> I even logged … scans of post received (and categorised in Google Drive but linked from Google Calendar)
Oh, very nice idea. What's your workflow for doing this?
466 karma · joined February 20, 2007
Oh, very nice idea. What's your workflow for doing this?
If such a site existed, vote buying and/or coercion would be a lot more prevalent.
Lots of useful things don't fit that pattern.
To take one example from here, I use 'pry' regularly, but before reading https://github.com/jbranchaud/til/blob/master/ruby/editing-c..., I didn't even think to wonder whether there was a way to fire up an editor from within it. It's not something I've ever actively needed, but it's a very useful shortcut now that I know about it.
As you say, if the company has a fixed office at the centre of that radius, they can still tell the worker that their days begin when they arrive at the office, and then the 'worktime' begins once they get there, ready to travel out to the first customer. That's how many businesses operate anyway — and how the business at the centre of this case used to work. The case was brought once they closed that office down.
Why?
Even without getting into complex election fraud, parties in many countries already know how to buy votes in a paper-ballot system: you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want.
And even without that, there's a much simpler calculation in play in Estonia. Keskerakond (the party closely allied with Putin's party), only got 7.7% of the e-votes in the most recent election: the demographics of online voters has very little overlap with their supporters. If only the paper-based votes were counted, Keskerakond would have won the election.
Sure, they'd still have the complication of actually forming a government; but it's much more likely they'd be able to do that with a first-place showing (and possibly without Savisaar).
With those sorts of numbers, if I were a Keskerakond strategist, I'd be doing everything I possibly could to discredit e-voting too. And the more "useful idiots" I could find, who'll merrily interfere in the elections a country they know very little about because it suits their own ideals, the better.
However, I'm much less concerned with this threat than with the much simpler virus that simply changes your vote in real time.
Most people I know don't leave their ID card connected at all time; so the virus would need to wait for the next opportune moment, rather than silently casting this vote whilst you're not at my computer — thus significantly increasing the chances that at least some people would notice it. If it also had to load the voting software again to send the vote (I don't know enough about the protocols around this to know if it would have to or not), then it would be even more likely that some people would notice.
And on top of that, don't forget that the ID-card software shows on launch how many times you've digitally signed things. Most people almost certainly don't pay much attention to that number, but I'm sure some people would notice it rising unexpectedly from the virus, and an investigation could happen.
This certainly doesn't protect against all attacks (and it's only one part of the security system) — but it _does_ help against the threat of a virus that invisibly intercepts your vote to turn it into something different. If people started reporting that their phone showed a different vote to what they thought they'd cast via their laptop, then the election would be in trouble.
The fact that it only shows you this for a short time period also gets around the problem of you being able to show to a third party how you voted (in cases of vote-buying or coercion), because under the Estonian system you can also vote as many times as you like (with only the final vote being counted). So you could use this verification to 'prove' to someone that you voted the way they wanted you to — and then log in again an hour later and vote for someone different.
The section on "The Technical Origin" explicitly references that as the starting point for this project.
The issue is more subtle than that. In lots of cases the value of knowing the information is when it lets you make connections that you wouldn't otherwise have _realised_ were important.
Let's say you're reading something that happens to mention The Alhambra Decree. You've never heard of this before, so you do a quick Wikipedia lookup, where the first paragraph says:
"The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year."
If that "1492" is a well primed trigger point for you — especially in a context involving Spain — you're much more likely to pause for a second and wonder if this might be related to anything else you know about that year. And, although the remainder of this page never mentions Columbus at all, it doesn't take you much searching to discover that there are indeed some very interesting connections between the two, some of which lead to further questions about Columbus' own religious background and leanings.
But if that 1492 doesn't have that trigger effect, you're much less likely to draw any connection here, and simply nod and return to your original reading.
We do that all the time. There are so many things that pass us by constantly because we simply don't even realise there's anything worth paying attention to. The more hooks we create in our brains for those to get snagged on in passing, the deeper you start to understand things, and the more interesting life becomes.
As more and more authors are simply buying dozens of 5* reviews for their books on sites like fiverr (or outsourcing it to Book Marketing companies who do the dirty work on their behalf), then I think we're moving further from that world, rather than closer to it.
So clicking the link should be perfectly OK.
The thinking is that even if someone has managed to compromise, say, your laptop (e.g. through a specially constructed virus) to secretly switch your vote to a different party, then they'd also need to be able to compromise your phone too to persuade an entirely different piece of software to also report your vote back to you wrongly. Not impossible, but a much harder task (especially as you'd need to manage to do it for everyone, or else there'll be a big outcry from the large number of people who notice a discrepancy).
Being able to prove you voted that way during that time period doesn't really matter, as the system already allows you vote as many times as you like, with only the last one being counted. (i.e. if someone tries to coerce you, or buy your vote, you simply vote their way, and then, when they head off to the next person, log back in again and vote the way you originally wanted.)
Dislike != downvote.
Dislike can also be "I don't like this thing that happened to you" / sympathy.
There's a big difference between annexing (parts of, or even all of) Ukraine (which isn't a NATO member), and Poland (which is not only in NATO, but also the EU)
If your financial advisor is so great, where is your yacht?
That's not so true in Europe, where many airlines have a quite strict size and weight limit (e.g. 8kg @ 55cm x 40cm x 20cm)
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
> Is that so controversial though. Cycling, absent dedicated bike lines, separate bike paths, and very well organized intersections is dangerous.
The more cyclists there are, the less dangerous cycling is. Things that discourage cycling thus make it more dangerous for all other cyclists (and vice versa).
Google is even funding interesting projects in this area too (e.g. https://techpresident.com/news/23379/googleorg-offers-fundin...)
Your logic isn't backed up by places that have experimented with this.
Yes, there will always be some people who are content to live at the poverty line if they don't have to do any work for it. They are not the people to base your system around.
There are many more people who are happy to do something to improve their quality of life even a little. A problem in many countries with an advanced welfare state is that doing even a little work reduces your benefits significantly enough (and introduces so much bureaucracy into your life) that it's not work it. With a basic income, that disappears.