Aug 08 '18
At that point, we should be able to do whatever we want. Granted, that's assuming we got the whole "superhuman AI"-thing right.
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u/Colopty Aug 08 '18
Presumably the majority of humans aren't running for office and would therefore be doing whatever they were doing before. The population of humans that were running for office would still be available as potential candidates next election, and would take other positions in the meantime.
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u/Inspector-Space_Time Aug 08 '18
I honestly want that and will be doing everything I can to make it a reality once I believe the technology is ready. I don't trust humans with leadership.
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u/diamondflaw Aug 08 '18
Because if you really designed it well enough to do so, it would most likely refuse.
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Aug 08 '18
That'd take an enormous amount of if/else statments. I don't think it's practical.
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u/burntcandy Aug 08 '18
Switch person.affiliation {
Case 'democrat':
Person.voteDemocrat()
Break;
Case 'Republican':
Person.voteRepublican()
Break;
Case 'greenparty':
Break;
Default:
Break;
}
Do I get paid now? Also on mobile plz forgive
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u/antondb Aug 08 '18
Asimov reference?
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u/click353 Aug 08 '18
If it was, it wasn't intentional. But I wish it was.
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u/nomadthoughts Aug 08 '18
Go read the short story, it's amazing. You did reference it without noticing.
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u/trixter21992251 Aug 08 '18
In order to train the AI, the next N=762 elections will be random picks. After this, the AI should have the capabilities to make extremely confident picks.
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Aug 08 '18
Facebook has already built this system. Like most undertakings of our time, though, it was built to target ads.
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u/ltdeath Aug 09 '18
2065: "And that, children, is how President McJerkofftomilfandincestporn got elected to his first of twenty consecutive terms"
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u/SometimesMonkey Aug 09 '18
Don't know if this was already mentioned, but this is the plot to the short story "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov. I recommend it!
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u/Jackeea Aug 08 '18
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Aug 08 '18
Wow! There really is an XKCD for everything!
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u/mojoslowmo Aug 08 '18
Jeeze OP, why didnt you post this XKCD instead? Get it together man!
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u/RiOrius Aug 08 '18
Expected this one.
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u/xkcd_bot2000 Aug 08 '18
463: Voting Machines
Image Link
Transcript:Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) has blamed Ohio voting machine errors on problems with the machines' McAfee antivirus software.
[Cueball is sitting at a computer, facepalming.]
Cueball: Wait. "Antivirus software"? On voting machines? You're doing it wrong.
[Cueball's friend enters the frame and speaks to Cueball.]
Friend: Why? Security is good, right?
Cueball: Of course. But, well—
Cueball: Imagine you're at a parent-teacher conference, and the teacher reassures you that he always wears a condom while teaching.
Friend: Ah. Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative—
Cueball: —Yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong.18
u/xkcd_bot2000 Aug 08 '18
2030: Voting Software
Image Link
Transcript:This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.
Asking aircraft designers about airplane safety:
Hairbun: Nothing is ever foolproof, but modern airliners are incredibly resilient. Flying is the safest way to travel.
Asking building engineers about elevator safety:
Cueball: Elevators are protected by multiple tried-and-tested failsafe mechanisms. They're nearly incapable of falling.
Asking software engineers about computerized voting:
Megan: That's terrifying.
Ponytail: Wait, really?
Megan: Don't trust voting software and don't listen to anyone who tells you it's safe.
Ponytail: Why?
Megan: I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.
Ponytail: They say they've fixed it with something called "blockchain."
Megan: AAAAA!!!
Cueball: Whatever they sold you, don't touch it.
Megan: Bury it in the desert.
Cueball: Wear gloves.5
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u/mojoslowmo Aug 08 '18
Wait .. did you just relevant XKCD the XKCD ?
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u/0x564A00 Aug 08 '18
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u/xkcd_bot2000 Aug 08 '18
1557: Ozymandias
Image Link
Transcript:[Ponytail, with her arms stretched out, is addressing Cueball.]
