Steve Brinich: The Criminal
Dug this from my old archives, after finding out it vanished from the Net. Decade-old, but more truthful than before. May it provide some inspiration. -- Title: The Criminal Lyrics by: Steve Brinich Tune: The Idiot (Stan Rogers) Date: 1994 Found online at: http://www.access.digex.net/~steve-b/myfilks.htm Recorded on: Subject: Government [This is one of my reactions to the US government's attacks on freedom of electronic speech (I was thinking specifically about the government's Big Brother wiretap/encryption policies, but it applies equally well to the CDA and other such offenses. As for the politicians who vote for these abuses -- alas, cutting out the tongues of oathbreakers has gone out of fashion, so we will have to settle for turning them out to find honest work. They're sneaky characters, but groups such as the Voters' Telecom Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc. do a fairly good job of monitoring the hired help in Washington and sounding the alarm when they start getting out of line again.] I log onto this homebrew Net where the Feds are not around I've turned my back on Big Brother's track and made this open ground I slip past the surveillance taps; the alarms will make no sound I set up the link and I always think back to my old account I remember back six years ago, this outlaw life I chose When every day the news would say there's another rule to impose Well, I could have stayed and just obeyed, but I'm not one of those I'm remaining free, and that makes me a criminal, I suppose. So I bid farewell to the tamed old Net I never more will see But write I must, and I put my trust in human liberty Oh, I miss support, and the GUI ports, and the realtime videos But I like being free, and that makes me a criminal, I suppose. So, come you fine young hackers all, to the cyber underground This outlaw life's no paradise, but it's better than lying down Oh, the interface isn't cut-and-paste, and the system's often down But the government spies will set their eyes on a licensed Net account So bid farewell to the tamed old Net you never more will see Here your words will ship without censorship; there's real liberty You'll miss the bells and the fancy shells; here we just have plain old prose But you'll be free, and just like me, a criminal, I suppose.
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For Guidance in Iraq, Marines Rediscover A 1940s Manual
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB108137571973077200,00.html The Wall Street Journal April 8, 2004 PAGE ONE For Guidance in Iraq, Marines Rediscover A 1940s Manual Small-War Secrets Include: Tips on Nation-Building, The Care of Pack Mules By GREG JAFFE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL April 8, 2004; Page A1 When Maj. Matthew Chisholm shipped out to Iraq in February, he stuffed his dogeared copy of the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual -- a 64-year-old guide to battling guerrillas -- into his backpack. I brought it as a checklist or mental nudge, says the civil-affairs officer. [It] pretty much describes the intent of everything I do over here: rebuild schools, roads and police stations. It also describes a lot of things Maj. Chisholm isn't likely to see. Dozens of pages are dedicated to the care and feeding of pack mules. Never feed fresh grass to an overheated animal, it warns. Some passages are, at the same time, naïve and patronizing: Inhabitants of countries with a high rate of illiteracy have many childlike characteristics ... eliciting the untarnished truth from them requires patience beyond words. Another section covers the killing and dressing of game, warning that meat cooked after rigor mortis has set in will be tough unless it is first boiled in vinegar. In its three-week drive to Baghdad last year, the U.S. military relied heavily on satellite-guided bombs and supersonic jets. But now it is looking to this anachronistic book for some answers. The 446-page manual was born out of three decades of hard-won experience. From 1898 to 1934, the Marines fought a number of small wars, in the Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, China, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. They clashed with guerrillas, built constabularies and held elections. Then, in 1940, a group of Marines set out to capture in writing the lessons of those battles. One year after their book was finished, the U.S. found itself embroiled in World War II, and the manual was forgotten. The manual was classified until 1972. Thus, in Vietnam, where it might have been useful, it wasn't widely distributed and wasn't much read. Now, it is popping up everywhere. Last month, the Marine Corps passed out copies to all officers headed to Iraq. William Luti, an adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and one of the architects of the Iraq war, keeps a copy on a coffee table in his Pentagon office. He praises the book for its keen recognition that in small wars support of the locals is far more important than raw firepower. One of the visionary aspects of this work is its focus on the social and psychological aspects of small wars, Mr. Luti says. 3 The Marine Corps Small Wars Manual, written in 1940. (Read the manual at www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil4) Democrats cite it, too. We know how to fight wars like Iraq. We even have a how-to guide in the Marine Corps's Small War Manual, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee insisted last October at a hearing on Iraq reconstruction. Some soldiers and Marines say the fat book has been mythologized by a military that is struggling with change. It's cited more often than it is actually read, says Lt. Col. Richard Lacquement, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. Col. Lacquement suggests that at a time when the U.S. military has been pulled into an unfamiliar and complex guerrilla war, the book harks back to the Banana Wars in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s. The idea that we have a history of doing these sorts of missions well is comforting for a tradition-minded organization like the military, he says. Others say the book has caught on because there are so few alternatives. The Small Wars Manual is so popular today not because of its excellence -- although much of it is very good -- but because it has little serious competition, says Army Maj. John Nagl, who is deployed near Ramadi, the site of some of the fiercest fighting since the end of the war, and is the author of a history of modern counterinsurgency. In the absence of anything better, the book has become must reading for muddy-boot troops. Before he embarked last week on a four-day mission to track down enemy fighters raining mortars down on a U.S. base near Fallujah, Marine Corps Capt. Adam Strickland reread the sections of the manual that discuss how to cordon off an area infested with enemies. Even the much-derided mule sections are proving useful in Iraq, he says. Marines still keep a handful of mules in California to practice using the animals to carry gear into war. Unfortunately Marines get hung up on the pictures of the donkeys with rockets on their backs, but what is ironic is that we search every donkey we see here for that exact reason, he writes from Iraq. And well they might. Last November, insurgents packed rockets into a donkey cart and fired them at the Iraq Oil ministry. In Afghanistan, Army Lt. Col.
