I am disappointed by the lack of political discussion on Hacker News. Can't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly? Technology and governance increasingly have an extensive, nuanced relationship and HN is the exact place where that meta-discussion needs to happen!
> Can't we trust our fellow HN users to handle this discussion civilly?
Unfortunately, no we can't. That's clear empirically.
We can all come up with speculations about why it is; mine is that politics is tribalism and activates the pre-rational brain.
What's clear from years of experience is that such discussions degenerate rapidly, that the degeneration compounds—i.e. the more it happens, the worse it gets—and that allowing it to go unchecked would kill what's valuable about this site. That's why the HN guidelines' definition of "off-topic" leads with an admonition against pure politics: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There are some political topics that can be substantively discussed here, but that's because they're not pure politics: the drug is cut with something else. An example from yesterday is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841178.
* While I am interested in broad scocio-political discussions about technology's impact on how we live I have zero interest in US specific political discussion. Not because I think it doesn't affect people outside the US - it does, but because anything I have to say, or anything most people (including US citizens) would say would just be armchair activism or pointless what-if pontification.
* I come to HN mainly for tech discussions and insights into things that influence me and those that I can influence as part of the tech community. US politics is neither of those.
They could be fake, they could be doctored, they definitely are are out of context, etc. We know these emails are provided courtesy of Russia. Considering the Trump campaigns disturbing ties with Russia, these should be taken with extreme skepticism. To me, the much bigger question is, what does Russia want from Trump? He is obviously going to repay the favor somehow.
We don't know who leaked the emails. You'll have to show me proof otherwise.
What's disturbing is the content of the emails. Clinton will not last six months into her presidency, I can promise you that. There is clear evidence from the Podesta emails so far that the Clinton campaign cheated, broke the law, and used the Clinton Foundation for shady purposes. Mark my words, after what's come out in the last few weeks about Clinton, she will be seen in history as criminal, just like her husband.
Did you see she got debate questions ahead of time via Donna Brazile (in addition to the previously discovered town hall question)? That they made millions off pay-for-play with brutal foreign governments? Every day there are multiple discoveries of enormous magnitude, and that confirm long-standing suspicions about the Clintons.
It's disappointing that for whatever reason Clinton in particular is barely discussed on HN. What's come out in the last few weeks should be an enormous, shocking news story (especially if you've been living in the MSM bubble), and yet every submission gets knocked off the front page instantly.
CNN is now mixing in pure lies with their usual selective reporting and narrative spinning. The whole "it's illegal to read the Podesta emails, but not for us at CNN, so get all your information from us" (not verbatim) is one good example of that.
MSNBC has had some drone riots lately, with Morning Joe and crew briefly exiting the matrix to talk about the utterly obvious pay-for-play scheme run by the Clintons, a scheme that has often amounted to pay-for-weapons with brutal foreign regimes. They also discussed, but missed the point, an email where Clinton campaign staff were prepping for how to deal questions about Bill (e.g. "How is what Bill Clinton did any different than what Bill Cosby did?"). It was such a marked shift in tone for MSNBC that a lot of Youtube commenters noticed as well. It's on their official channel even.
It seems pretty simple to me. Have the machine print a receipt that shows your info and who you voted for, have the voter check it over and sign it, and then have the voter hand it in before leaving the voting station. The receipt is really no different than a paper ballot at that point.
That's not to say that other security precautions can be ignored. Ideally I'd think there should be mature open-source software running on secure intranets for each voting station, and transparency at every level of the process, including better transparency in how those physical receipts are transported, handled, and stored.
Bear in mind that by requiring each voter to sign their ballot slip, you're reducing the anonymity of the election, since it's potentially possible to prove that you voted in a certain way to sell your vote.
The gold standard, which has been deployed where I live for a couple decades now, is to skip all the e-voting network touchscreen foolishness and simply fill out an optical scantron sheet like the tests you probably filled out in school.
The last step of voting is inserting the ballot into the scantron machine. Valid ballots are eaten, invalid are kicked back out at you.
Theoretically the machine can output running totals at any time, and if you've never seen an optical scanner in action you'll be surprised how fast it can scan and grade a classrooms worth of multiple guess tests, less than a minute to scan and process perhaps a hundred tests, so a thousand people living in my voting district is not exactly a data processing challenge. The votes can obviously be counted by hand of course, they're just custom printed multiple guess test sheets.