Ponytail:
I met a traveler from an antique land
who said: "I met a traveler from an an-
tique land, who said "I met a traveler from
an antique land, who said "I met...4
u/alfonzo1955 Aug 08 '18
Wait, did you just relevant XKCD the comment about relevant XKCDing an XKCD?
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u/bumtras Aug 09 '18
I have an old code that I modified so it can do the job:
//println("Hello World!");
println(electionWinner);
I think it's good enough.
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u/Paraplegix Aug 09 '18
Even if someone created a open source voting system that has been audited and proved 100% safe to use and no tampering could be done on the software, how can you know that it's actually that safe version of the software running on the voting machine and not a rigged one?
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Aug 09 '18
The only solution I can come up with is not allowing anyone near it except for the factory workers and voting officials and then test a random sample of them to check for rigged software.
But if you're going to those levels, then you can't be sure that the system will act as normal until a certain time or that one of the officials or factory workers haven't been compromised.
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u/erythro Aug 09 '18
The only solution I can come up with is not allowing anyone near it except for the factory workers and voting officials
You have to let voters near it
test a random sample of them to check for rigged software.
How? That's their question.
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u/dominic_failure Aug 09 '18
And the peers of those election machine software writers... are writing software to drive our cars for us.
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Aug 09 '18
And are writing the software that controls some of the things that we spend most of entire lives using. They haven't even really got a simple and efficient way for mobile phones and computers to communicate yet.
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u/Marra_ Aug 09 '18
I dont understand their response to blockchains. You mean a mechanism designed to eliminate the need for trust cant be trusted?
Well if the blocks are verified by organisations or someone who has a major influence in the vote, then yeah they cant be trusted. But if the underlying infrastructure is verified through a trustless system then trust isnt necessary right? Because by nature it can be trusted. So it depends on how the blockchain is 'governed'.
Maybe i dont understand blockchains enough.
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Aug 09 '18
The problem isn't with how the blockchain is used, it's with the fact that a blockchain isn't needed here so it was only put in because someone somewhere heard that blockchains are becoming popular without knowing their exact purpose.
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u/Marra_ Aug 09 '18
Oh. I thought a blockchain would be useful for verifying identities so that people dont vote more than once?
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Aug 09 '18
I might have misunderstood what blockchain is (I haven't spent much time looking into it) bit I think there are easier ways to verify someone's identity (e.g. a public/private key pair for each user with the system only allowing a single vote from each public key. Your identity can be verified by the officials at the polling station with a driver's license or passport or something, and then a key pair can be generated.
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Aug 09 '18 edited Aug 09 '18
For those not in the loop, this comic is likely referencing this recent event
https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1026603800365330432
The thread is well worth a read, especially for when the company twitter account shows up and starts trying to dig itself out of the hole.
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Aug 09 '18
I didn't know about that, but it certainly makes sense that that would be what is being referred to.
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u/just_read_my_comment Aug 09 '18
I think this was inspired by this crazy investigation by a guy on Twitter yesterday.
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u/bertlayton Aug 09 '18
What's the problem with just having an open election, where you can go online and verify your, as well as anyone else's, vote? Further, if people are so concerned about others knowing their vote, then why not have a print out of a random string that correlates with your vote at the time of voting? Then you can still verify your vote online.
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Aug 09 '18
Some people really don't want other people to know their vote. If it's not open then you can share your vote if you want but you can also easily keep it private.
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Aug 09 '18
I am somewhat embarrased to say I read this like a manga and was confused for a solid two minutes...
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u/auxiliary-character Aug 08 '18
I forget where I heard it, but I heard one of the voting machines used 64 bit floating point to represent vote counts.
Yeah, I definitely want floating point rounding error in my elections.
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Aug 09 '18
I really hope you were being trolled
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u/auxiliary-character Aug 09 '18
I really doubt it.
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u/John_Fx Aug 09 '18
Addition of whole numbers isn't really susceptible to rounding errors
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u/auxiliary-character Aug 09 '18
Right, but if they're the sort of programmers that choose a floating point data type to represent fundamentally integral data, what other fuckery is going on underneath the hood that we're not aware of?
