> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.
Using Wayback machine, I can confirm that this text was associated with these images from the first moment that they were published on Wikileaks.
Also, HIV isn't AIDS and you should keep that in mind.
> I think the key issue is that these machines are internet or network connected.
If we're really concerned about this - get rid of the network connectivity.
They (generally) aren't.
(Almost) every demo of voting machine hacking involves physical access to the machine, tools, and keys/lockpicks.
This article is about how "tinderization" has reduced the need for players to go out and stay out late at night clubs when on the road, and attempts to map that to a measurable decrease in home field advantage
This guy ported wolf3d to the Gameboy Color more or less that way (looks like all the game logic is still on the Game it's CPU and just the ray-casting is done on the co-processor)
> Nearly every demonstration of voting machine hacking has required unrestricted physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
For that to be any consolation, we’d have to unconditionally trust those who have physical access to the machine and tools/keys.
Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
A vote count given by an electronic machine has no such auditability.
> Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
“Hacking” a stack of paper, e.g. ballot stuffing or destroying ballots, is something people can see happen. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to do out in the open with security cameras and the public there to watch. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but you tend to make a much bigger mess doing it.
Also, today an observer can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet if something fishy is happening in the polling station, but nobody can see what happens inside a voting machine and whether it counts the votes properly. Electronic voting is a perfect tool for falsifying election results.
I appreciate your perspective, but these issues should be dealt with by citizens. It is not a global issue how the USA handles its elections. Foreigners weighing-in scare the shit out of our old people. That's how we get epithets like (((globalists))).
>Such trust is not necessary with paper ballots because they can always be hand-counted with supervision from both sides of a disputed election.
That assumes they aren't replaced at some point. For a nation-level election this is probably too difficult to significantly influence an election but at even a state level it's relatively doable with a little coercion and/or carefully placed individuals even in 2019 in the United States.
You also have the option to do voter impersonation in states without voting ID laws, again this would mostly only work at a more local level.
Outside of the United States there are all sorts of examples, including standing out the polling places with force to let people know vote our way or we'll shoot you.
What you describe can be easily detected by an observer, who can take a video and instantly publish it on the Internet. You cannot take a ballot from the box so that nobody notices. But with electronic voting, you can replace the firmware and nobody notices anything.
>What you describe can be easily detected by an observer,
Have you never heard of bribes or threats? It happens with juries, I imagine it happens with poling places, and I imagine some of those convictions involved exactly that.
If you've reached a point where you are willing to tamper with an election, greasing some palms or finding something to threaten key people with is not going to make you lose a single wink of sleep or have any mental reservations or other hesitations. People like money, like a lot, and if you haven't the funds to bribe them with the 21st century offers a horde easily discoverable information about people and those close to them.
Here in Russia, every candidate can assign up to 2 observers to every polling station (and also one person to the election committee). As the people are chosen by a candidate, we can assume that they are motivated and you cannot easily bribe them.
Also, with presidential elections in 2018, there were no prior notifications and the government didn't know who was going to become an observer before the voting day, which was nice.
Sadly, you cannot become an observer by yourself, I don't like that.
I haven't heard about bribes or threats, but there were cases when an observer was taken away by police for allegedly being too loud and obstructing the voting. In recent elections, independent observers used a Telegram chat for coordination, so that they could ask for consultation or ask someone else to come to the polling station if something happened.
In Russia fraud is usually committed by election staff who often are public school employees, social care or government workers, people who are paid by the government. And typically they prefer to falsify results when there is no observers, they don't want to appear in Youtube videos.
Of course, in other countries the situation may be different.
Also, here in Russia, people who are observers, are often opposition activists, who dislike the government and for example take part in illegal protests and get arrested for this. This is the type of people that would be most difficult to bribe.
Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place. Russia was always founded on liberty and is a living example of it forever. No "blood and soil" or eugenics garbage from the Russians...Yes, that's sarcasm.
The Russian Revolution established a control-freak government that hated freedom; Lenin was a self-annointed genius. The USSR failed because the incentives were misaligned.
My grandparents immigrated from Russia when their parents saw the pogroms in the 1890s. Using scapegoats, promising free stuff, and fear mongering is over 100 year tradition. Emotion and anecdotes over data.
