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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Flaws in the blockchain app some states plan to use in the 2020 election allow bad actors to alter or cancel someone’s vote or expose their private info.
Security researchers have found key flaws in a mobile voting app that some states plan to use in the 2020 election that can allow hackers to launch both client- and server-side attacks that can easily manipulate or even delete someone’s vote, as well as prevent a reliable audit from taking place after the fact, they said.
A team of researchers at MIT released a security audit of Voatz—a blockchain app that already was used in a limited way for absentee-ballot voting in the 2018 mid-term elections—that they said bolsters the case for why internet voting is a bad idea and voting transparency is the only way to ensure legitimacy.
West Virginia was the first state to use Voatz, developed by a Boston-based company of the same name, in the mid-term election, marking the inaugural use of internet voting in a high-stakes federal election. The app primarily collected votes from absentee ballots of military service personnel stationed overseas. Other counties in Utah and Colorado also used the app last year in a limited way for municipal elections.
However, despite the company’s claim that the app has a number of security features that make it safe for such an auspicious use—including immutability via its use of a permissioned blockchain, end-to-end voting encryption, voter anonymity, device compromise detection, and a voter-verified audit trail–the MIT team found that any attacker that controls the user’s device through some very rudimentary flaws can brush aside these protections.
“We find that an attacker with root privileges on the device can disable all of Voatz’s host-based protections, and therefore stealthily control the user’s vote, expose her private ballot, and exfiltrate the user’s PIN and other data used to authenticate the server,” MIT researchers Michael A. Specter, James Koppe and Daniel Weitzner wrote in their paper (PDF), “The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in U.S.Federal Elections.”
[...] One voting district in Washington state—Mason County–already has pulled its plans to use Voatz in November, according to the New York Times, while West Virginia is moving ahead with its plans to expand Voatz used to disabled voters, the paper reported.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday February 17 2020, @01:54AM (4 children)
I'm sorry, but you are mentally gone if you think voting means anything. The fundamentals of the system failed. How does voting fix that? Seriously, how does voting fix that?
It's not dramatics, but an objective analysis of our current situation. Nobody that is going to be considered reasonable, is going to be able to argue that the system hasn't experienced abject and critical failure. Regardless of the votes of 130 million people as you claim, the fundamentals of our government should have removed Trump within a year. On the grounds of the 25th amendment alone. Or are we going to transplant Kansas City back into Kansas from Missouri so the emperor can be made right? There are so many examples of his complete ineptitude and the danger he represents towards our country and principles. He and his family flaunt the Emoluments clause and have probably made over a billion personally through US funds being used in their businesses and properties. He openly admitted to violating the Constitution and attempting to extort a foreign country into attacking his political rival and resistance movement against him. He's openly admitted that he thinks bribery should be completely legal, which means that he sees no corruption, but just good business.
The only way we do it "our own damn selves" is open revolution. Not just civil war, but open fucking revolution. We need Declaration of Independence II where the people stand up, throw away the current government, and then implement another one. That's about the ONLY way I can see doing this through voting, and it's absolutely now possible (assuming that level of organization is possible in light of Republican corruption and oppression), to get us to an Article 5 Convention. It's at this point, we can reasonably and peacefully, vote in a new Constitution, and then vote in a new government. One with more branches and levels of checks and balances. It's become clear what the checks and balances are needed for Congress, but also clear that it's not possible for corrections within the process. It's too corrupt, and has abjectly failed.
I will openly state it - REVOLUTION!!
We can begin now, and start voting on that. THAT might actually change something, and you're sorely fucking deluded if you think there is any hope whatsoever within the process. Get the fuck on board dude. You're very reasonable and a good example of an American dedicated to the process and rule of law. It failed, and utterly at that. Instead of telling me to have faith in a wholly corrupt and broken process, let's talk about new processes. Let's design new government, organize, refine the design, obtain more "stakeholder" viewpoints, and implement a new government together.
Anytime you talk about the delusion of working within the process, I'll objectively remind you, and everyone else, that it completely and totally fucking failed. If this was a FOSS project, this is the fucking point where we talking about a fundamental rewrite and possible move to a new platform. No different than switching distributions of Linux because if meets the new project requirements.
