>Where I live we vote by mail by filling in little bubbles with a pen.
>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.
Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.
Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.
Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
These problems are all theoretical. If you actually tried to implement them at the scale you'd typically need to sway a federal election you'd find it pretty unworkable. And in close elections, the recount process is pretty intense, so it's even less likely that you'll be successful.
You'll probably want more detail. Ballot harvesting can't work because data analysis shows weird patterns like this ("huh this nursing home went 95% Biden whereas every other nursing home in the county went 55%"). Recounts do signature validation and lawyers from either party can challenge any ballot they want. Voters are contacted to cure their ballots. I've worked on the Democratic side and been heavily involved in doing all of this. We had armies of lawyers, software and data engineers, and organizers.
Most of the pointing out opportunities for fraud comes from a place of like, reasoning from first principles. But elections are huge undertakings involving tons of people. It's hard to successfully commit election fraud at a large enough scale to sway a federal election. It's why foreign adversaries prefer to swarm social media with bots: it has a chance of working.
> People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times.
Or more subtle: watching them vote, with the implicit threat of violence if they vote the "wrong" way.
> The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water.
In my country it is mandatory to give time off to vote if necessary. But the booths are open from 07:30 to 21:00, are located in a bunch of convenient locations (schools, libraries, train stations, shopping malls), and have basically zero waiting time, so in practice rarely anyone needs to make use of it.
The thing is, right now we have very little evidence that there is any significant mail-in voting fraud.
But we do have a fair amount of evidence that there is suppression of in-person voting.
So neither of these systems is perfect, but we should go with the one that gives us the most accurate legitimate vote.
Someone else posted a list of ways that in-person voting would be more acceptable, e.g. having a large window to cast ballots. But instead, we see move the other way, trying to restrict the window in which we can cast ballots.
You put a free ID in the hands of every legitimate voter and give them enough time and opportunity to vote, and then I will consider in-person to be on par with mail-in.
Because they operate in a non good faith model where discouraging voting and gerrymander is normalised. The electoral commission is politicised, not neutral and independent. Because voting is held at times and dates which disadvantage working poor, because voter ID rules are capricious and partisan.
When looking at supporters of voter ID laws, look at whether they support free IDs, expansion of DMVs/issuers of IDs, etc.
Similarly, opposition of mail-in-voting typically ignores or supports closing down polling places (in strategically partisan areas), making it difficult for groups of people to vote.
These issues are always (by design) discussed in isolation, while ignoring the intrinsically related issues.
TL;DR: Voter ID laws are fine, only if, coupled with universal free IDs for citizens. And no mail-in-voting would be fine, if voting occured on a national holiday, and polling places were reachable by all eligible voters. This is not supported by any (elected) proponent of voter ID laws or opponent of mail-in-voting.
- Free FEC federal voter ID (requires proof of citizenship) to be used ONLY for voting
- Voter ID can be obtained early (age 16?) but DOB is connected to ID and you can’t vote before the legal age
- Funded FEC program to register students for voter IDs at schools and colleges and teach them about voting
- FEC to work with agencies like social security and IRS to determine if a voter is deceased (messy process). Likely deceased voters are communicated to the states ASAP. States must report confirmed deceased voters to FEC ASAP for recording.
- Federal 2 week minimum early voting period
- Federal funding and monitoring of elections requiring adequate polling site coverage of geographic areas, notification of residents, etc
- Federal program to provide free shuttle to and from nearest polling station for residents without transit. Operated federally, states have no involvement. Contract with private transit as FEMA does.
- Mail in ballots heavily restricted, must provide proof of absence or be military
- Voting day is a national holiday
- Federal ballots are separate and simplified to speed up counting/recounting (ballot complexity is often cited as a reason for slow counting)
It will never happen but this would solve so many issues.
Yes, which is why no politician who supports stricter voter ID laws or limiting mail-in-voting would support those proposals, because those issues aren't about strengthening democracy/participation but about voter suppression.
I've been saying glossy screens are pure cancer for 20 years and every time I was dismissed as a Luddite that should get with the times.
Now they can sell you "nano texture" at a premium after getting you hooked on functionally terrible displays (they look pretty in the store though).
My worst experience with glossy displays was when I had to perform some work outside on a sunny day and I comically could not see a single thing. It looked like a pure black square. I laughed, packed up and left, and told my boss it wasn't happening.
Unappealing PC matte screens are for old farts who can't appreciate sexy rounded corners and perfectly rendered fonts¹
¹ assuming your display yields over 300dpi
If you are a cool kid, you'll prefer glossy screen any day. Only with deep contrasty blacks will you be able to appreciate your low-contrast macos interface or your low-contrast VScode solarized theme. Occasional gorgeous reflection of stunning you squinting at the screen is just a nice bonus.