VPN VoIP
I've been installing a Draytek Vigor 2900 router at work lately, and found a line of models which do VoIP (router with analog phone jacks on them). They also support VPN router-router, and come with DynDNS clients. I thought I've seen VoIP over VPN being mentioned, but I can't find it right now. They're reasonably priced, and have pretty good online support: http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/ I've also been looking at them from vulnerabilities angle, but couldn't find much. Not even which embedded OS they run on. No glaring remote exploit holes yet reported. Everyone has seen http://www.skype.com/download_pda.html right? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 03:29:58PM -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 11:28 AM -0700 4/8/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Geodesic means shortest path, and you'll note if you play with tracert that the shortest path (as seen on Earth's surface) is rarely taken. A pretty densely distributed radio mesh with good (geographic routing) algorithms would tend to use the shortest path. Very small cells based on current WiFi or ultrawideband/digital pulse radio might have to route around obstacles (large high buildings, flow along the nodes with aerials dangling into the streets). MobileMesh doesn't seen to be the single solution, at least one contender exists. Both are being used in practice, alas not yet in your $100 garden-variety WiFi routers (these do bridging already, though). Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Wires over long distances will tend to follow geodesics (because cables are expensive, and an enterprise will try to minimize the costs). Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. American cities are orthogonal, European usually radial. The cities are connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. Easiest is a cloud of satellites with mutual time of flight triangulation, and line of sight laser signalling. Measure the path in time? UWB gives you realtime location in each node down to cm scale. No idea how difficult to ToF triangulate with multipath. The higher device density, the less confusion. Intel's pushing UWB as wireless USB substitute. No reason why it couldn't cover 10 miles of open terrain with enough power and proper aerials. Anyone knows how UWB handles directional aeriales? Does it prefer fractal emitters, or are there specific optimal radiator geometries? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Gmail as Blacknet
Well, I never claimed to be Einstein, but your 3 simple steps sound a hell of a lot like my recipe for making a ham sandwich: First, order a steak in a restaurant. Second, tell them to add two slices of bread. Third, tell them you don't want beef as the primary meat of your steak, you want pork. Tell them, Uh, change that pork to ham, and put it between the two slices of bread. Oi La! Instant Ham sandwich! -TD From: An Metet [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Gmail as Blacknet Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 02:08:39 -0400 Tyler Durden writes: Ironically, some of the features of Gmail bear resemblance to BlackNet. In particular, its claimed policy of retaining email indefinitely, even after the recipient has stopped using the account, is reminiscent of BlackNet's function as a data haven, as well as other Cypherpunk projects like the Eternity Network. This retention is objectionable to conventional privacy groups, but Cypherpunks will recognize it as being deeply in accord with their values. Poo poo. The difference between a potential blacknet and Gmail is that there's little doubt that google will cough up the true names of objectionable posters, if and when anyone looking even remotely authoritative/governmental comes pounding on their doors. In a worst-case Blacknet, my True Name will only be gettable by agents of the state via the expenditure of very large amounts of resources, if at all. You have missed the point of the analogy entirely. BlackNet makes information available even when the subjects of the information (or any other parties) want it suppressed. It is a censorship-proof store of data. If information about you is stored in BlackNet, anyone can get access to it (for a price, perhaps), and you can't do anything about it. To make Gmail more like BlackNet, you should first do as others have suggested and access it via cryptographic anonymity techniques (see the recent announcements for the onion routing network now being developed, http://www.freehaven.net/tor. Now you can use it as a store of data for your pseudonym without linking to your true identity. A second step is to then PGP-encrypt all email going to your Gmail address. This could be done easily by someone writing a mail forwarder which accepted email for any username, looked up a PGP key for that name and encrypted the email, then forwarded it along to the corresponding username at Gmail. This would be less than one page of Perl. You would give out the name of a system running such a script as your email address, but your encrypted mail would then be stored and accessed at Gmail. You'd gain the advantage of their multi gigabyte storage facility while protecting the privacy of your own email. And I'd like to see their adwords facility struggling to come up with something appropriate when the only legible text is BEGIN PGP ENCRYPTED MESSAGE. A third step is to get a browser plugin which would transparently decrypt PGP encrypted email stored at web mail services like Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc. At one time this would have been an overwhelmingly difficult task due to the multiplicity of browsers; at a later time, it would have been impractical due to the dominance of IE; but today, with Mozilla becoming a widely used, standardized, open source alternative to IE, it is finally possible for such browser customizations to become generally available and useful. So there you have it, a simple three step program to turn your Gmail account into a privacy-protected, virtually unlimited-size data store. _ Get rid of annoying pop-up ads with the new MSN Toolbar FREE! http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200414ave/direct/01/
What Brought on the French Revolution?
