ko kāihe ahau ✝️CERN MS costs increase tenfold, reveals it’s been looking at alternatives for a year.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/13/cern-microsoft-alternatives-project-open-source-software/
Dave Lane 
🇳🇿@donkey Just shows why it's foolish to invest in an infrastructure built on someone else's proprietary technology (for reasons I explain here: https://davelane.nz/mshostage) - I'm pleased they're making the move now, but they should've been smart enough to realise this could happen at any time. And now it's going to be very expensive and painful to change because they've allowed themselves to succumb to lock-in, not because the #FOSS alternative is painful.
@donkey Sadly for the taxpayers of the world, all of our gov'ts are in the same boat, but they've *always* been paying the 10x more amount... for the past 20ish years. Imagine if that $ had been invested in the local industry instead, and in local enhancement of #FOSS that everyone could've used instead...
Strypey@lightweight @donkey I was frothing at the mouth when I found out how much #CorporateWelfare the #NZ government has been giving FarceBook every year to "advertise" to its own citizens. It could have built its own social network system for that sort of money.
From the piece by @lightweight
> Your business is effectively a non-voting subsidiary of your supplier. At the very least, you have a potentially catastrophic dependence. The supplier could choose, at any time, to ... compete with you and take over your market
This has disturbing implications for an elected public government that has to pay FB - a anti-democratic private government - to commununicate with it's citizens.
@donkey
@strypey @lightweight agreed - there’s a lot of tension there between “where the people are”, “what we can afford” and the “what is best for democracy”.
@donkey @strypey Sadly, that conflict only exists for people without sufficient technical knowledge and strategic savvy to realise that it's not a "network effect" or technology problem. All could be sorted, as I've told them in the past, for very low cost using openly available software from the global digital #FOSS commons.
@lightweight @strypey yup. At least they seem to have listened regarding the paperless voting.., 😉
@donkey @strypey well, eventually even the gov't spy agency agreed that it was a totally unwarranted risk to take. But there are still people in Local Gov't especially who're committed to foisting online voting upon us because they don't "get" tech stuff (or, perhaps, how crucial it is that voters can trust our democratic institution & those administering it). I've talked to some of them.
@donkey @strypey yes, it's sorta like software patents - as long as anyone has an incentive to push it (IP lawyers and established proprietary bizs for patents. People with an online voting system to sell + people who don't understand the tech problem, i.e. most folks in local govt, in the latter case) there's always a need to stay vigilant. For the record, if you haven't seen it (I've posted it many times)... everyone with an interest in democracy should see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM
Internet Voting? Really? | Andrew Appel | TEDxPrincetonU
@lightweight @strypey thanks for that - yes, I think that’s a video that I’ve seen you post before that I’ve sent to the governance people at work.
@lightweight I'll see your video criticizing #DigitalVoting (seriously, I'll watch it) and raise you this video by #JoshBenloh which explains ways that digital voting can be not only as secure as paper voting, but more secure:
https://invidio.us/watch?v=zC-rJX0Nmxg
@donkey
https://invidio.us/watch?v=zC-rJX0Nmxg
@donkey
Josh Benaloh - Elections with both Privacy and Integrity [13 Mar 2017]
This talk is part of the CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy. For more information and to view other talks in the series, go to: https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/speakers/ Elections with both Privacy and Integr
@strypey @donkey part way through it... I'm not getting a good feeling about where he's going. I also note that Microsoft recently announced they're getting into the online voting game... and despite their oft promoted love for open source, there's no mention of this https://apnews.com/7e78189c21ce4a7cb7cb73432705c3caI being open source (which, in my opinion, is an automatic fail)...
@lightweight the implementation is not the point. If the cryptography holds up (and this is an area I have no expert knowledge about), the same concepts could be fairly easily implemented in #FreeCode voting systems.
@donkey
@donkey
@strypey @donkey even if this is legit (frankly, this guy sets up a few too many straw men for me to know for sure what he's trying to say) it fails the (very sensible) German litmus test for a ballot: can it be scrutineered by a layperson? Germany ruled that even electronic voting machines were unconstitutional due to that. #Onlinevoting definitely is.
@lightweight that's not the reason. Have you seen how much it costs to send a letter now? With the last users of snail mail moving to digital billing, and even the government moving to email and secure messaging within its websites, postal voting is rapidly becoming uneconomic. This is why digital voting for local body elections *will* happen. We can stick our fingers in the dyke, or we can put our energy into influencing *how* it happens.
