I forgot the name but 10 years ago there was a popular free vpn extension for browsers that let each user exit by the other users ip and you could choose the location with a click.
But behind that free service, the model was to provide an expensive service to companies needing high frequency testing or scraping (sometime illegal) with multiple ips and locations. I got a trial for 1 week after a visio with them, it was complicated to setup, but it felt like exploiting unknowing free users.
I got in love with Zammad for this kind of things. It's a modern alternative to OTRS, but it's so light and easy to use that you can push it to any kind of business or personal project.
Every time I build something long-term with at least 3 people, I check if we can use Zammad. It's opensource, I know how to get a complete setup in 3 hours, the design and perf are nice.
I share your feelings. I had switched to Dendrite 1 year ago and its flaws made me open my eyes to the major problems I had with the design of the protocol.
I started to worry that it would not improve and I reexamined XMPP.
Finally I switched to XMPP that I had abandoned more than 5 years ago because I think there is a better chance that the community will finally offer clients with the important features, on all platforms, in the coming year and that it will last over time.
The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
Everything else is a scam.
It would mean no secrecy of vote, but I think that secrecy of vote is for places that are new to democracy.
It could be anonymised to a point a clever system of personal certificats, but the idea is that in a 100 people district, the citizens should be able to count themselves and check if their real votes are correctly registred.
If the list is public, everyone got a proof of vote and can confirm that the global list is correct localy, then there is no way to hide cheating.
The value of secrecy is for protecting wives, mothers, etc from violence and punishment. the same is also true in local elections in particular. You could be ostracized from public services in a heart beat if they knew your vote. I can think of a hundred other reasons why a secret ballot is better than a public ballot. A secret ballot is necessary for safety, courtesy, and well being of a society.
But, there is still someone somewhere that distribute the certificats and can link you to your vote so why try to hide something that can leak. It will leak.
We have a major party candidate right now saying his political opponents should face a firing squad and you’re asking “why try to hide something that can leak?”
It’s pretty clear that he is saying that Liz Cheney is a war hawk but might change that stance if she found herself on the other side of said hawking. Your statement is technically correct but like many other interpretations of his statements, forgoes context and intent to make an easy point.
The context is that he has been publicly calling for a televised military tribunal for Cheney (who is not in the military) for quite a while now, but since he’s a senile old man who “weaved” this into an argument against hawkishness, the right wing can play dumb.
Since when do people facing firing squads get issued a rifle of their own? How do you explain this language he is using?
To me it's clear he meant "put her in combat facing a squad of adversaries" (US Army squads are 9 men, USMC are 13), essentially calling her a coward/chickenhawk.
Sure if you omit the times he's called for televised military tribunals for Cheney, an American citizen who has never served in the military. As already addressed below, the fact that he's "weaving" (deliriously free-associating) various arguments together isn't a good defense.
But, should we deceive people like the tech companies are doing right now with privacy?
If someone is scared that his position will be known and still do it only because there is some fakely advertised security in place, you may ruin that person's life againt their will.
I prefer a system where people know how things work, take risks and are responsible. For what do we need a democracy if people are so scared of their family, neighbours and coworkers political views. The way we do democracy should me more mature after all this time. Probably the only place in the world trying to do it right is Switzerland, per example they have frequent local votations accomplished by raising one's hand.
If there is a risk that a husband would beat his wife in this case and that she could not leave him, there is no way that any form of electronic vote would change her life, or even her childrens. People who protect this system will probably rig the votes to keep it or a similar one.
I don't know any big change in the past, anywhere, like a big social progress, a regime change, a revolution or a coup that was enabled by a mass or anonymous voters. I think that if you look into it, you will find that it's always with a large consent or when a group of people takes action openly to push for it.
> If there is a risk that a husband would beat his wife in this case and that she could not leave him, there is no way that any form of electronic vote would change her life, or even her childrens. People who protect this system will probably rig the votes to keep it or a similar one.
What? There are people in America who live under this threat today, and yes voting can actually change important parts of their lives.
> There are people in America who live under this threat today
Women under threat of their spouse beating them to death for voting "incorrectly"? Can you link to some examples of this? Like testimony of women who came forward fearing their spouses, not just in general terms but on this specific issue of voting?