--- begin forwarded text Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mises Daily Article [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: What Brought on the French Revolution? Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 09:15:18 -0400 List-Help: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1489http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1489 What Brought on the French Revolution? By H.A. Scott Trask [Posted April 9, 2004] No matter how much the American economy grows during the next decade, the government will have serious trouble funding expanding entitlements, increased education spending, and ongoing wars in the Middle East, while maintaining a global military constabulary and presence everywhere. Something has to give. No matter how one crunches the numbers, a crisis is looming, and Americans are bound to see their standard of living fall and their global empire collapse. It has happened before. Consider that seminal and catastrophic event that inaugurated the era of mass politics, bureaucratic centralism, and the ideological statethe French Revolution. It is a large and complex event worthy of a Gibbon, but it may not have happened at all if the French monarchy had balanced its budget. While the causes of the Revolution are many, the cause of the crisis that brought on the Revolution is not. It was a fiscal and credit crisis that weakened the authority and confidence of the monarchy so much that it thought it had to convene a defunct political assembly before it had safely carried out a successful program of liberal constitutional and free market reform. It would be as if the American federal government called a constitutional convention with an open agenda and hoped that all would go smoothly. The Estates General lasted only a little over a month before the leaders of the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie, artisans, and peasantry) transformed it into a National Assembly and took political power from the monarchy. The Revolution was on. Revisionist historians have challenged the standard interpretation of pre-revolutionary France as a country with a stagnant economy, an oppressed peasantry, a shackled bourgeoisie, and an archaic political structure. In Citizens (1989), Simon Schama describes France under Louis XVI as a rapidly modernizing nation with entrepreneurial nobles, a reform-minded monarchy, nascent industrialization, growing commerce, scientific progress, and energetic intendants (royal administrators in the provinces). Moreover, Montesquieu was in vogue; the English mixed constitution was the cynosure of political reform, and the economic philosophy of physiocracy, with its belief in economic law and advocacy of laissez faire, had discredited the dogmas of state mercantilism. Turgot argued perceptively that another war with England would derail his reform program, bankrupt the state, and, even if successful, do little to weaken British power. In 1774, Louis XVI appointed Jacques Turgot, a Physiocrat, to be Controller-General of Finances. Turgot believed that subsidies, regulations, and tariffs were crippling productivity and enterprise in France. End them, he advised the king, and business would thrive and state revenues increase. He proposed an ambitious reform program that included taking down internal custom barriers, lifting price controls on grain, abolishing the guilds and the corvee (forced labor service), and devolving political power to newly created provincial assemblies (two of which he established). Turgot envisioned a federated France, with a chain of elected bodies extending from the village through the provinces to some form of national assembly. Not surprisingly, there was both aristocratic and popular opposition to these reforms, but what really doomed them was Turgot's inveterate opposition to French intervention in the American War of Independence. Many were still stewing over the humiliating and catastrophic defeat suffered by France in the Seven Years' War (17561763). The country had lost her North American possessions (Quebec, Louisiana) and all of French India, except two trading stations. The foreign minister (Vergennes) calculated that by helping the Americans gain their independence they could weaken the British Empire, gain revenge, and restore France's previous position as one of the world's two superpowers. Turgot argued perceptively that another war with England would derail his reform program, bankrupt the state, and, even if successful, do little to weaken British power. The first gunshot will drive the state to bankruptcy, he warned the king. It was to no avail. International power politics and considerations of national prestige took precedence over domestic reform, and the king dismissed him in May 1776. He would be proved right on all three points. The French began covertly supplying war material to the rebellious colonists in 1777, and in 1778 they signed a treaty of alliance with the
Cypherpunks, worldwide shipping meds for you
What's so good about it? :)Nature gave us one tongue and two ears so we could hear twice as much as we speak.To talk goodness is not good... only to do it is. Cypherpunks, exceptional medications, low rates, best quality http://crassly.wsmeds.com/d13/index.php?id=d13 toptail Oh, love is real enough you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy -- and that is life.In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.The heart and benevolent and kind the most resembles God.
RE: Gmail as Blacknet
And I'd like to see their adwords facility struggling to come up with something appropriate when the only legible text is BEGIN PGP ENCRYPTED MESSAGE. Wow are you non-commercial :-) All the spy stores, sec phone makers, disk encryptors, VPN vendors, etc will be paying top dollar to get seen by privacy fans. Perhaps PGP etc will take out ads for those who *don't* have this header :-)
RE: Gmail as Blacknet
At 09:58 AM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I never claimed to be Einstein, but your 3 simple steps sound a hell of a lot like my recipe for making a ham sandwich: Hardly. One could put together a very slick drop file here for encrypted net storage script in a day. One could even prototype this using any net mail system like Yahoo, albeit with a rather piddling storage capacity. By including plaintext search tokens (meaning known only to you, perhaps derived from hashing keywords) you could use Gmail's search feature to find stored data. This uses local encryption and net-based storage backup. Sounds good to me. It would be rather telling if Google said no encrypted email wouldn't it? :-)
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. Wires over long distances will tend to follow geodesics (because cables are expensive, and an enterprise will try to minimize the costs). For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. American cities are orthogonal, European usually radial. The cities are ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. That's certainly true, but now you are talking about political decisions made ages ago. Many roads in England were built by the Romans. These roads lead to London. You see the same pattern on the Continent, of course, with the roads leading to the local capital (Paris, say) and then on to Rome. That is, fiber optic paths today reflect the strategic requirements of the Roman Empire, not geometry. -- Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure
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Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Fixed P2P energy costs are trivial. Not so for mobile P2P. And if your meshnodes are mains-powered, you have wires going there, so wireless is less useful. Solar nodes might be useful. At 03:19 PM 4/9/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: A pretty densely distributed radio mesh with good (geographic routing) algorithms would tend to use the shortest path. Very small cells based on current WiFi or ultrawideband/digital pulse radio might have to route around obstacles (large high buildings, flow along the nodes with aerials dangling into the streets). MobileMesh doesn't seen to be the single solution, at least one contender exists. Both are being used in practice, alas not yet in your $100 garden-variety WiFi routers (these do bridging already, though).
Online drugs.