@donkey
@donkey
@lightweight obviously I share these concerns ;) So I would focus on educating folks at #LGNZ, #ElectoralCommission etc about the importance of independently auditable voting software *and* hardware. I suspect they see #NZOSS as partisan, since its members and their companies stand to gain financially from a free market in free code voting software. So I would work with #InternetNZ, or another organization not vulnerable to that perceived conflict of interest, to do that education work.
@lightweight if you want to prevent digital voting in NZ local body elections, you need to come up with a financially *and* politically viable proposal for how to deliver and collect paper voting forms in the event of #NZPost shutting down their snail mail operation, or merging it with parcel post, raising the price past $5 an item (one of which now seems inevitable). I can't think of one. Make delivering voting papers gratis a compulsory pre-condition of operating a delivery business?
@donkey
@donkey
@strypey @donkey the issue is this (as the video I referenced explains succinctly): #Onlinevoting is unsecurable and failure cannot easily be identified. I remain deeply skeptical about the validity of the MSFT research guy's approach - can't see how it avoids standover tactics. The only proven way to voting tech is hand marked paper ballots in community ballot places (the "Australian system")... the postal vote is also dubious (standover tactics, postal fraud) but less so than online voting.
@lightweight @donkey hmm. Maybe I sent you the wrong link. The video I watched specifically explained how the "Australian ballot" is no longer sufficient to prevent standover tactics and explained a method for doing so using digital voting.
@strypey @donkey that's not the message I got - he said that the Australian ballot was the technology that *did* prevent stand-over tactics - but if you *want to use online voting* he asserted that his approach would prevent coercion and bribery, due to making it impossible to prove how you voted... however, I'm skeptical - his talk is quite muddled, in my opinion.
@strypey @donkey and I'm not convinced at all that it addresses the issues of vote tampering at the client or server ends, especially if folks don't verify their votes afterwards (I wonder, in reality, how many people would actually do this)... My skepticism lies (based on what I think I understood, among his various straw-men) in how, if you allow people to verify their vote is recorded correctly after it's cast, you can prevent them from proving their vote to someone else...
@lightweight @donkey the Australian ballot did prevent standovers, until the advent of wearable cameras made it possible to demand someone take a photo of their vote while in the voting booth. He covers that within the first few minutes of the video, maybe we both need to watch it again? This seems like a crucially important point. Because if it doesn't protect secrecy, the whole rationale for keeping paper voting collapses in a heap.
@strypey @donkey I think the point with camera glasses was that with them, all bets are off regardless (another of the speaker's digressions). The possibility is that scrutineers could examine the glasses of voters prior to voting and, say, tape over anything they suspected of being a camera... not sure of any other mitigation.
@lightweight What about mobile devices, all of which have cameras? What about buttonhole cameras? You'd turn polling booths into airport security trying to keep cameras out and still fail. This isn't even a consideration in local body elections anyway, since postal votes contain no protection against standovers. Josh's verification proofs OTOH are highly relevant. If they work, they mitigate any risk of vote flipping by malware etc.
@donkey
@donkey
Incident Creator ❎@lightweight
The "tick" box is elongated. Form tears in half. Order of names on form is randomised (this should be the case anyway). The takeaway half does not have names on it.
@strypey @donkey
The "tick" box is elongated. Form tears in half. Order of names on form is randomised (this should be the case anyway). The takeaway half does not have names on it.
@strypey @donkey
@lightweight coercion and vote-buying are possible with postal voting, so this is not a requirement for local body elections. I remember voting papers being delivered to empty student flats by the hundreds one summer in North Dunedin. Had I cared to, I could have gone around collecting them up and voted hundreds of times. I think an auditable digital voting system would likely be more robust than this.
@donkey
@donkey
@strypey @donkey the MSFT guy makes so many blithe assumptions, it's kinda impossible to workout all the caveats that apply at any point in his explanation. If people are voting on their devices from home... I cannot see how the client device can a) be secured against malware "flipping" the vot the person casts, nor can I see how you can avoid standover tactics in that case. I don't really understand the scenario in which Josh's system is useful.
@strypey to be fair, part of our education needs to be that we *do not* have a pecuniary interest in open source tools as none of us have any proprietary guarantee of getting any #FOSS-related work. We are simply trying to ensure that the voter doesn't get shafted by (probably low quality, if all the international precedents are anything to go by) proprietary system that cannot be usefully audited. To us, permissionless auditability is necessary (but not sufficient) for any #onlinevoting system.