You call it dramatics. I honestly wonder if they weren't German analogues to you, talking about fighting the rise of the Nazi party as "overly dramatic Germans". I hope you're right, and that in 20 years I can't say I told you so, while America suffers the stains of greatly expanded concentration camps for undesirables and political opponents. If you think that is crazy, listen to the Orange Anus talk. He openly speaks of revenge. Openly.
Only votes I'm interested in now, are the ones about the new government we will be forming. It's clear that will never happen, so I assure you, America is going to start experiencing a long decline over the next 20 years with people and their wealth leaving, similar to fall of the Shah in Iran, 1979.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday February 17 2020, @02:38AM (3 children)
The fundamentals of the system failed.
Absolutely incorrect! Well, yeah, ok, the voters are the very fundamental base, and they have failed. Has majority rule finally hit the brick wall?
The revolution bullshit has been done a thousand times. It just restarts the cycle.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday February 17 2020, @04:30AM (2 children)
No, absolutely correct. Stop blaming the voters for a system that was insufficiently designed to provide the checks and balances against exactly what happened. Were the system not a failure, checks and balances against Republican Senators refusing to do their clear duty would've been corrected. Would we ever accept judges that would announce the verdict before the trials? That's fucking Kardassian man. Literally, their system of jurisprudence had nothing to do with the search for truth, but the sentencing phase. Guilt is predetermined, and innocence is simply the virtue of not being in court. Then these Senators refused to call all witnesses, there was witness tampering from the White House and Orange Anus, and I'm supposed to seriously fucking believe these Senators can come to an objective nonpartisan conclusion in accordance with their Constitutional duties? Fuck no, no, no. That's so ludicrous it's gone plaid.
So the first thing we should discuss are what checks and balances would've been effective against the outright, premeditated, unmitigated gall of those treasonous Senators. One of that is treason. We could have a citizen oversight branch that can deliberate, and in cooperation with the judicial branch, initiate impeachment proceedings against sitting and non-sitting US Senators and Congressmen. In this case, it would be treason. Refusing to faithfully and impartially do their duties in such a flagrant manner requires at the very least their removal, and at the most punishment. We don't actually have to shoot or hang them, just give them prison sentences.
Now that preceding paragraph is infinitely more fucking productive than voting in the current system, thank you very much.
This revolution I call for doesn't not need to repeat the cycle. Even if it does, so the fuck what? It's at least an evolution. This time we have a deeply considered document correcting the oversights that couldn't possibly be understood in 1776. If a revolution happens in the future, it will be because of our collective failures as the new "founding members of our new republic", and our systems of checks and balances will have failed, and we wouldn't have adequately addressed our civil rights or defined them.
In other words, just because we made a fucked up putrid cake that took a couple hundred years to go bad enough to throw out, doesn't mean the next cake we bake will turn out bad. We can get better each time it is done, and this revolution, unlike others, could be completely bloodless.
We have the technology to organize and do all of this, it just needs to be combined with the will and moral courage, and I dare I say, a heaping helping of the courage, patriotism, and dedication to the principles of freedom that our founding fathers had.
We can call it an Evolution Revolution if you want, but that's a fuck ton better than actual civil war where we need to split the country into three pieces while shooting each other. Only other solution is the status quo, and that isn't a viable solution whatsoever. All of that is so intense, that it will just be easier for the rich to leave with their wealth instead. Did the rich, powerful, and sophisticated in Iran stay for their civil war? NOPE. Why the fuck would I, or anybody that has the means to leave, choose that? That's why I say people will start leaving the country.
Or do you still refuse to see the dead canary?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday February 17 2020, @05:14AM (1 child)
Only the voters can correct those problems. And only they can be blamed for allowing them to happen in the first place. You are merely hand waving in denial of their complicity. Your rage, though amusing, carries a serious bias which is very unbecoming and only helps the people that antagonize you.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 17 2020, @07:02PM
You're boring and a troll. I think we're gonna have to start marking you spam.
Know what would really fix things up? A series of contracts!! Wolololololololol