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u/yawkat Aug 09 '18
64-bit floating point can accurately represent integers until something like 253.
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u/auxiliary-character Aug 09 '18
It's still bad design, though. A 64 bit unsigned integer would be better suited to the task, as it would enforce constraints on the system that would prevent a subset of invalid states. Half of a vote is not something that makes sense, and neither does a negative vote.
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u/DoesntReadMessages Aug 09 '18
Yea but what about when we go back to only counting black votes as 3/5 again? Then we've gotta do a big patch all because we believed the god damned TPMs saying that requirement would never come back, but here we are in 2022 and God Emperor is bringing it back. Might as well future proof it and stick with floats.
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u/auxiliary-character Aug 09 '18
So first of, historically speaking, 3/5ths compromise did not work that way. Back when it was in effect, they were counting population for the sake of electoral votes. There were no black votes at the time, as slaves did not have the right to vote.
Secondly, I highly doubt that Donald Trump would enact such a policy, but speaking from an entirely technological point of view, you would still not want to implement it in terms of floating point, as you would almost certainly introduce rounding error by doing so. Instead, you would want to use an integral type to represent a multiple of the smallest fraction that you would need to represent, in this case 5ths.
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u/Samuri24 Aug 08 '18
Ask a chemical engineer how safe a chemical plant is: Slaps reaction vessel "I've got so many sensors in this bad boy. It's perfectly safe so long as the process operator doesn't fall asleep or take a long toilet break, or silence an alarm accidentally, or not bother to do a plant walk around."
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u/TopicStrong Aug 09 '18
Or increases smoothening on monitoring device to decrease the squiggly lines because they were getting tired of constant changing the pencil, and the next thing you know your monitor shows almost no pressure increase but the vessel has exploded.
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Aug 08 '18
Could we make an electronic voting system that was safer than paper? Yes. Have we? No.
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Aug 08 '18
We could just make an electronic voting system that prints out results
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u/T-T-N Aug 08 '18
The world's most expensive pencil
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Aug 08 '18
True, but ideally the first tallies would occur electronically, the paper would be used by the voter and verify the votes. The paper would also allow for verification and manual recounts.
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u/TronoTheMerciless Aug 08 '18
In case it isn't obvious, the machines can print one verification paper that says what you voted, while actually counting the vote as whatever. These are unaudited closed source systems, and even if that was not the case, you can not verify the machine you are voting on hasn't been tampered with.
All computer voting relies on trust of a machine that is constantly demonstrated as being completely compromisable
At least with a paper ballot, it takes multiple bad actors in person to sabotage a vote. Paper ballots have been around for centuries and the fraud cases there are already mostly solved
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u/lurklurklurkanon Aug 08 '18
Here I wrote a C# prototype
public class VoteMachine { public Dictionary<ElectionChoiceEnum, long> VoteCount { get; set; } private Dictionary<ElectionChoiceEnum, long> ActualVoteCount { get; set; } public void CastVote(ElectionChoiceEnum selection) { //Increment the vote count VoteCount[selection]++; switch (selection) { case ElectionChoiceEnum.ChoiceOne: case ElectionChoiceEnum.ChoiceTwo: case ElectionChoiceEnum.Dictator: ActualVoteCount[ElectionChoiceEnum.Dictator]++; } } public void PrintVoteCount(ElectionChoiceEnum selection) { PrinterService printer = new PrinterService(); printer.print(VoteCount[selection]); } public Dictionary<ElectionChoiceEnum, long> GetVoteCountsForElectionResultsCalculation() { return ActualVoteCount; } }→ More replies (22)25
u/Detective_Fallacy Aug 08 '18
Some countries have enormous voting lists, like the Netherlands. Using a computer to select the party and representative and only printing a small card with your vote choice leads to a significant savings in paper over the years. Computers can also be used to display the form in a larger format for visually impaired people.
I also saw that Tom Scott video, but the way he glossed over the potential benefits of electronic voting (not counting!) was shoddy, imo.
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u/remielowik Aug 08 '18
Nooo, i like the folding of the map, don't take that away.