But I have to give it to Apple: PC glossy screens are mostly even worse.
Keep in mind that google is primarily a cloud business. That means that they take on a lot more of a risk, as when they are hacked its a them problem vs traditional software where its much more the customer's problem. Security is very much about incentives, and the incentives line up better for google to do the right thing.
It's more about when Google assumed full control of the cloud, the browser, the OS, and everything in between they self-appointed themselves as the unelected standards board of the Internet, and forced everyone else to follow their whims and timelines. Some of which are completely insane.
What are the policies you view as "completely insane"? I have some I disagree with like how they've handled things like Manifest v3 in the browsers, however there are still alternatives like Firefox anyway. However I think in terms of web standards some of the things they have pushed are also helpful. It's been much nicer having a much more consistent web browsing experience with less things like "You must use Internet Explorer on this site".
I feel like web browser and website standards are one of the main areas Google has a lot more control of policies. Is there somewhere else they have much control of for standards?
"To demonstrate how crappy most front door locks are, to boost our company's social media cred we will be leaving drills and a dish of bump keys at the entrance of the neighborhood."
NTLM is often used for more of the underlying technologies, some more secure than others… nthash, net-ntlmv1, net-ntlmv2. There’s a little more complexity here and this is different than the stuff that was out 15 years ago
> this is different than the stuff that was out 15 years ago
This stuff was out at least 10-15 years ago. It’s different from the ancient local ntlm hash cracking everyone used to get admin in high school, yes, but it’s not a novel technique.
You're not wrong, I just want to point out this is net-lmvm1, which is different and more complex. Not functionally meaningfully more complex to an adversary with a few hundred USD (almost typed LSD) in monies. But technically larger tables. That being said I'm in agreement that this has been known problem for 10+ years, and Google is just saying the horses are so long out of the barn their grandchildren are grazing.
The bad guys already know you live in a bad neighborhood and have been closing your front door with a plastic combination lock you got in a Happy Meal 40 years ago. They can already come and go at a whim. This is Google letting you know that your crappy lock is pre-broken to encourage you to upgrade to literally anything else.
It's certainly morally and legally dubious to facilitate attacks on things that others choose to use in within their own private domains, just because you disagree with that choice. But that's how these people roll.
It's been 15 years since this was known broken. If you had children when it was not known broken, they'd be almost old enough to drive in most western nations.
I mean this kindly, but if you're still using net-netlmv1 on anything that matters, you need to pay much more mind to your own business because even the original vendor of it has been telling you to get off that since 1999 because it is not safe.
If you're using it on something that doesn't matter, then it also doesn't matter that rainbow tables any attacker could have already had for a decade are slightly more available.
Probably because this looks more like a Deep Research agent "delving" into the infrastructure -- with a giant list of sources at the end. The Archive is not just a library; it is a service provider.
An article about "infrastructure" that opens up with a dramatic description of a datacenter stuffed into an old church, I would expect more than just generic clipart you'd see in the back half of Wired magazine.
That's super cool!
Can the IA building be accessed by some random people like myself? Next time I'm in SF (who knows when that will be though) I'd very much like visiting it!
There was a lot of renovation. One day they fired up the pipe organ (which still works) inside the building as well as the servers and the transformer for the street blew up. That was a legendary day.
No regular residential building is set up to host a datacenter off the bat. Even racking more than half a dozen boxes in a given room requires an upgrade.
Most rooms in North America won't be wired for anything over 2.5 kW by default (kitchens and laundry rooms being obvious exceptions).
An electric dryer might pull 5 kW. An electric range ballpark 10 kW. Versus 15 kW per full rack for a fairly tame setup.
And then you've got the problem of dissipating all that heat.
>It is very economical and hard to compromise at a scale that has any effect.
Vote-by-mail creates unnecessary opportunities for cheating, irregularities, and all sorts of foolishness. If you can fill in the bubbles, you could theoretically fill them in for other people. People living with parents suffering from dementia could fill out their ballots without them knowing and vote multiple times. You don't even need a valid signature; states allow witnesses to vouch. Ballot boxes get vandalized. Ballot harvesting is rampant. There's so many problems. It's for the same reason universities don't allow take-home exams.
Vote-by-mail states are open targets for mockery (and rightfully so) as it routinely takes days or weeks to count all the ballots and declare a winner. Third-world backwaters can do it in the same night. This is a solved problem.
Whenever vote-by-mail is criticized, people get really upset. How do you think the other states do it? The argument about not being able to take off on election day doesn't hold water. Most states allow early voting for weeks. If you can find time to visit a post office or ballot box, you can certainly go to the library or a church basement for the 5 minutes it takes to fill in the bubbles, stick it in the machine and you absolutely know it's counted. And results will be available election night.
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