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Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 06:22:06PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote: On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. A modestly high dimensional grid of some billion nodes doesn't look like this: http://members.easynews.com/L4/opte/www.opte.org/maps/static/1069646562.LGL.2D.700x700.png This is clearer: http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/wired.gif It should look a lot like a Golgi stain of your neocortex, though, the horizontal component being dominating (until we've get several million birds zooming over our heads in the starry sky). The neocortex and the human CNS in general is also laid out in a specific way, because it's also been/is subject to massive optimisation, both evolutionary and in course of operation. For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. You're proving my point. The network started as a bureacratic, static, tiny, suboptimal configuration. As it grew bigger, and started participating in economy it started minimizing itself. This isn't just connectivity, but goes down to the protocol level. We know IPv6 isn't the answer, mostly because it is largely geography agnostic, can't handle nodes moving with orbital speeds (or even a speeding car), doesn't handle interplanetary latencies and isn't local-knowledge routed/switched in general. It also can't handle relativistic speed cut-through, which is the killer requirement. Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. You're correct, currently. Things will become better as network ages, and especially if we get cellular radio architectures in densely populated areas (there's about a GBit/s worth of wireless bandwidth within a small cell, when we ignore THz and optical wavelengths). Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. Human societies optimize. Geodesic is a shortest path on Earth surface. Look at Christaller and followup (Christaller and geodesics is good first start). ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. I'm not going to dive into city architecture, but compare these two adjacent cities: http://www.redtailcanyon.com/items/18393.aspx connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. That's certainly true, but now you are talking about political decisions made ages ago. Many roads in England were built by the Romans. These A road is a place channeling traffic from A to B. Roman roads which are still used (I use one quite frequently) were created between areas of major human activity, requiring traffic frequent enough to warrant an expediture (in terms of wealth fraction, roman roads were just as expensive as autobahns). roads lead to London. You see the same pattern on the Continent, of course, with the roads leading to the local capital (Paris, say) and then on to Rome. That is, fiber optic paths today reflect the strategic requirements of the Roman Empire, not geometry. 1) today, EU today, elsewhere, looks different. future, everywhere, looks even more different. We're at the beginning of the optimization process. You can't cheat physics in a relativistic universe, in an economic/evolutionary context. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. A modestly high dimensional grid of some billion nodes doesn't look like this: http://members.easynews.com/L4/opte/www.opte.org/maps/static/1069646562.LGL.2D.700x700.png This is clearer: http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/wired.gif Yes. I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of the Internet. These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees. For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. You're proving my point. The network started as a bureacratic, static, tiny, suboptimal configuration. As it grew bigger, and started participating in economy it started minimizing itself. This isn't just connectivity, but goes down to the protocol level. We know IPv6 isn't the answer, mostly because it is largely geography agnostic, can't handle nodes moving with orbital speeds (or even a speeding car), doesn't handle interplanetary latencies and isn't local-knowledge routed/switched in general. It also can't handle relativistic speed cut-through, which is the killer requirement. Over the last 30 years or so, various people have hypothesized about what the killer requirement might be. To the best of my knowledge, all have been wrong. The Internet is quite obviously optimizing along certain lines. However, these lines don't follow any geographical geodesic, which was my point. And it is only obvious what the lines of optimization are in hindsight ;-) Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. You're correct, currently. If you try to replace observations with theories, the most important thing is to verify that your theory corresponds with reality right now. If your theories aren't correct currently, it is very unlikely that they will be a better fit tomorrow. It isn't a minor point that the Internet is fractal. This is in fact what is consistent everywhere and has been, to the best of my knowledge, throughout the history of the Internet. If you go back to your pretty pictures and look, you will see fractal structures. Things will become better as network ages, and especially if we get cellular radio architectures in densely populated areas (there's about a GBit/s worth of wireless bandwidth within a small cell, when we ignore THz and optical wavelengths). dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. Human societies optimize. Geodesic is a shortest path on Earth surface. Look at Christaller and followup (Christaller and geodesics is good first start). A geodesic is a minimal path in whatever geometry you are talking about. If you looked carefully at traffic between European countries around 1999, it turned out that the minimal cost path between say German and France was in fact through Virginia. Traffic was following a geodesic -- but not a geographic geodesic. As I recall, a 2 Mbps E1 between most major European cities and Virginia was about $30,000 a month, but an E1 across the English Channel was around $45,000 a month - 50% more to go 30 miles than to go 6,000. We had customers in Northern Ireland whose traffic to Dublin went first to London, then to our PoP in California, then to Virginia, and from there back to Ireland. This was our financial geodesic. ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. I'm not going to dive into city architecture, but compare these two adjacent cities: http://www.redtailcanyon.com/items/18393.aspx I have spent time in both cities and am familiar with their layouts, but really can't see how this relates to how fiber
Communication in (Neuronal) Networks