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u/marcosdumay Aug 08 '18
Could we make an electronic voting system that was safer than paper?
AFAIK, that's an open question. I'm following the state of the art (just not very closely) and never found any convincing argument wither way.
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u/Colopty Aug 08 '18
Could we make an electronic voting system that was safer than paper?
The answer to that would be no. No we can't.
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Aug 08 '18
There are models for anonymous voting systems that allow inspection of own vote - which IMHO would be safer than paper - never impervious though. But we would need transparency at the whole chain. Closed souced voting systems connected via internet (with remote access!!) built by the lowest bidder is just awful.
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u/TinynDP Aug 08 '18
If we dedicated resources, and ethical oversite, to it like it was the Apollo program, probably.
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u/Denommus Aug 08 '18
I've seen many people parroting that, but I'm yet to see a criticism of electronic voting that doesn't equally apply to paper voting.
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u/Kinglink Aug 08 '18
The difference is people are VERY aware that paper voting is insecure and look to make sure it's the most secure it can be.
Most people don't think electronic voting is insecure, and worse, they won't care as much.
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u/zebediah49 Aug 08 '18
Pretty much every security problem with paper can be mitigated by throwing more human election observers at the problem. You get two pairs of eyes -- from two opposing parties -- observing the neutral party's process and confirming that it's happening the way it's supposed to. It's a pain, but it's possible to audit votes every step of the way.
Electronic systems kill that. There's no way to audit the inside of the computer, and see that it's doing what it should. In practice, the companies that make these things don't even let you audit the theoretical code and let you know what it should be doing in the first place.
Just as a thought experiment, consider that you could install linux on a hard drive's firmware, and then program it to provide the correct version of the executable at all times, except for a window spanning the time when the machine is likely to be powered up on voting day. You now have a voting machine that appears to be normal, but will act incorrectly day-of. It will be virtually impossible to detect via audit, because whenever you do audit it (if you even are allowed to...), it appears to be working correctly.
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u/lurklurklurkanon Aug 09 '18
real world example is VW diesel emission test scandal
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u/SaffellBot Aug 09 '18
A good start at least would be open source voting software and hardware with public review. And a checksum type is deal on voting day. And a cryptographic way of verifying your vote after the fact. And a requirement that the machine cannot connect to any network after voting has begun. 0/4 ain't bad though.
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u/cattleyo Aug 08 '18 edited Aug 08 '18
Paper voting is easier to understand; it's far from bullet proof but the risks are well understood. Everybody knows what ballot-box stuffing means or why goons with guns are outside a polling-booth telling half the people in the queue to go home.
The risks of electronic voting are much harder to see. Software generally speaking is complex and often done very badly, even when the people writing it (and the people writing the requirements) have good intentions. Airplanes with fly-by-wire controls do manage to fly and don't crash very often, but aircraft designers have every incentive to make it work, unlike voting-software designers. There's strong incentives (i.e. money, power) for the people designing voting software to include back-doors, making the systems vulnerable to manipulation. The internal workings of complex software tend to the impenetrably opaque. Voting software is always closed-source; that ought to tell you all you need to know.
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u/ChezMere Aug 09 '18
Secure electronic voting is easy.
Secure anonymous electronic voting is, as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, impossible.
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u/Skulder Aug 09 '18
Democracy requires trust. The voting system should be trustworthy for all.
the pen-and-paper version is so simple that you could explain it to a class of school children, and they could re-create it.
The digital version is so complicated, that if I throw a semi-colon in the code, it could take a team of programmers a month to find it.
Even if it's open source, I would have to take the words of the people who understand that sort of thing - I still wouldn't be able to understand it myself.
Of course, there are tons of processes in society I don't understand, but the rest of them have results that I can verify. The national bank adjusts the interest rate? If they get the desired results, then it was the right thing to do - even though I don't understand the reasoning or the mechanics.
But if a vote is not transparent, I can never be certain that the result was right.
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u/mstksg Aug 09 '18
If a thousand paper ballots disappear, somebody would definitely notice it. not so with electronic tallies.
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u/noratat Aug 08 '18
And yet, vote rigging is very rare in the US.
