As a long time reader of comp.risks, and having a professional interest in security (as a sysadmin), I'll take this opportunity to say that anyone who is promoting online voting as a replacement for paper ballots is (in my opinion) one or more of a)Hopelessly naive, b)Frighteningly optimistic, c)Woefully ignorant of the problems of authentication combined with anonymity, d)Ignoring the problems of coercion, or (worst of all) e) Willing to accept vote tampering. I do not seriously think that the Electoral Commissioner would be willing to accept vote tampering, but every electronic or online system has been demonstrated to be vulnerable to it. Worse, such attacks can occur at any point, be it in corrupt coding, interference with the ballots, or by injecting forged ballots. All of these have be proven to be possible in every practical and theoretical system proposed to date. This is ignoring the problem of d) - if the voting is not occurring in a public place, how do you prove that t...
My mother goes by her middle name. Never did manage to convince one of her distance-education tutors of that..
ReplyDeleteOr my mother, with some 23 middle names. Most of which are matronyms, tracing her matriarchal ancestry.
ReplyDeleteI once had an Egyptian colleague in Perth. Half the Australian government departments he dealt with had his family and given names reversed.
ReplyDeleteI'm usually only known by my middle name. This was originally because my dad and I have the same first name, and it was either "Adrian" or "Junior". :)
ReplyDeleteMy girlfriend's name is Arkady Rose. There are some government departments that don't reverse her names. Of those, some don't call her "he".
ReplyDeleteDavid Gerard Sigh. At least governments you expect that sort of thing from.
ReplyDeleteParents, on the other hand, can be evil. I am put in mind of a long-time friend (and fellow nursing student) of my mother's. Nurse Rose Bush. She managed to get over it though, courtesy of a war-time hospital romance.
She married Doctor Garden.
Really.