@lightweight you're preaching to the choir mate ;) But you can't deny that a decision to exclude proprietary vendors from consideration improves the chances of getting contracts for those already working with free code software. I know that #NZOSS isn't intended to be a trade association, but in a small county like #NZ, with its membership overlapping heavily with those in the industry, it's highly likely to seem like one to those outside its circles.
@strypey heh - well, given that I don't do that kind of work, I have no pecuniary interest... and until now only proprietary would've even been considered. Having the whole solution be auditable by *any interested party* without requiring permission is key to it having a chance of standing up to scrutiny. A proprietary #onlinevoting system should be rejected on democratic principles.
@lightweight again, you're teaching Grandma to suck eggs here. All these arguments are as self-evident to me as they are to you. But if you want to have some influence over whether/how digital voting is introduced in local body elections, it's necessary to consider not only how you look from the POV of yourself and your allies (eg me), but how we might look to the people making these decisions. Our arguments, however articulate and technically correct, will be boosted or muted on that basis.
@strypey I think we've already got sufficient allies who recognised our credibility within gov't that we'll manage to prevail in this and block #onlinevoting. Ultimately, the people pushing it have an obvious problem: the solution they're dead set on getting does not address the problem they have, and the facts don't support them. When democracy is concerned, I'm not much of a diplomat. Those in favour of #onlinevoting are simply either not sufficiently well informed, or are not credible.
@strypey ultimately, it'll be all of us against Microsoft, so I think I'll have to swallow my bile and watch Josh's explanation all the way through and try to sift through the layers of obfuscation to see if there's a legitimate kernel in there...
@lightweight the problem they have is the rapidly increasing cost of postal ballots and the end of the snail mail delivery system in the forseeable future, due to the combination of falling volumes and rising costs (fossil fuel dependency etc). I'm still waiting for you, @vik or Chris to address this and presumably so are the people making decisions about the future of local body elections.
@strypey @vik the alternative to postal *and* #onlinevoting is to simplify the ballot for in-person voting. I think that's the best option. And perhaps have more votes.
@lightweight
Postal ballots will still be needed for rural and less abled voters. Cost of post goes down in bulk. My local supermarket manages to poke a leaflet in my letterbox on a weekly basis, and I'm rural. Not convinced the actual cost of delivery is escalating.
@strypey
Postal ballots will still be needed for rural and less abled voters. Cost of post goes down in bulk. My local supermarket manages to poke a leaflet in my letterbox on a weekly basis, and I'm rural. Not convinced the actual cost of delivery is escalating.
@strypey
I agree with @vik that in-person voting either excludes people in far-flung areas or with mobility issues, or if you run enough polling stations to avoid this, is prohibitively expensive for local body elections. Having "more votes" (more frequent elections? Referenda?) would make it even more expensive. Unless you held local body elections the same year as general elections and used the same polling booths?
@lightweight
@lightweight
@strypey @vik and if gov't did what I told them to, implementing https://openstrandards.nz they'd have enough money in savings to run an election every month... :)
@lightweight funny, I didn't know local councils did fossil fuel subsidies or had military budgets ... ;)
@vik
@vik
@lightweight good question :) My understanding is that each council has to cover the cost of running its own elections out of rates. This would be a good thing to clarify with LGNZ.
@vik
@vik
@vik you're not comparing apples with apples here. Your local supermarket don't have to deliver to about 3 million voters spread across the country. They pay #AdPost, and other companies who specialize in targeted ad delivery runs to the areas surrounding retail outlets. We used them once to deliver a few hundred community newspaper, it was expensive and a lot of the papers never got through. From then on we had volunteers fold and deliver them, a day's work for 15 people.
@lightweight
@lightweight
@vik Have you asked #LGNZ what delivering voting papers costs their member councils every three years? You can't trust circular delivery companies, for the same reason you can't trust proprietary software vendors. They need to be delivered by posties, probably as registered mail. Have you seen what sending a letter costs these days, compared to 5 years ago? 10? Extrapolate that curve. Councils are saying this is why they're turning to digital voting. Why don't you believe them?
