Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fordec | Hacker News Reader

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The project I'm currently working on is a community data aggregator for an upcoming election to improve election transparency. I will not be requesting user sign up or registration because the average age of the users will be over 45 and for a single day without getting into GDPR issues.

But I do intend to arbitrate if the election information being input from multiple geographical locations is valid data or not. Otherwise I'm not doing the project and the existing system of it only being owned by the largest political parties who have their own organization doing the tabulation. Others who have attempted this work have seen active manipulation campaigns over the course of their validation and speak to the only way to counteract the manipulation was bot control.

I do not want mass market appeal. I want the thing to get adoption for a day by people that would otherwise be casual at best internet users.

> The open internet is the one where we get to use whatever software we want to interoperate without restriction. It's the one where we get to use a Python script to scrape your site if we wish to do so

Sorry, Error 402, please provide payment. You're a bot until proven otherwise.

> But I do intend to arbitrate if the election information being input from multiple geographical locations is valid data or not.

How are you going to do that?

I live in a country whose supreme court routinely orders censorship of "fake news" and other kinds of "harmful" information, something not seen since the days of our military dictatorship. This year our government essentially created a ministry of truth. They censored "fake news" which literally turned out to be true after our current president was elected, it's comical.

How do you plan on being any different?

> Sorry, Error 402, please provide payment. You're a bot until proven otherwise.

OK. Do you accept credit cards?

> How are you going to do that?

The same way it's organized among the political parties. Word of mouth, social media and good will among interested parties who trust each other for a common goal of maintaining democratic principles. I don't come from a country that censors such work. Their main problem is it's all pen and paper by people that are usually schoolteachers and farmers on a normal day and they need the tech help.

> OK. Do you accept credit cards?

No I do not accept credit cards. I'm neither a business nor a payment processor. Please contact the administrator. Don't expect a reply. If you have to cold call, you're not in the existing trusted network where others vouch for additions to the network and will be two-factor geo-IP verified. Good luck with your python scraping in your world.

If you don't want my money, then I suppose I just won't get access. That's OK.

Disagree that that is OK.

A good democracy will have access for whoever requests it to validate and learn about their peers more, not forced behind a paywall. Hopefully by enabling my ethos, it marginally feeds towards culturally maintaining that my country doesn't have a Ministry of Truth and other forms of democratic deficits.

An open, democratic web doesn't discriminate against me just because I want to use a Python script instead of a browser.

One person, one vote. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote

A core of Democracy is indeed preventing ballot stuffing when people go to upload the vote results they see. We're just not talking about electronic means than paper ones. You say "me", why is your script different from a Russian-style nation state trying to put weight on the scales? Or trying to DDOS the site? And if you are indeed different, to make the distinction in any way, some form of meta information must be monitored and acted upon. You may be innocent, I can not know that in the technological future you propose. Without information, as per security best practices, the wire defaults to closed, not open. The cost is the loss of ease of use and access, but the data integrity is more important than your scripting convenience. The data can at least represent the historical record. Without that historical record, scripting of false data is worse than useless and actively dangerous and not worth putting into the world.

> A core of Democracy is indeed preventing ballot stuffing when people go to upload the vote results they see

> You say "me", why is your script different from a Russian-style nation state trying to put weight on the scales?

Don't accept votes from unknown, untrusted randoms. Even in my country where the election is fully digital, they check my ID before letting me vote. There are ways it could go wrong but that isn't one of them.

> Or trying to DDOS the site?

They can't DDoS you if you have them pay for the resources required to serve them.

> The cost is the loss of ease of use and access

That's fine.

> Don't accept votes from unknown, untrusted randoms.

Trust can be built from metadata. You stop it from being unknown, by shock, building up knowledge through recording it.

> They can't DDoS you if you have them pay for the resources required to serve them.

Not a payment processor. Not a business. Nobody is going to pay for membership. This is not on the table.

> That's fine.

I deeply disagree and you're not changing my position on that nor am I likely to change yours. But I'm the implementer, so guess which way it's going. See: Not accepting your money.

What I have though gotten out of this conversation is that I'm now aware of how much more complex feature set I need to put into the first party tracking to get it right in a shifting tech environment. So food for thought.

> But I'm the implementer, so guess which way it's going.

You're an implementer operating in a deeply adversarial environment where everyone is your enemy. Everything you do can and will be circumvented, especially by the Russia-style attackers you mentioned. See the copyright industry's fruitless attempts to curb copyright infringement. If it actually looks like you succeeded, it's only because people didn't care enough.

Unless the free computing we enjoy today is completely destroyed to the point we can only run government signed software, there's little you can do to defend against these things. To stop this, you will need tyranny the likes of which will destroy everything the word "hacker" stands for. I presumed you cared at least a little about that since you're posting on Hacker News.

Everything can be circumvented. I but this isn't some SaaS service, I don't need to survive forever, just about twelve hours. I can achieve that.

Yeah, I grew up and realized that there's more to the world than mere developer convenience above all else. If Hacking means siding with the developer over everyone else in humanity and societal benefit, let it burn. Luckily, that's not my definition.

You're gonna insult me now? I'm a kid in fantasy land and you're the grown up dealing with the harsh world? Lol. You just admitted that irrelevance is your only leverage.

I'm talking about me. I changed, I matured and took on wider problems. If you read my self improvement as an direcy insult or anything about you, that speaks more about your mindset than anything. And if thats the case I now see why you care so much about your scripts, if you don't have other audiences in mind it has to be the only scope you have to care for.

I'm fine with what my side project is and it's scope. It's secondarily a tech demonstration for the bigger thing that comes later. If that means the early stage is only viewed by 2000 people and improved the lives of some election nerds for no monetary gain plus a news article after submissions close, good, the plan is on track. I'm not trying to be big in this project.

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