I am open to the idea that it is possible, but many things are possible. I'm asking you to share information that supports your assertion. You still haven't done so. It appears you're dodging the question. Do you have documented examples or data, or not?
Inb4 "those are anecdotes!" And then subsequent refusal to answer the point blank question of whether you believe it happens or not, for aforementioned reasons.
> I didn't ask if it's possible. I asked whether you think it happens.
I would not make an assertion either for or against it in the absence of data. I would not put forth such a hypothesis without at least anecdotal indicators of a problem. I appreciate you linking to something; even anecdotes help to paint a picture for potentially additional research/analysis, so thanks for that. Now, in response to the linked anecdotes:
The author mentions emotional gaslighting in 2009 and in 2017. There's no indication that she or the other woman was at risk of physical abuse (which is what you suggested was the issue) in either case.
So I would agree with and endorse the statement "Some men use emotional abuse and gaslighting to control how their spouses vote" but still disagree with the extreme position of "women are at risk of being beaten to death for their voting positions" as that remains unsupported hysteria.
This is the most charitable take I can make from your link. There's some real nuggets sprinkled in her writing which lead me to paint her as a completely unreliable narrator and discount/disregard anything she says. If she's foolish enough to stay in a relationship with a delinquent, drug-abusing, alcoholic emotional abuser....hey, that was her choice, and her competency as a responsible adult is questionable at best. If one of my junior male Marines walked came to me with the same sob story (and I've had Marines with bizarre relationship problems before), he'd get a pretty stern talking-to, some life advice...and we'd probably be questioning his decision-making and level of responsibility he can handle moving forward.
"Life is hard....it's even harder when you're stupid."
Which is what troubles me about making auditable digital voting systems. I'm not sure how you could do it while preserving the secret ballot.
About the best I can come up with is a QR code displayed on the screen and on a printout that you can compare with a third party phone app. Machine results are tabulated, and the QR code sheet is put in a lock box separately. This at least provides some way to compare what the computer says you voted versus the QR backup ballot for audits. I'm sure there are holes in my idea.
It's not, but I'm saying you have the option to compare the two with an outside reference at the time of voting. You keeping the result on your phone after would be entirely your decision.
>You keeping the result on your phone after would be entirely your decision.
And what happens if baddies come to your house before the election, and say that after election day they'll check up on you, and if you don't they'll beat you up?
>The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
How about having the voter verify a printed copy of their electronic vote before the machine casts the ballot and then counting the paper ballots afterwards to verify the tally with the machine. Two way verification. Problem solved.
Since 2016, with the help of activists over the country, NJ and many otther states switched to electronic machines with paper records validated by the voter. Unfortunately the part about counting the paper ballots afterwards varies between states.
I believe since 2002 all electronic voting machines must produce a paper receipt like that, due to the Help America Vote Act.
I don't think most states hand-check every single ballot, but I'd be shocked if there are any that don't perform random audits where some sampling of the receipt are hand-checked.
As of 2024 there are still many states that are still using DRE: Direct Record Electronic: a voter records the vote digitally and any paper record, if available is printed after the fact.
I am not a fan of Optical scan either. In NY back in 2019 I was a volunteer for a local election that was super close and we discovered that the machines rejected a bunch of votes. We then had to challenge the election and do a manual hand count. For the votes rejected by the machine that were not fully legible we had to find the voter who cast the ballot. I recall some ballot were rejected for stupid reason like there was a mustard stain on the ballot(this is in NYC ha ha). In the end I think we lost by 60 votes or so.
A good system in my mind is what NJ has moved to (although it seems like they have not moved to this system statewide which is a shame): DRE with paper trail. Essentially, the voter votes, the machine prints a paper record and shows it to the voter so they can verify. Once they verify, the vote is cast and the paper is deposited into a sealed box.
Unfortunately they only go back and count the paper for close races but they should really do it for all races.
> The only way to get an honest electronic vote is by giving realtime visibility on who voted what and where publicly.
The secrecy on individual votes has a good reason to exist. Votes are already bought based on per-section public results, imagine what would happen if individual votes were public.
Moreover, people under any sort of threat (communities dominated by drug dealers, employees of a dishonest, politically engaged business owner) would be in big trouble.