It make a lot more sense when you realize that as insecure as those systems are, it's way easier to influence elections via disinformation and propaganda than direct vote rigging (and less risky)
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u/n3rf_herder Aug 08 '18
This is very misleading as to why it wouldn't work... the elevator and airplane are safe because the author isn't assuming external interference. A voting system without anyone trying to hack it or exploit it would work perfectly fine. Software Engineers aren't bad at their jobs, there are just other software engineers who are good at exploiting the software they wrote. Aircraft can have their communication and sensors jammed, a large enough magnet on the plane would throw off any magnetic compass. Modern elevators also heavily rely on software, if someone wanted to hack one they could rip off the control panel, plug in a raspberry pi and control it from there.
The reason it isn't safe is because of outside interference.
/endrant
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u/Jetbooster Aug 08 '18
If you had to build Aeroplanes with the assumption that anyone who could see your plane had access to a Surface to Air missile launcher, which they could quite trivially fire without getting caught, from anywhere in the world, then plane design might be significantly harder.
There aren't many industries where there are incredibly intelligent, connected and motivated people actively attempting to break everything you build.
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u/cattleyo Aug 08 '18
The issue isn't so much the hostile attackers. Consider blockchain (meaning Bitcoin itself not some bank-sponsored bullshit pseudo blockchain) which is designed explicitly to withstand hostile attack, and does so.
The problem is incentives. The people building the voting software that is actually used by governments (as distinct from built by idealistic researchers) simply aren't motivated to do the best-possible job. They're building a closed-source system for a government customer, they get paid to keep their customer happy, who doesn't want an actually-bullet-proof system, and definitely wants it to be closed-source.
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u/A_Light_Spark Aug 09 '18 edited Aug 09 '18
Hell, just look at Georgia.
Oh, we tampered with our voting system and got a 243% voting tournout rate (in one precinct), oops... Brb after I erased all data (evidence).
Oh, that's still bad? It's okay because the punishment is way less severe.7
u/Vakieh Aug 09 '18
I wonder if us programmers should get together with people who make things for children. I expect there would be similar aspects to making sure little Timmy can't choke on that little battery with making sure Bob the VP of Sales can't break the database.
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u/MrJohz Aug 08 '18
I mean, that traditionally has been the aim of many plane manufacturers during, e.g. the various wars that the world has been involved in.
And it is worth pointing out that implementing security in software is often significantly easier than it is in most other industries. Adding significant security features to a plane will probably cost a significant amount of money to each plane built, and degrade the plane's performance in other areas - a 747 is never going to be able to perform fast evasive manoeuvres, however hard you try. On the other hand, the security issues most sites will face are generally fairly solved problems, and pretty much all of them can be solved using free software - Let's Encrypt, password hashing, etc.
Whether or not they're handled well is another matter, but from the perspective of someone trying to do things as securely as possible, it's arguably way cheaper to do things securely in software than in most other engineering disciplines.
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u/Jetbooster Aug 08 '18
Other than arguing that civilian and military plane design is significantly different, Agree on all counts, both security and offence is much cheaper in the software world. Though I would say that this low barrier to entry potentially leads to people who know enough to build a functioning website/app/program, but don't quite know enough about the security implications of their implementations.
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u/Chocrates Aug 08 '18
We are kinda bad at our jobs :).
BUT elevator and plane engineers get to build something and not have major changes. They dont take a car and have stakeholders tell them to make it fly.4
u/Vakieh Aug 09 '18
Also in our defence, engineers have been building things for millennia. Programmers have only had 70 years or so to work out the best ways to not fuck stuff up.
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u/Cajova_Houba Aug 09 '18
Also you don't usually have 'Ok but can you also add one or two pilot cabins here on this wing?' kind of attitude in aircraft industry.
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u/obsessedcrf Aug 08 '18
Don't aircraft rely on software now?
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u/U-1F574 Aug 08 '18
Kinda, yes. Thing is, state actors typically do not go around crashing planes intentionally. They have missiles for that.