I'm not saying that electoral system in Russia is perfect; it is constantly manipulated by authorities. They are very inventive and develop new techniques every time. Nobody can be trusted, because we saw how the head of central election committee was looking for excuses to justify banning opposition candidates that you mention and ignore their objections. The meetings were livestreamed and I watched hours of such videos trying to clear up everything for myself.
But this allows us to see what measures to ensure transparency work in such circumstances and what don't. We see that independent observers and paper voting at polling stations help to prevent fraud and electronic voting would be completely opaque and uncontrollable.
> Sure, let's do like Russia and ban opposition candidates[0] from running in the first place
Holy whataboutism. Yes Russia is a far cry from a healthy democracy but that has no bearing in any way on paper ballots. You seem to have just changed the subject entirely.
Both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly believing that elections are not fair, and it's far easier for people to believe conspiracies (true or not) when electronic voting machines are involved. At some point we will lose the ability to peacefully transition power.
A successful voting process both accurately counts the votes, and is trusted by the people. Computers can count, but they are not seen as trustworthy by the people. Paper is more understandable and trustworthy. Even as a computer programmer I'm not sure I can trust electronic voting.
Thus, even in the absence of any actual hacks or fraud, electronic voting is inferior at a primary objective of the voting system, being understandable and perceived as trustworthy.
Election commitee (or whatever it is called in different countries) has unlimited and uncontrolled physical access to those machines and their keys. What stops them from uploading a firmware that would count every N-th vote for candidate A no matter what was voter's choice? How do you detect that?
Unlike electronic voting, paper ballots are much more difficult to manipulate. If a voter has marked a box for candidate X, you cannot change it or ignore it if there are observers. An observer can verify that voting goes according to the rules and votes are counted properly. The most popular way to "hack" paper voting is to organise groups of people and ride them on a bus from one polling station to other so that they can vote multiple times, but it is more difficult to do, and easier to spot than simply replace the firmware in a voting machine.
In the case with an electronic machine, you cannot see what's happening inside.
In Canada, each person is assigned to a polling station, typically a school, church, or community center near their residence. You present ID at the door and your name is crossed off a paper list. Your name is not on the list at any other polling stations.
You have the option to mail in your vote or to vote in an advance poll, but these options close a week before the main poll, so if your name appears on the list at your polling station, they're pretty confident you haven't voted yet.
How does one “simply replace the firmware” is a way that isn’t trivial to spot by an observer?
Assuming there is no external IO such as USB or Ethernet, someone would have to disassemble the machine and solder a programming header in order to re-flash the device.
Hack voting machines: trick or bribe an election worker to plug a USB drive into all the machines a week before the election.
Hack paper ballots: bribe the multiple people, including representatives from each party who cares to send one, to look the other way while you steal a box full of paper ballots and substitute your own.
It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder to mess with paper ballots at scale and much easier to secure them.
>Paper ballot boxes are just as hackable at scale with those requirements.
No they arent. You need one guy with physical access to to a machine, at any time, to screw an election, with manual counting you need everyone in the room conspiring to rig the election during the voting hours. With the possibility to volunteer to count votes and publishing the voting numbers for each voting station, you just dont get those situations.
I know its an unpopular statement, but having a democratic election is not a new problem to solve. Most western countries do it just fine. This is not a problem with the concept of paper ballots but a absurdly broken system.
Electronic voting machines run proprietary code which, AFAIK, was never publicly audited (AFAIK, the manufacturers have resisted auditing efforts bitterly).
How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?
IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).
In Minnesota, the problem of individual untrustworthiness is handled by putting multiple people on every task - and those people must be from different political parties. So any time ballots are handled, marked or unmarked, members of at least two different parties are present.
Translate that concern into action. Volunteer to be an election official yourself and keep an eye on everyone else. Participate in how this thing works. It's really rewarding.
This isn't the 70s anymore; all paper companies nowadays use tree plantations instead of random old growth, which means paper is now only about as damaging as regular food products.
just call your credit card company(ies)/banks and demand they stop sending you offers in the mail
this action alone will save an enormous amounts of paper, orders of magnitude more than is required for every democratic action you'll participate in with our super low tech future (paper ballots for all), and nicely reduces the amount of shipping/logistics etc. that your local mail delivery service has to do. massive win-win for the planet and democracy
The USPS has subsidized junk mail. I have a mail scale, 90% of the mail sent to me is complete junk. Non-market based entities have no incentive for efficiency.