It depends where, in France we had only one state controled company that gave use the lowest prices in Europe and became an international leader in the domain, until under pressure from activists and Germany we introduced competition and cut EDF in small pieces.
I would say that competition is good for energy only if you depend on importation.
It may seem proselite and overly highlighted, but personally I find it very practical.
Whenever I review a tool, or look for an alternative, I always look at the state of the maintenance and the choice of programming language, mainly to eliminate, as much as possible, the many tools written in Javascript and Python when it is not suitable.
I will not necessarily prefer a tool written in Rust, but at least it is rarely a flaw.
For those using Windows games from GOG or other none-steam supports, I recommend Lutris, it requires a little more setup, but after the initial groking you can have a library as nice as Steam and with a lot more manual settings and support for other platforms or emulators.
A nice trick with Lutris is to create 2 initial prefixes for wine 32 and 64 bits and then to duplicate them in the library for each game. Only the lauch settings will be different but you get all games installed in 2 wine instances.
I'm not the parent, but I use both XMPP and Matrix, and have some thoughts to both of these.
> Matrix isn't really decentralized
I think most of the concerns stem from the majority of the development in the ecosystem being driven by a single company. This manifests in a few ways:
matrix.org is by far the biggest server. Element is by far the most popular client. Both were (until recently) maintained by the same company, and the client selects matrix.org as the default server. This was done to make onboarding easier, but it centralised power into one organisation.
Theoretically, since Element does most of the development, if they want to push something into the protocol, the whole ecosystem really has to follow.
Because most people are on matrix.org, and the protocol works by replicating state between involved servers, matrix.org gets a lot of metadata even from conversations that are not hosted on their server (as long as one person in the chat is on matrix.org).
There are some flags which are enabled by default which automatically "phone home" to matrix.org even when you are running your own server. They are easy to turn off, but an annoyance for people who want to run completely separated instances.
The standard way to join a chat is via a "matrix.to" link. This leaks some information to matrix.org even if the server is completely separate.
By contrast, XMPP has no dominant player who drives most of the development, and no dominant server instance. I imagine this is because the protocol has been around for much longer (so there is more time for things to settle), and there is a very clear separation between the standards body and the software developers. There are popular clients that have some influence over the ecosystem, but nowhere near the extent as in Matrix.
Now, XMPP has its problems too, but few of these stem from having too much centralisation.
> which XMPP client you're using on Linux
I personally use Dino (https://dino.im/). It offers a simple, clean experience, and looks really nice.
There are also more fully-featured clients, like Gajim (https://gajim.org/)
* the webserver hosting matrix.to can see your browser’s IP and user agent as it connects to it. (this could be improved by connecting to matrix.to via an overlay network of some kind, or simply using matrix URIs instead)
* it cannot see the room/user being linked to, as this is deliberately hidden in a url fragment from the server
* it cannot see details about the room/user being linked to (eg the icon or room name); it optionally lets the client chose to grab this from a given homeserver, but the service itself never sees this data.
In other words, it was written with privacy in mind.
Sorry but, your list of examples feels like a list produced by an AI from a set of articles about aphantasia, or it's like you're too influenced by these articles.
Rotating 3d objects, doing multiple visual operations on a rubik's cube or mental abacus are not operations that even people with hyperphantasia will be able to do naturaly.
If you gave more examples of every day situations, or if you told us that you tried to train for thoses operations for 3 months and failed, we could conclude something else.
I was thinking the same thing 2 months ago, I used tmux locally and remotely for 5 years with advanced features in bashrc using systemd-run to start sessions and keep them open.
But there were always some problems with copying, terminfo features, truecolors, composed unicode...
And recently I changed my mind about the usefulness of a multiplexer, after all only some remote machines were adapted to my workflow, most of the time I just used it locally and had to deal with multiplexer and terminal issues at the same time.
So I tried Kitty again, Kitty claims that multiplexers are a bad idea and that the terminal can do more and better, and it's right about that. Multiplexers should be replaced by advanced terminals.
But behind that free service, the model was to provide an expensive service to companies needing high frequency testing or scraping (sometime illegal) with multiple ips and locations. I got a trial for 1 week after a visio with them, it was complicated to setup, but it felt like exploiting unknowing free users.