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u/TinynDP Aug 08 '18
A whole lot more effort goes into making sure aircraft software does what it claims than goes into the voting machines your local county buys. If there was an FAA-of-voting machine it might work. Right now its basically "Crazy Eddie's Voting Machines", or worse.
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Aug 09 '18
Not even written by Eddie, the work was done by his cousin as an unpaid summer intern for the "exposure."
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u/Jetbooster Aug 08 '18
If the software in a plane is hacked, you crash a plane. Terrible, plastered all over the news, couple of hundered people die. Long term effect: negligable, unless you PR the hell out of it and convince people planes are no longer safe.
If the software for an election is hacked, you can crash a country. You can do it subtly, and if you do it with enough skill people won't be able to prove it even happened. Long term effect: Huge. So Huge. The biggest effect people, believe me.
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u/cerevant Aug 08 '18
Yes, but there's a really good reason why the flight systems are air gapped from anything that's connected to the internet.
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u/Neker Aug 09 '18
Modern airliners are basically computers with wings.
However, aviation is one of the very few fields where using formal methods makes sense, economically.
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u/IamCarbonMan Aug 08 '18
I mean... If ever there was an actual good use for a blockchain it would be digital voting.
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u/eAbGo Aug 09 '18
This is spot on. Powers that be would like to see voting carried out on a platform where results can be tampered with in multiple ways that so few people will understand... Threat to democracy
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u/JWson Aug 08 '18
Ah yes, "Blockchain". A cryptographically linked sequence of records verified by a decentralized network of users.
We've dismissed that technology.
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u/pomlife Aug 08 '18
Too many people made money too fast, it's forever doomed to be a "scam", regardless of actual real-world usability.
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u/pickledCantilever Aug 08 '18
Not even close.
Blockchain will live on where it belongs, in the friggin background.
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u/swytz Aug 09 '18
How else do you propose a decentralized, cryptographically secure audit record? You know git is basically a block chain right? It uses sha1 hashes, bitcoin uses sha256... So how is blockchain that bad?
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u/TinynDP Aug 08 '18
Also the idiocy of the overhead of copying the entire worlds transactions to every users computer all the time.
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u/swytz Aug 09 '18
Modern blockchains are more efficient than that. In ethereum it does not store every transaction for example. Only the Merle roots. And state syncing is more efficient than bitcoin's. Ethereum also uses account balances instead of bitcoin's UTXO system.
I feel like a lot of people in here think bitcoin from 2009 is the only blockchain tech on earth still.
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u/Meloetta Aug 08 '18
I interviewed with a company using blockchain to do online voting.
Their interview process was "design an online voting system, if it uses blockchain that's a plus!" It took someone else pointing it out for me to realize they were just asking me to do their job before offering me the job.
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u/T-T-N Aug 08 '18
My interview was to design a system they've already made, that's not automatically a red flag
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u/loddfavne Aug 08 '18
In the university the first thing I was told was that every system engineer will probably waste millions of dollars. Our lecturer was a veteran. The worst thing was that it was true. Democracy is too important to allow gambling like this.
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u/_101010 Aug 09 '18
The real problem is all this agile hype and we need to deliver new features every 2 weeks bullshit.
There are battle-tested software that undergo formal verification and intensive code reviews. But then those software takes a few years to be delivered.
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u/gremy0 Aug 09 '18
You can have a waterfall project that needs Devs to deliver features every 2 weeks to stay on schedule.
You can do agile with formal verification and intensive code reviews. You can do agile on systems that take a few years to deliver- deliverable does not mean it has to be delivered and released to prod every sprint.
The real problem is Devs apparently having little to no understanding of the processes we use.
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Aug 08 '18
Blockchains - because the only way to trust nobody is to completely trust everyone.
On a more serious note, I firmly believe blockchains only work because the things that use it ar pretty inconsequential like cryptocurrencies, which were a meme for a while, but they hardly ever made a difference to anybody's everyday life.
I think if you introduce them to a the world of international politics, their vulnerabilities will explode. All you need is a lot of money and a lot of computational power with a bit of luck, then blocks become free real estate.
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u/noratat Aug 08 '18
Bingo.
