The article talks about being “receipt free” as a required feature of any electronic voting system.
Fine. But by that standard, in a world where someone can bring their phone or AI glasses into the voting booth to record the whole voting process, how can any voting system be deemed secure? Anyone can show anyone else how they voted.
> I was looking for a job during working on this and absolutely got some disappointing rejections, and one was because of my lack of skillset on things like this in a big tech company's interview. I literally failed the technical screening. Oh well.
Sure, that's one way of looking at it. My product may fall flat on it's face (most likely outcome) so I wasn't interested in solving the problem before I had it.
But my mindset isn't YOLO. I genuinely would like to find a mutually beneficial way for it to work. Lots of ideas like revenue share but I'm hoping other ideas emerge.
This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.
This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.
I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?
If you know so much about Widgets that you don't need to consult Wikipedia about them yourself, you know more than it'd accept anyway. Wikipedia does not compete with passion sites of people deeply into a topic; if anything, it uses them as citations.
Also, counting audience is a thing that matters when you're running ads, which kind of disqualifies you from the passion site category, or as a trustworthy source of knowledge.
The thing is that a closed system like DMs on a platform can be more effectively monitored for spam than something like email (or phone calls or texts) because everything is under single control.
good question! I don't really know, but you can tell it isn't money; he admitted that himself anyway and reportedly he has no equity in openai[0].
my optimistic hypothesis is he really wants to control AGI because he believes he can make a more efficient use of it than other people. he might even be right and that's what scares me, because I don't trust his measures of efficiency.
I'd rather not let my pessimistic fantasies run wild here.
1) more money is not necessarily a goal for these people - it's what for they want more money and why they believe they can spend it better than everyone else (regardless if they truly can)
2) in a post-AGI world money may be an obsolete concept
A proxy yes. But not everyone leverages it that way. So it really depends. Some do just want to hoard as much as possible, others want to lobby, others want fame, others want legacy.
Money helps with all those, but will not passively do that stuff.
> Not sure how one can design a system robust to these two threats.
The US at various time has had a system robust to these threats. A prerequisite has been an educated and well-informed electorate with at least a large majority committed to a shared set of national values.
> Where possible try utilizing HSMs, yubikeys, secure enclaves - any specialized hardware that has been hardened to protect key material.
Are there any circumstances where this hardware is accessible in the browser? As I understand, it is not generally available (if at all) for any cryptography you might want to do in the browser.
The browser doesn’t have direct access for JavaScript but can use those for supported features. This already happens for FIDO/WebAuth using a hardware root such as a Yubikey or Secure Enclave, and I believe SubtleCrypto uses hardware acceleration in some cases but I don’t remember if it makes it easy to know that.
One thing to remember here, though, is that there isn’t anything special about key material in this attack other than it being a high-value target. If we move all crypto to purpose-made hardware, someone could just start trying to target the messages to/from the crypto system.
> If we move all crypto to purpose-made hardware, someone could just start trying to target the messages to/from the crypto system.
This is one of the technical advantages of a blockchain-based system. As long as the keys are protected and signatures are generated in a secure environment, then the content of the message doesn't need to be secret to be secure.
It's not a solution to situations where privacy is desired, but if the reason for secrecy is simply to ensure that transactions are properly authorized (by avoiding the leakage of passwords and session information) then keeping the signature process secure should be sufficient even where general secrecy cannot be maintained.
In general, this usually results in front-end logic being very tightly coupled with back-end logic. In some of the examples given, you even have database access in the same line that is generating the HTML document.
> In some of the examples given, you even have database access in the same line that is generating the HTML document.
Python template engines have the exact same problem, just way less obvious.
It doesn't have to be that way. Make all the queries up-front and pass the result the same way as you would pass context to templates. This way, all your components are pure. The difference is explicitness. Much easier to spot where side-effects happen than in templates.
I think the issue is orthogonal. I'm not a huge fan of react but it's an example of an architecture where the structure that is (imposed/encouraged) helps avoid the problem you're talking about.
I don't think the issue is "markup expressed in another language" - I think it's "poor application architecture". I don't dispute there might be a correlation between libraries and frameworks that do poorly on each - but that doesn't mean it's intrinsic.
Fine. But by that standard, in a world where someone can bring their phone or AI glasses into the voting booth to record the whole voting process, how can any voting system be deemed secure? Anyone can show anyone else how they voted.
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