Optically scanned paper tapes and punch cards were contemporary in the 60s and optical scantron machines appeared shortly after. I'd estimate my state converted from mechanical voting machines and mimeograph machines to scantrons and photocopiers about the same time, lets say 1980 although maybe as late as 1984 or earlier in the 70s. I distinctly remember watching my parents vote one last time on an old fashioned voting machine when I was a little kid, probably voting for Nixon, may have been Reagan but I'd have been too old by then, I think. Old fashioned mechanical voting machines were cool and steam punk ish in appearance.
Its such a simple, cheap, reliable system that it almost leads credence to claims that elections are being intentionally rigged. Its hard to explain otherwise why something so cheap simple and logical is being covered up and so few people know about it. Ironically I live in a non-swing state in a gerrymandered district so my vote has never mattered and never will, but at least if I ever get a chance to influence politics via voting, its pretty obvious my vote would be counted fairly.
Two systems. One assigns a unique a temporary code to you on arrival at the polling station, much like those "take a number" queues at places. Then another unconnected voting system with printable receipt.
Step 1) You queue, get a "Temporary Voting Id"
Step 2) Enter the booth, enter your "TVID"
Step 3) Vote
Step 4) The Machine prints your Receipt with your vote clearly visible and your TVID as local proof its you and your vote is right.
Step 5) You fold your printed ballot and put it in a box.
Step 6) You fold your ID Receipt and place that into a "Validation Box" as you leave.
Step 7) All machines keep and print a "Tally" used as the count.
Step 8) All ballots and validation id's are saved in boxes and shipped ready for recounts if needed, ID's can be matched to ballots to validate attendance and votes anonymously.
Bonus Step) ALL vote machine should produce a "Vote Audit" when asked that will show a full history of votes (without times and in random order) and the ID's used and ALL id generation machine should produce all vote id's generated (again without times and in random order)
You can stuff the receipt box with fake receipts just to culture jam. IF you're going to pre-print certified serial numbered receipts, why not ballots? I suppose jamming the receipt signal would be wise if you're otherwise hacking the vote. It certainly would be easy.
The UI of a #2 pencil and a pre-printed form is a lot simpler and easier to use and un-jammable compared to an e-voting machine printer. Also cheaper and harder to hack.
If you keep your ID receipt theoretically you could prove your vote and sell it. If you don't keep your receipt, they might toss out your vote and you'll be unable to prove it. There are cryptographically secure-ish ways to work this, mostly involving statistical security (I forget the exact term, the kind that makes engineers pull their hair out because the algo looks inefficient but the inefficiency is the source of the security)
Even worse I assume multiple votes per TVID would overwrite the previous vote to handle user interface mistakes (see above, why must we use a complicated electronic UI instead of a #2 pencil and paper UI?). So any poll worker with access to the unshredded TVID has root password and can change everyones vote at their leisure.
You should have inserted the votes into a networked blockchain so people can ask WTF if 50 votes are changed ten minutes after the polls are officially closed. Or people could ask WTF when district #239 is the only district to have 50 revotes more than five minutes after the original vote. And the blockchain would store the former pre-tampering ballot which might be handy once the corruption is identified.
Of course it'll be fun to link the timestamped blockchain to CCTV cameras everywhere, so if you timestampped blockchain you no longer have anonymous voting, every ballot is now linked to license plates and face pictures, thank you "war on fake terror".
If the TVID is not cryptographically secure you don't need access to the box of stored TVIDs, because I see they handed #200 to me, #201 is next on the table, why shouldn't I type in and "correct" votes for TVID #190, #191, #192, #193 ... while standing in my private booth?
If I walk out the door with a cryptographically secure verified TVID and just toss a blank piece of paper into the TVID disposal box, then I can sell my TVID to someone for money or booze or sex, then dude walks in with my TVID, gets one of his own, votes for the two of us. You'd need to timestamp each TVID for a limited validation time. I could see management at companies requiring people to hand in their TVIDs to get their timecards or paychecks. Or at soup kitchens. Or crooked cops, or especially college professors. Imagine trying to explain you can't give your TVID to your feminist studies professor because your african world heritage professor already took it, which class do you accept the "F" in?
Essentially with TVIDs you're trying to implement Kerberos tickets which is tricky enough for computers, much less 80 year old deaf poll workers who dropped out of high school during the great depression and have never touched a computer. Every security hole or bug thats ever existed in Kerberos needs patching.