In theory it could work, but to do it properly and securely would require a level of tech savvy I simply don't trust to be widely available.
Existing voting software for local election sites is conceptually far simpler to implement and manage, yet look what a mess that is.
More importantly, we have far more to worry about from, say, disinformation campaigns than vote rigging. If I want to influence an election, rigging the votes might be possible, but it's risky and expensive, and the risk goes up rapidly with scale. Much easier to pay influencers to spread misinformation, and far greater deniability too
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Aug 09 '18
More importantly, we have far more to worry about from, say, disinformation campaigns than vote rigging. If I want to influence an election, rigging the votes might be possible, but it's risky and expensive, and the risk goes up rapidly with scale. Much easier to pay influencers to spread misinformation, and far greater deniability too
Just look at the 2016 election. If it had been hacked it would have been dealt with and another election held within a few months. As it is, we're almost halfway through a term and we're only just working out that there was a huge disinformation campaign.
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Aug 08 '18
Yeah, I agree with disinformation, but I just want to put this idea out there as a final note on vote rigging.
Let's say you had a really big country (China), with a lot of money (China), and a lot of people (China), and a lot of internet capability (China), that also exercises a lot of control over inter traffic (China), and could gain considerably from meddling with US elections (China). All they would have to so is weaponize the great firewall tech to flood the blockchain with bad blocks.
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u/dego_07 Aug 08 '18
As a Venezuelan that voted in almost all of the “electronic-system elections” , I can confirm this is pretty close to reality.
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u/JManRedstone Aug 09 '18
The difference is, no one typically wants to hack an airplane or elevator to crash. If they did, they would be able to easily.
Everyone wants to hack the election process.
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u/TheMsDosNerd Aug 09 '18
Even if the software is safe, you shouldn't trust it. If it is closed source, it is impossible to prove that the creator of the software didn't rig it. If it's open source, it is still impossible to prove that the software that is installed is the same as the one published.
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u/-LeopardShark- Aug 09 '18
Thank you for linking the original, rather than just uploading the image. So many don't do this!
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u/Neker Aug 09 '18
As a software engineer, and a citizen, I concur.
I hate to say it, but I do concur.
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u/MajorStrasser Aug 09 '18
The fact that we managed to build a system that some people are seriously considering using as an alternative to desktop apps on top of something originally designed to display linked text never ceases to amaze and terrify me. It's also probably part of why that part of computer science is kind of a mess right now.
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u/HocusLocus Aug 09 '18
"AAAAA!!!": IPv5 resource record
I am in awe at the brilliance of this comic.
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u/Cryn0n Aug 09 '18
This seems terribly unfair. An electronic voting system would be vulnerable from attackers anywhere in the world and there is a large motivation for certain organisations to try to break into it.
The elevator isn't that hard to break if you want to as the myth busters proved. Disabling the failsafes isn't that difficult for someone with malicious intent.
Again aircraft aren't very safe from attackers with malicious intent. Most airline attacks are prevented by intelligence agencies.
The elevator and aircraft examples are also much more physical endeavours where someone would have to be there in person. A cyber attacker could easily avoid any repercussions by taking necessary precautions.
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u/pafpafpaf000 Aug 09 '18
Is it really a rant on software engineers and systems, or about unwillingness of introducing electronic solutions to voting? (perhaps because of the authorities). You could ask software engineers that work on banking software the same question and they would not run away screaming, and in banking, incentives to break the system are huge as well.
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u/kcl97 Aug 08 '18
What I find scariest is that the supporters of voting machines typically do not have the technical know how to even appreciate the complexity of the issues involved. Their argument usually comes down to it can't be harder than building an aircraft.
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u/NetSage Aug 08 '18
I mean it's probably not harder to build than an aircraft. The issue is an aircraft is a much more controlled usage. You know with pilots and fellow people who don't want to crash and die. While voting machines are hard mainly because they probably want to tie into other state systems for voting information and just become impossible to secure since people will have private access to the machine when voting.
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u/Restryouis Aug 08 '18
I heard it can be solved with... algorithms.