@lightweight
@lightweight
@vik @lightweight have you ever been involved in delivering campaign leaflets for political candidates? I have. A number of times, beginning in 1984. Getting a leaflet to every voter is a mammoth task, requiring a huge amount of coordination to make sure every household is covered, but only once per run, to keep printing costs down. Without professional posties who know their runs, paying people to do this would much more than doing it through a regular postal service. About as much as couriers.
@strypey @vik I totally get the pressures local councils are under, and I get why they're enthralled by the tantalising mirage (@kayakr's turn of phrase) of #onlinevoting. But ultimately, the issue is that voting online undermines the entire democratic process. LGNZ don't have an easy way out. Voting online is not the solution - it has all the flaws of postal voting, plus many more besides.
@strypey @lightweight I don't believe them because I can get things paid for and delivered to my house from China for less than the cost of a standard envelope in NZ.
@lightweight @vik if you can negotiate a bulk delivery discount for local elections, I'm sure LGNZ would love to hear from you. Otherwise you're essentially extrapolating from mass delivery of Christmas presents to a proposal that Santa deliver voting papers.
@strypey and no vendor is excluded. Any vendor can choose to comply with the gov't's functional requirements. Release under an approved open source license is certainly a legitimate requirement. No one is excluded whatsoever. If vendors are committed to being proprietary, they can find some other suckers to exploit... :)
@strypey
The postal system exists in our technological society to produce an undeniable paper trail between all aspects of citizen /government interaction, not just voting. If necessary, that function needs to be retained as the cost of democra y.
@lightweight @donkey
The postal system exists in our technological society to produce an undeniable paper trail between all aspects of citizen /government interaction, not just voting. If necessary, that function needs to be retained as the cost of democra y.
@lightweight @donkey
Chris Burgess@lightweight I'm wary of ever saying that oss online voting is any less scary
@strypey "the govt could have built its own social network for that $$" yikes! ... how's that looking from where you are right now?
@vik
Has there been a contested election where the paper trail reversed fraud attempts, or do we think that the audit trail is prevention? I don't have full faith in "undeniable" here
@xurizaemon
The last Austrian presidential election springs to mind. Also various forms of ballot stuffing in Nigeria and Columbia were proven and overturned. People do not consider that a reliable vote is particularly necessary in times of great turmoil and instability. Electronic voting won't cut it.
@lightweight @strypey
The last Austrian presidential election springs to mind. Also various forms of ballot stuffing in Nigeria and Columbia were proven and overturned. People do not consider that a reliable vote is particularly necessary in times of great turmoil and instability. Electronic voting won't cut it.
@lightweight @strypey
@xurizaemon
> yikes! ... how's that looking from where you are right now?
The devil is in the (implementation) details, of course. The Chinese government hasn't built a social network, it's done exactly what the #5Eyes governments have done, insisted on their own back doors in corporate ones like #WeChat and #Weibo. Contrast this with the French government (I think) funding a #Matrix app - #FreeCode and federated - which is more like what I was thinking of.
@lightweight @vik
@vik I'm sure as paper was replacing stone tablets people made similar comments. Even signatures on contracts are already being replaced by digital credentials. Paper will retain a role, just as stone engaving has (eg tombstones and other memorial plaques), but it's already becoming uneconomic for most uses. If you want to keep postal voting you have to engage with this reality or you will be ignored as failing to understand the problem. See:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/102280745879927129 @lightweight @donkey
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/102280745879927129 @lightweight @donkey
Strypey (@[email protected])
@lightweight if you want to prevent digital voting in NZ local body elections, you need to come up with a financially *and* politically viable proposal for how to deliver and collect paper voting forms in the event of #NZPost shutting down their snail mail operation, or merging it with parcel post, raising the price past $5 an item (one of which now seems inevitable). I can't think of one. Make delivering voting papers gratis a compulsory pre-condition of operating a delivery business? @donkey
@donkey @strypey yup - people should read this case study to understand some of the real value of #FOSS: https://tech.oeru.org/2018-update-oeru-technology-stack#case-study (and the sections before it explain the value we've found in #FOSS for globalising higher education)...
2018 update on the OERu Technology Stack | OERu Technology Blog
As I prepare for the 2018 OERu Partners' Meeting, I'm working how to convey the depth and breadth of the OERu open source technology stack - our infrastructure and applications - to our partners and other attendees. Over the past year, we've had our first live OERu courses allowing learners to work towards a formal exit qualification (our "1st year of study"), and our infrastructure has worked as intended throughout, so I'm chalking that up as a win.