At 08:21 PM 4/9/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: It should look a lot like a Golgi stain of your neocortex, though, the Sorry the below is long, but its subscription only, and the comparisons to man-made networks are worth reading. Science, Vol 301, Issue 5641, 1870-1874 , 26 September 2003 Communication in Neuronal Networks Simon B. Laughlin1 and Terrence J. Sejnowski2,3* Brains perform with remarkable efficiency, are capable of prodigious computation, and are marvels of communication. We are beginning to understand some of the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of cortical networks. To operate efficiently within these constraints, nature has optimized the structure and function of cortical networks with design principles similar to those used in electronic networks. The brain also exploits the adaptability of biological systems to reconfigure in response to changing needs. 1 Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK. 2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. 3 Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Science, Vol 301, Issue 5641, 1870-1874 , 26 September 2003 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1089662] Previous Article Table of Contents Next Article Communication in Neuronal Networks Simon B. Laughlin1 and Terrence J. Sejnowski2,3* Brains perform with remarkable efficiency, are capable of prodigious computation, and are marvels of communication. We are beginning to understand some of the geometric, biophysical, and energy constraints that have governed the evolution of cortical networks. To operate efficiently within these constraints, nature has optimized the structure and function of cortical networks with design principles similar to those used in electronic networks. The brain also exploits the adaptability of biological systems to reconfigure in response to changing needs. 1 Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK. 2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA. 3 Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Neuronal networks have been extensively studied as computational systems, but they also serve as communications networks in transferring large amounts of information between brain areas. Recent work suggests that their structure and function are governed by basic principles of resource allocation and constraint minimization, and that some of these principles are shared with human-made electronic devices and communications networks. The discovery that neuronal networks follow simple design rules resembling those found in other networks is striking because nervous systems have many unique properties. To generate complicated patterns of behavior, nervous systems have evolved prodigious abilities to process information. Evolution has made use of the rich molecular repertoire, versatility, and adaptability of cells. Neurons can receive and deliver signals at up to 105 synapses and can combine and process synaptic inputs, both linearly and nonlinearly, to implement a rich repertoire of operations that process information (1). Neurons can also establish and change their connections and vary their signaling properties according to a variety of rules. Because many of these changes are driven by spatial and temporal patterns of neural signals, neuronal networks can adapt to circumstances, self-assemble, autocalibrate, and store information by changing their properties according to experience. The simple design rules improve efficiency by reducing (and in some cases minimizing) the resources required to implement a given task. It should come as no surprise that brains have evolved to operate efficiently. Economy and efficiency are guiding principles in physiology that explain, for example, the way in which the lungs, the circulation, and the mitochondria are matched and coregulated to supply energy to muscles (2). To identify and explain efficient design, it is necessary to derive and apply the structural and physicochemical relationships that connect resource use to performance. We consider first a number of studies of the geometrical constraints on packing and wiring that show that the brain is organized to reduce wiring costs. We then examine a constraint that impinges on all aspects of neural function but has only recently become apparentenergy consumption. Next we look at energy-efficient neural codes that reduce signal traffic by exploiting the relationships that govern the representational capacity of neurons. We end with a brief discussion on how synaptic plasticity may
Re: Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Only if they pay me cash. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
voting, KISS, etc.
--- begin forwarded text Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: voting, KISS, etc. From: Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 12:46:47 -0400 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think that those that advocate cryptographic protocols to ensure voting security miss the point entirely. They start with the assumption that something is broken about the current voting system. I contend it is just fine. For example, it takes a long time to count pieces of papers compared with bits. However, there is no actual need for speed in reporting election results. This is not a stock exchange -- another election will not be held the next day, and the number of elections being held will not rise 8% per quarter. If it takes a day or even several days to get an accurate count, no one will be hurt. The desires of television networks to report the results in ten minutes is not connected to the need for a democracy to have widespread confidence in the election results. Speed is not a requirement. As it is, however, automated counts of paper ballots are plenty fast enough already. It also is seemingly behind the times to use paper and such to hold an election when computers are available -- but the goal is not to seem modern -- it is to hold a fair election with accurately reported results that can be easily audited both before, during and after the fact. It seems to some to be easier to vote using an electronic screen. Perhaps, perhaps not. My mother would not find an electronic screen easier at all, but lets ignore that issue. Whether or not the vote is entered on a screen, the fact that paper ballots can be counted both mechanically (for speed) and by hand (as an audit measure), where purely electronic systems lack any mechanism for after-the-fact audit or recount, leads one to conclude that old fashioned paper seems like a good idea, and if it is not to be marked by hand, then at least let it be marked by the computer entry device. It is also seemingly better to have a system where a complex cryptographic protocol secures the results -- but the truth is that it is more important that a system be obvious, simple and secure even to relatively uneducated members of society, and the marginal security produced by such systems over one in which physical paper ballots are generated is not obvious or significant. (The marginal security issue is significant. Consider that simple mechanisms can render the amount of fraud possible in the old fashioned system significantly smaller than the number of miscast votes caused by voter mistakes, but that no technology can eliminate voter mistakes. Then ask why a fully electronic fraudless system understandable to a miniscule fraction of the population but where miscast votes continue to occur -- and possibly to be inaccurately perceived as evidence of fraud -- would be superior.) To those that don't understand the understandable to even those who are not especially educated problem, consider for moment that many people will not care what your claims are about the safety of the system if they think fraud occurred, even if you hand them a mathematical proof of the system. I suspect, by the way, that they'll be right, because the proofs don't cover all the mechanisms by which fraud can occur, including graveyard voting. We tamper with the current system at our peril. Most security mechanisms evolve over time to adjust to the threats that happen in the real world. The protocols embedded in modern election laws, like having poll watchers from opposing sides, etc., come from hundreds of years of experience with voting fraud. Over centuries, lots of tricks were tried, and the system evolved to cope with them. Simple