There are so many problems I'm kinda bored right now, but I can tell CCTV attacks and cellphone camera based attacks are going to be a very interesting problem. Essentially any security guard with a high res camera pix of the stack of TVIDs has root over your system, I think. If the TVIDs are preprinted any corrupt person with physical access to them before the election or before the recount anyway, who owns a cellphone camera or has access to a photocopier has root. Big data attacks might be possible, "sell" memorized TVID number to the bartender as part of a "I voted so now I get a free shot" sounds very much like democracy boosterism until the employer collects memorized ballot receipt number for their own parallel "I voted so I get a free ice cream cone at work" democracy boosterism, until the data is sold and you're powned because you gave away both parts plus the name your employer knows to "separate" entities who are not "separate" after all.
I'm not sure if you fix everything if you basically end up with optically scanned pencil on paper ballot "scantron" voting or if you end up in a parallel but different rabbit hole of higher complexity, cost, and lower security.
Not that I'd hold the UK up as a good example of democracy, but here there is a unique ID on each ballot paper that is noted down on a list next to your name when you vote. The ID/name list is kept securely, but can be used to find a voter's ballot paper later in the case of a dispute over the result or fraud.
> No, I don't want to dork around with spending days compiling kernel patches and installing soundcard drivers before I can use the computer.
You are badly misrepresenting the current state of mainstream Linux distributions. I've done probably 20 Linux installs, and by and large it always just works. If there is some necessary proprietary driver, it's almost always as simple as Menu --> Administration --> Driver Manager and then clicking once or twice.
Kernel patches? I wouldn't know how the hell to do that, but somehow I've been using Linux happily for a decade.
I am using Linux distros on both laptops and a desktop as the only OS and you are definitely misrepresenting the current state of things. It takes a lot of work.
For the laptops, the clickpads never work well. You have to mess with synaptics settings a lot and eventually you get a slightly worse config than the default on Windows and a lot worse than OSX clickpad. This is coming from someone who looked into hardware compatibility and bought a laptop that didn't seem to have any problems.
For Desktops (and laptops * 10), you have a lot of issues if you want to
A) Use CUDA in general for neural networks.
B) Resize VM encrypted hard drive after creation.
C) Dual boot with Windows (things like updating windows or reinstalling a Linux distro after digging yourself into a hole with CUDA drivers mentioned above can wipe grub in a way that wouldn't let you boot).
D) Allow hibernation in a dual monitor setup with proprietary drivers.
E) Use a tablet for drawing on a system with multi-monitor setup and proprietary drivers.
F) Mess with Compiz settings too much when you have proprietary drivers.
G) Dual booting with one hard drive with Linux full disk encryption and non-default partitions and another hard drive regular Windows.
H) Dual boot from one disk and encrypt Linux partition with luks and forgo swap partition.
Having said all this:
I would still use ubuntu/linux because almost all non-.NET/Java tools are easier to use on Linux. Lets you customize your system and code without VM overhead and inconveniences.
The system doesn't get slower over time and nothing unexpected randomly happens (except after updates to graphics drivers).
Most of your list is either a specialized requirement, or something that probably wouldn't be that much easier on Windows / MacOS. I meant that simple things like browsing the Internet, video chatting, and playing music (the needs of 99% of computer users) work out of the box. GP was saying that you literally can't install Linux without kernel patching and command line wizardry, which is totally false, and the only point I was refuting.
I'll add one to your list -- dealing with Linux audio. I have a stable music production setup now, but it took me a long time to iron everthing out.
I recently had to binary patch a video card driver -- using a patch I found on a forum -- just to get it to start X, after I had specifically bought the hardware (Foxconn, AMD - major brands) because they specifically advertised that they fully support Linux and X, which I had cross-verified with the Linux and X documentation.
Why? The video card was a Radeon model "1234" (I forget the real exact number), but the hardware was a newer minor revision that identified itself as a "1234-A" to the OS in its ID string. Linux (Ubuntu) then simply refused to load the "1234" driver, because "1234-A" was not in the list of approved card ID strings in the driver.
Absolutely nothing on AMD's site, nothing on Foxconn's site, nothing on Ubuntu's sites. Contact tech support? Ha.
Eventually -- after days of googling for a solution -- I found some obscure forum where others were discussing the exact same problem. Someone provided a binary patch ("just load up the video driver in a hex editor and change the following 20 bytes to these other opaque values".) It worked.
