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...
WOW! An interesting experiment. Let's hope it produces.
ReplyDeleteIt should. It has been in limited trials for 3 or more years now. Interestingly that article has a different explanation for the mechanism to any I have seen previously (all previous explanations that I saw talked about providing an alternate target for the IgE antibodies).
ReplyDeleteThat 1 in 70 figure looks weird, it comes from the Coeliac Australia website and seems to come from a statement that 30% of the population caries one of the two gene's associated with Coeliac disease and 1 in 30 of them will get the disease. This they calculate to be 330,000 (math looks ok) but then they go on to say 80% currently remain undiagnosed. This smells of someone trying to fudge over a humongous difference between the calculated rate and the reported rate.
Anyone have additional info about this?
I don't know whether to say EWWWW or Cool!
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