measures like counting the number of people voting and making sure the number of ballots cast essentially corresponds, physically guarding ballot boxes and having members of opposing parties watch them, etc., serve very well and work just fine. Someone mentioned that in some elections it is impractical for the people running to have representatives at all polling places. It is, in fact, not necessary for them to -- the threat of their doing so and having enough poll watchers from enough organizations in a reasonably random assortment of polling places is enough to prevent significant fraud. I'm especially scared about mechanisms that let people vote at home and such. Lots of people seem to think that the five minute trip to the polling place is what is preventing people from voting, and they want to let people vote from their computers. Lets ignore the question of whether it is important that the people who can't be bothered to spend ten minutes going to the polling place care enough about the election to be voting anyway. Lets also ignore the totally unimportant question of vote buying -- vote buying has happened plenty of times over the centuries without any need for the purchaser to verify that the vote was cast as promised. Tammany
RE: Gmail as Blacknet
Actually, to some extent I did realize this, though I couldn't resist the droll troll urge. And of course, perpetual storage isn't really any kind of end-goal itself...the 'goal' of course is to be able to securely store and move information without fear (or the possibility due to anonymity) of reprisal, if that is so desired. (As an aside, although debt has to be -forgiven- after 7 years, contrary to popular belief it is not true that a debt has to be -forgotten-...I know of one credit major card company that will not accept 'new' cardmembers that didn't pay back what they owed, even if that's 15 years ago. That's actually perfectly legal.) That said, I guess the dude does have an interesting point under all that stuff, after all. That point being that (most likely) free email capabilities may in some cases become like the now-defunct lockers in Grand Central Station...a place where stuff can be stored securely, and access granted at will. The key feature (as you point out) isn't so much the storage capacity (although the increasing size of such capacity makes this a more and more attractive option), but the google search feature. OK, point conceded (once I tore off the wrapper). -TD From: Major Variola (ret) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Gmail as Blacknet Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 10:48:02 -0700 At 09:58 AM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I never claimed to be Einstein, but your 3 simple steps sound a hell of a lot like my recipe for making a ham sandwich: Hardly. One could put together a very slick drop file here for encrypted net storage script in a day. One could even prototype this using any net mail system like Yahoo, albeit with a rather piddling storage capacity. By including plaintext search tokens (meaning known only to you, perhaps derived from hashing keywords) you could use Gmail's search feature to find stored data. This uses local encryption and net-based storage backup. Sounds good to me. It would be rather telling if Google said no encrypted email wouldn't it? :-) _ Get rid of annoying pop-up ads with the new MSN Toolbar FREE! http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200414ave/direct/01/
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
At 8:29 PM +0100 4/9/04, Jim Dixon wrote: Traffic was following a geodesic -- but not a geographic geodesic. Right. Geodesic is a topologic content. In three (two?) dimensions, a geodesic is a great circle route across a sphere. In higher dimensions, it's something else. No. I don't know the math. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: VPN VoIP
Eugen Leitl wrote: I've been installing a Draytek Vigor 2900 router at work lately, and found a line of models which do VoIP (router with analog phone jacks on them). They also support VPN router-router, and come with DynDNS clients. I thought I've seen VoIP over VPN being mentioned, but I can't find it right now. I've not seen, nor played with any of these, *BUT*, heed this warning which applies to all devices (and software?) that are 1) closed source and 2) offer some useful service which you'd be tempted to place inside your network, 3) are allowed to communicate with the outside world. I would highly suggest that if you chose to use one of these that you do so from a DMZ in your firewall to be safe. You don't know what OS/firmware lives there and whether it can be used via the VOIP network to spy on your internal network. You might need to add another NIC to your firewall, and depending on what else this needs, you might also need to provide a DHCP server for it. Set the firewall rules to make sure no packets from this device can go into your internal network. EVER. Don't just say, Well this thing is its own router, it does VPN, it has a firewall (does it?) I can trust it. There will likely be features which it provides (perhaps a voice mail-email gateway?) which will tempt you to place it on the inside network instead of a DMZ. Don't! Find a way to secure your network and still provide for such features. [Or, if you use these boxes inside a corporate environment and actually care about this level of security and want several of these to talk to each other, build another network just for them. Depending on your needs, I'd also say, don't let them talk to the outside world, but if you do that, only nodes inside your VPN's will be able to communicate over VOIP.] If you trust this thing to do VOIP, enjoy, (Accepting possible spying on your phone calls by LEO/intel agencies, etc.) but don't trust it enough to put the ethernet end of it on your internal network. You never know when some bright kid takes one of these apart, disassembles the firmware and finds a backdoor to use against you. Why the tin-foil sounding rant? See yesterday's slashdot regarding the recent hardwired backdoor account in a Cisco Wifi router which has been exposed resulting in a call for a firmware update. You can bet that Cisco simply changed the backdoor password/hash instead of eliminating it. If they're not too scummy, they only made it harder to find: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/08/1920228mode=threadtid=126tid=158tid=172tid=99
Re: Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
RAH wrote... At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Only if they pay me cash Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity. In other words, say I'm driving down the FDR receiving telemetry about the road conditions downtown of me by a few miles. If I'm a router, I'm also sending that info behind me (which is routing I'm paying for basically), but I will understand that the reason I am getting my telemetry is precisely because there's a string of me's in the cars in front of me, routing info down to me. If I insist on getting paid, so will they, and the whole thing breaks down. Actually, this reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. I remember (I think) Hofstaedter doing an interesting analysis that showed that smart 'criminals' will eventually realize that it pays to cooperate, even if that doesn't optimise one's chances in this particular instance. Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the weighting factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route. -TD _ Tax headache? MSN Money provides relief with tax tips, tools, IRS forms and more! http://moneycentral.msn.com/tax/workshop/welcome.asp