> Both Le Roux and Satoshi did significant cryptography projects
The article says (emphasis mine):
"Le Roux is highly suspected to have been a part of a team of anonymous developers called the “TrueCrypt Team.”"
It also gives the fact that Le Roux has been in jail since 2012 as a possible explanation for why Satisfied
Satoshi's Bitcoin fortune has gone untouched, but doesn't attempt to reconcile that with why he was able to make a forum post two years later: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/07/real-bitcoin-creator-i-am-no...
- Anonymous creator of significant cryptography project
How many other people like that are there? People that are known to have written important cryptographic software, but chosen to remain anonymous. I'm sure there's a few, but it's a short list.
Who's politicized the rape charges other than Assange himself continuously calling them a government conspiracy against him?
The Swedish government doesn't discuss them (which is what's allowed Assange's version of events to get so popular). The US hasn't mentioned it. The UK gave him a fair trial based on them.
> Who's politicized the rape charges other than Assange
Swedish LE when they refused to hear the case with Assange in the embassy. Whether he's guilty or innocent, I can't take it as anything other than "we don't care about the case or the victims, we just wanted the extradition".
The Swedish courts disagree. They said that the prosecutor must use all available methods to progress the case, and if the objective is to interview a person of interest who is yet to be official charged then that is what the law say they should do. The law do not give an exception that it may give a precedent that people suspected of a crime may seek political asylum in a embassy and that the interview is then located there.
But let say this did create a precedent that you can dictate where the interview is located by seeking political asylum. Is that bad? In the US you can escape the reach of justice by just being pardoned by the president. Apple to apple comparison, the situation with political asylum seem like a better precedent.
I'm not sure what the issue is. If you are already hiding in a place unreachable by the Swedish LE, you don't have to take part in anything. If you agree to take part in the investigation over internet anyway, that's still better for the victims. (verdict, potential damages from any sources the LE can take over, public acknowledgement of guilt, etc.)
For the same reason you don't usually negotiate with terrorists? Or any other behaviour you don't condone, right or wrong the guy made a mockery of Swedish LE if nothing else he should be charged with obstruction for going AWOL after agreeing to come for an interview and then skipped the country a day before.
I don't see how this is similar to negotiating with terrorists. He holds no power in this case while physically unreachable by Sweden. If found guilty, he gets more problems. If found innocent, he's stuck with all the original problems.
Charging him for running away also seems irrelevant to the original question - was this case more than a political play.
So in your opinion it's ok for someone who committed a crime to run away and hide and then have the DA go and question to them knowing regardless of the outcome they can't touch them and even compelling them to answer questions would be impossible unlike in court?
Ofc not, they should be marked as fugitives and held in contempt until they can brought in.
This wasn't a political case this was an asshole trying to escape justice, he knew he wouldn't be extradited to the US from Sweden he just hoped to play that while he plays the UK authorities while he spins this as political prosecution to his fans and the media to gather public support.
You're bringing up the actual act of running away. I'm saying once someone already ran away and you know you can't touch them, it's more beneficial to everyone to allow them to testify remotely than delay/close the case, potentially forever.
The UK trial was not on the rape charges (there was no permitted discussion of the evidence or total lack of it). The ruling was over whether the UK was bound to extradite given the Swedish government's refusal to interview Assange in England or indict him in Sweden. The tortured legal conclusion was basically that the UK couldn't definitively conclude the Swedes were acting in bad faith, and they couldn't be entirely sure that Assange was only being extradited for questioning (technically illegal).
As far as the Swedes go, the Swedish government discussed the case when it closed it for the first time. If the government hasn't been public about the case since it was re-opened by a political appointee, perhaps it is because there is zero evidence against Assange. We know this because the pretext for re-opening the case was the "discovery" of new physical evidence (a broken condom) that lacked any of Assange's DNA. This is all public knowledge, btw. Funny how it isn't discussed much in the press.
Thanks for the downvote whoever it was. History is not going to be kind to those unaware of basic facts however, in this case the fact that the Assange case was re-opened in 2010 on the basis of fabricated evidence:
Assume that people can get their hands on the UK high court ruling. It takes only a bit of reading to confirm the complete accuracy of the statements above.
He'd tried to get her to have sex without a condom all night. She continually rejected it. He (allegedly) knew fully that she did not consent to unprotected sex and waited for her to fall asleep to do it.
How about this bullshit Steve Jobs AIDS diagnosis?
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/steve-jobs-hiv/steve-jobs-hi...