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...
This is so much more interesting than what "Stupid Republican Candidate Said This Week," which is all our TV news has consisted of for about 3 months now. :( I didn't even know that Australia was having a lot of refugees come in.
ReplyDeleteCrystal, that is a part of it - the actual numbers we are talking about are tiny, by comparison to the routinely processed refugee intake!
ReplyDeleteProportionally, we don't have a lot of refugees coming in, but like in all countries they are the target for lowest common denominator politics and media interests
ReplyDeleteTT doing scaremongering, sensationalist drivel? Who'd have thought?
ReplyDeleteIn other news, water is wet.