Re: Re: Status
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RE: Gmail as Blacknet (legally required forgetting)
At 05:16 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: (As an aside, although debt has to be -forgiven- after 7 years, contrary to popular belief it is not true that a debt has to be -forgotten-...I know of one credit major card company that will not accept 'new' cardmembers that didn't pay back what they owed, even if that's 15 years ago. That's actually perfectly legal.) I don't know about your anecdote, but Mr. May's original point was that the law *requires* companies to forget. Which is of course an illegitimate intrusion of the state into private affairs. And the responsibles need killing. Ahhh, that feels better. - When I was your age we didn't have Tim May! We had to be paranoid on our own! And we were grateful! --Alan Olsen
Re: Meshing costs, the price of RAH's battery
At 07:06 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: RAH wrote... At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Only if they pay me cash Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity. One can run a P2P app from mains-powered home machine and incur only a minor bandwidth penalty, which you can possibly throttle when you're busy. But my understanding of *mobile* devices (where meshing matters) is that they are severely power constrained. To the extent that boozohol power cells and various semiconductor/logic tricks are being used, despite the difficulties they require. So, get a clue. When your battery runs out, you get *zero* benefit from the mesh. Or even your local device *sans network*. Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the weighting factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route. The traffic-fraction and the extrapolation of Moore's 'law' are largely irrelevant for the next decade. In fact, given that standby usage will *decrease* relative to transmit usage only makes the relative proportions worse. I don't care if you use a picoamp on standby/listen, you'll still need a few milliwatts to forward a packet. Or more, if there are no nearby cooperative nodes. Sure, in the distant future, mobile power may so vastly dominate power usage that meshes become practical. (There's even positive feedback, the more meshnodes the less transmit power.) Meantime, uncompensated altruism is maladaptive. With something like soldier-radios, or smart dusts, meshes will happen sooner, since the Many eat the Few. For *your* cellphone, you have a *long* time to wait for it to be Rational to share your battery with randoms. In RAH's defense, mesh-everything is not necessary for the disintermediation, which he idiosyncratically calles 'geodesic' info flow, to have big effects. Neither is a geodesic (in any physical or otherwise meaningful sense) net important. Just cheaper info to more people. And that's been happening since before ponies carried dead trees with stamps. Re-reading RAH's if they pay me enough reply, it is also right that a price can be set on the wattage you've sherpa'ed, perhaps so that you can pay off your usage of said mesh by letting others use your batteries. And the micropayments will be feasible thanks to real cheap info + crypto, what RAH's undiagnosed brain tumor labels geodesic info flow. Perhaps the price of being a meshrouter to others will even depend on the wattage you have left. Your phone will negotiate with Fred's phone (has 10 Joules left but is 1000 m away) and Joe's (has 5 Joules but is 100 m away). But that's economics/physics applied to resource usage, nothing new, despite the neologisms and extrapolation.
RE: voting
privacy wrote: [good points about weaknesses in adversarial system deleted] It's baffling that security experts today are clinging to the outmoded and insecure paper voting systems of the past, where evidence of fraud, error and incompetence is overwhelming. Cryptographic voting protocols have been in development for 20 years, and there are dozens of proposals in the literature with various characteristics in terms of scalability, security and privacy. The votehere.net scheme uses advanced cryptographic techniques including zero knowledge proofs and verifiable remixing, the same method that might be used in next generation anonymous remailers. Our anonymous corrospondent has not addressed the issues I raised in my initial post on the 7th: 1. The use of receipts which a voter takes from the voting place to 'verify' that their vote was correctly included in the total opens the way for voter coercion. 2. The proposed fix - a blizzard of decoy receipts - makes recounts based on the receipts impossible. Given that so many jurisdictions are moving towards electronic voting machines, this is a perfect opportunity to introduce mathematical protections instead of relying so heavily on human beings. I would encourage observers on these lists to familiarize themselves with the cryptographic literature and the heavily technical protocol details at http://www.votehere.com/documents.html before passing judgement on these technologies. Asking the readers of this list to 'familiarize themselves with the cryptographic literature', is, in many cases, a little like telling Tiger Woods that he needs to familiarize himself with the rules of golf. We know the 'advanced cryptographic techniques' you refer to. We also know what their limitations - what they can and cannot do. This is not the appropriate forum to try to say trust me. Answer this: 1. How does this system prevent voter coercion, while still allowing receipt based recounts? Or do you have some mechanism by which I can personally verify every vote which went into the total, to make sure they are correct? 2. On what basis do you think the average voter should trust this system, seeing as it's based on mechanisms he or she cant personally verify? 3. What chain of events do I have to beleive to trust that the code which is running in the machine is actually and correctly derived from the source code I've audited? I refer you to Ken Thompsons classic paper Reflections on trusting trust, as well as the recent Diebold debacle with uncertified patches being loaded into the machine at the last moment. This last is an important point - there is no way you can eliminate the requirement of election officials to behave legitimately. Since that requirement can't be done away with by technology, adding technology only adds more places the system can be compromised. Based on the tone of this letter, I'd hazard a guess that 'privacy' has a vested interest in VoteHere. If this true, it's a little odd that they are willing to expose their source code, but not their name. We don't bite, unless the victim deserves it :-) Opening your source is an admirable first step - why not step out of the shadows so we can help you make your system better? I fear a system which does not have a backup mechanism that the average voter can understand. While it's true that non-electronic systems are subject to compromise, so are electronic ones, regardless of their use of ZK proofs, or 'advanced cryptographic techniques. I do think electronic voting machines are coming, and a good thing. But they should be promoted on the basis that they are easier to use, and fairer in presentation, then are manual methods. Promoting them on the basis that they are more secure, and less subject to vote tampering is simply false. Peter Trei Cryptoengineer RSA Security Disclaimer: The above represents my personal opinions only.
