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[smjjames]

You fixed the 'rtade typo but not the 'VS' typo? heh, just ribbing ya a little.

We'll have to see if it's just hot rhetoric from Trump or if he actually follows through or other countries threaten to follow through. I'm betting that it's just hot rhetoric as he's done similar rhetoric before without actually following through.

Blockchain is basically just a method of making data public and "secure" at the same time. What are they doing to make sure people's votes are confidential? I feel like the conservative crowd is probably all about that.

Honestly Blockchain seems like the least secure way to do that. It seems rely on public scrutiny for security, which seems like it will get the same results as when you ask the internet to name a boat, or a school.

The confidentiality as far as identity is probably the easiest part, making sure it can't be traced to a specific person or location would be a different challenge, and it's important for the proccess to have transparency.

The challenge is balancing transparency vs security.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm no expert though, thanks for humoring me on the tech side of things. I'm also super cynical about what I trust people as a whole to do, so my mental image is of people hunting each other in the street with harpoons because someone released the town's voting records on the internet.

[nenjin]

Had some Blockchain developers at my work space. They talked a loud game, trashed their offices and left without paying rent.

Blockchain is an unproven tech that is a giant fucking unicorn.

[Dunamisdeos]

That is sort of what it read like to me? It sounds like it's a cloud sort of thing that everyone can see and since everyone can see it noone will mess with it, we can trust them because more people = more accountability.

Which to me is not how human works.

[smjjames]

Unproven tech as far as voting systems in the US go anyway. I know there's a few places which do use online voting for elections, but I haven't heard of any of them using blockchain.

That is sort of what it read like to me? It sounds like it's a cloud sort of thing that everyone can see and since everyone can see it noone will mess with it, we can trust them because more people = more accountability.

Which to me is not how human works.

If they're treating it like a normal online poll, they're going the wrong way about it.

[Kagus]

That is sort of what it read like to me? It sounds like it's a cloud sort of thing that everyone can see and since everyone can see it noone will mess with it, we can trust them because more people = more accountability.

Which to me is not how human works.

If they're treating it like a normal online poll, they're going the wrong way about it.

Or maybe it's the right way? We may finally get Hank the Angry Drunk Dwarf (Deceased) as commander-in-chief.

You never know, might be an improvement.

[Starver]

Pfft, they're claiming that they're using blockchain when they aren't actually using it?

Related?: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/21/companies-shares-soar-adding-blockchain-names/

[Descan]

I know enough about Blockchain to say that while it's proponents have a decent case for saying it's 'tamper-proof,' every 'tamper-proof' system up until now has been broken, and I have no reason to believe blockchain is any different.

It's certainly not been proven enough to trust an election to it, especially when the last major election showed that adversarial agents can already do some wonky tampering from left-field already. Why give them yet another field to play in that hasn't been truly tested yet?

[smjjames]

Theres no evidence that they actually changed any vote numbers, which would be trickier and more high risk than the methods they actually are using, but yes, I agree that the risk of hacking is too high to use a system on a large scale that hasn't been thoroughly tested and vetted yet.

While private companies do have their role to play, it seems like only the government really has the resources to develop and vet a system that would be online and still be secure, maybe some sort of DARPA-like challenge or something. Never going to happen with Trump being like that GIF with the dog in a hat and drinking coffee while the surroundings are on fire while saying 'this is fine'.

[sluissa]

Can we just drop all this silliness and go back to paper ballots, please? I mean, yes, they can be foiled by party balloons. But at least it's not a single point of failure. Any attempt to make major changes has to be widespread and organized with many actors involved.

[Egan_BW]

Theres no evidence that they actually changed any vote numbers, which would be trickier and more high risk than the methods they actually are using, but yes, I agree that the risk of hacking is too high to use a system on a large scale that hasn't been thoroughly tested and vetted yet.

While private companies do have their role to play, it seems like only the government really has the resources to develop and vet a system that would be online and still be secure, maybe some sort of DARPA-like challenge or something. Never going to happen with Trump being like that GIF with the dog in a hat and drinking coffee while the surroundings are on fire while saying 'this is fine'.

I'm thinking more like the dog in a lab coat (?) with the caption "I have no idea what I'm doing".

[Rolan7]

Electronic voting doesn't inherently have a single point of failure, this implementation was just... dramatically insecure and arguably dishonest about their process.

Paper ballots are falsiable too - heck the system expects counts to be off by a large margin, hence the expectation of recounts.  Having actual paper in a bunch of piles throughout the country is false security

[smjjames]

Can we just drop all this silliness and go back to paper ballots, please? I mean, yes, they can be foiled by party balloons. But at least it's not a single point of failure. Any attempt to make major changes has to be widespread and organized with many actors involved.

Paper ballots led to the whole hanging chads debacle in 2000, no system is going to be 100% infallible. You do have a point in that any major changes have to be done in an organized fashion, which is why only the government really has the resources (and authority) to do that.

Theres no evidence that they actually changed any vote numbers, which would be trickier and more high risk than the methods they actually are using, but yes, I agree that the risk of hacking is too high to use a system on a large scale that hasn't been thoroughly tested and vetted yet.

While private companies do have their role to play, it seems like only the government really has the resources to develop and vet a system that would be online and still be secure, maybe some sort of DARPA-like challenge or something. Never going to happen with Trump being like that GIF with the dog in a hat and drinking coffee while the surroundings are on fire while saying 'this is fine'.

I'm thinking more like the dog in a lab coat (?) with the caption "I have no idea what I'm doing".

I was referencing Trump's attitude towards the problem, not his cluelessness.

[Egan_BW]

The only truly secure method is to put a hyper intelligent AI in charge of discovering the preferences of every single person in the country.
It might end up cutting some heads open with diamond blades just to be sure it got the right answer, but it'll work.

[hector13]

Christ, Egan, why don’t you just give the AI the keys to the missile silos while you’re at it?