Re: voting, KISS, etc. ( social bias)
Perry I agree with you on all *except* that you are prejudiced against folks who are not mobile, have immobile dependants, are busy or agoraphobes. In-person voting doesn't resist graveyard voting much better than lining up the meat. One could say that in-person voting rewards those too lazy or careless with their time to request absentee status. Home voting is important to keep participation high. I believe 25% of the Calif governor votes were absentee. Participation is nominally a figure of merit for elections. And the voter authentication is the weakest I know of: to register you submit a name, signature, and address. To vote, you submit same. Nothing prevents graveyard registration except the law. Why is this relevent? Because you have to consider threat models. Spousal coercion vote buying is one, well-addressed in this thread. So are tech-implementation and social-trust issues. Snipers or bombers at polling places is another, ignored because we're all modern westerners. Rain and immobility have only been touched on because most of us can drive and walk. Voting from home should be *encouraged* and it should use paper as the transport, not computers. (The paper being kept by the counters not the voters.) Which is how it should be at the in-person polls. Again, keeping tech away is good, fighting coercion is good, but don't argue against absentee voting. In fact, absentee voting (vs. tech in the polling booth) is a good *example* of how to keep things simple and resistant to many (eg tech-enabled) attacks. At 12:46 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: I'm especially scared about mechanisms that let people vote at home and such. Lots of people seem to think that the five minute trip to the polling place is what is preventing people from voting, and they want to let people vote from their computers. Lets ignore the question of whether it is important that the people who can't be bothered to spend ten minutes going to the polling place care enough about the election to be voting anyway. Lets also ignore the totally unimportant question of vote buying -- vote buying has happened plenty of times over the centuries without any need for the purchaser to verify that the vote was cast as promised. Tammany Hall did not need to watch people's votes to run a political machine. I'm much more concerned that we may be automating the graveyard vote, which is currently kept in check by the need to personally appear at polling places. I'm also concerned about the forms of fraud I haven't even considered yet because no one has invented them yet. Election security isn't just about assuring that votes are correctly counted.
RE: voting
| privacy wrote: | [good points about weaknesses in adversarial system deleted] | | It's baffling that security experts today are clinging to the outmoded | and insecure paper voting systems of the past, where evidence of fraud, | error and incompetence is overwhelming. Cryptographic voting protocols | have been in development for 20 years, and there are dozens of proposals | in the literature with various characteristics in terms of scalability, | security and privacy. The votehere.net scheme uses advanced cryptographic | techniques including zero knowledge proofs and verifiable remixing, | the same method that might be used in next generation anonymous remailers. | | Our anonymous corrospondent has not addressed the issues I raised in my | initial post on the 7th: | | 1. The use of receipts which a voter takes from the voting place to 'verify' | that their vote was correctly included in the total opens the way for voter | coercion. | | 2. The proposed fix - a blizzard of decoy receipts - makes recounts based | on the receipts impossible. The VoteHere system is really quite clever, and you're attacking it for not being the same as everything that went before. Current systems - whether paper, machine, or whatever - provide no inherent assurance that the vote you cast is the one that got counted. Ballot boxes can be lost, their contents can be replaced; machines can be rigged. We use procedural mechanisms to try to prevent such attacks. It's impossible to know how effective they are: We have no real way to measure the effectiveness, since there is no independent check on what they are controlling. There are regular allegations of all kinds of abuses, poll watchers or no. And there are plenty of suspect results. | Answer this: | | 1. How does this system prevent voter coercion, while still allowing receipt | based recounts? a) Receipts in the VoteHere system are *not* used for recounts. No receipt that a user takes away can possibly be used for that - the chances of you being able to recover even half the receipts a day after the election are probably about nil. Receipts play exactly one role: They allow a voter who wishes to to confirm that his vote actually was tallied. b) We've raised prevention of voter coercion on some kind of pedestal. The fact is, I doubt it plays much of a real role. If someone wants to coerce voters, they'll use the kind of goons who collect on gambling debts to do it. The vast majority of people who they try to coerce will be too frightened to even think about trying to fool them - and if they do try, will lie so unconvincingly that they'll get beaten up anyway. Political parties that want to play games regularly bring busloads of people to polling places. They don't check how the people they bus in vote - they don't need to. They know who to pick. However, if this really bothers you, a system like this lets you trade off non-coercion and checkability: When you enter the polling place, you draw a random ball - say, using one of those machines they use for lotteries. If the ball is red, you get a receipt; if it's blue, the receipt is retained in a sealed box (where it's useless to anyone except as some kind of cross-check of number of votes cast, etc.) No one but you gets to see the color of the ball. Now, even if you are being coerced and get a red ball, you can simply discard the receipt - the polling place should have a secure, private receptacle; or maybe you can even push a button on the machine that says Pretend I got a blue ball - and claim you got a blue ball. The fraction of red and blue balls is adjustable, depending on how you choose to value checkability vs. non-coercion. | Or do you have some mechanism by which I can | personally verify every vote which went into the total, to make sure they | are correct? In VoteHere's system, you can't possibly verify that every vote that went into the total was correctly handled. You can verify that the votes *that the system claims were recorded* are actually counted correctly. And you can verify that *your* vote was actually recorded as you cast it - something you can't do today. The point of the system is that any manipulation is likely to hit someone who chooses to verify their vote, sooner or later - and it only takes one such detected manipulation to start an inquiry. Whether in practice people want this enough to take the trouble ... we'll have to wait and see. | 2. On what basis do you think the average voter should trust this system, | seeing as it's based on mechanisms he or she cant personally verify? On what basis should an average voter trust today's systems? How many people have any idea what safeguards are currently used? How many have any personal contact with the poll watchers on whom the system relies? Could *you* verify, in any meaningful sense, the proper handling of a vote you cast? Could you watch the machines/boxes/whatever being handled?
