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>The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely
by abakker 8y ago
>The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch.
I guess the devil is always in the details. "freely adopt and customize" to me says that the code will not be verifiable or open source anymore? Or that the implementation could be flawed. Open sourcing the code, and then letting commercial entities change it, cut corners, make money, etc seems to be a good way to ensure that all the hard work that went into designing the system is rapidly compromised.
- masswerk 8y agoIsn't there a law in the US prohibiting public institutions from competing with private businesses? This may provide a cause for not rolling it out, but rather handing it over to private enterprises for implementation. Edit: I recall the US having to withdraw from the Human Genome Project because of this as soon as a private enterprise claimed it as a field of business.
- ashelmire 8y agoNo, that’s not true. I’m unaware of such a law and could point to many counter examples. The human genome project was declared “complete”.
- masswerk 8y agoActually, the HGP was on the verge of being scrapped, but then the U.K. came to the rescue with a major investment to make up for the US. If I recall this right, the US enterprise (Celera) wanted to take an algorithmic shortcut in mapping and verifications, by this overtaking the HGP regarding final results in order to provide the data as a paid service. This happened 7 years before the scheduled finalization of the HGP. Eventually, they finished in a tie. (However, this has been some years ago now and I'm not a US citizen.)
- Keverw 8y agoI've heard of that too, but I believe that only comes to tax software. In some other countries they mail you a postcard with how much taxes you owe, but if you have deductions they didn't know about you have to correct it... They wanted to a similar system here but the major companies like Intuit and H&R Block lobbied agaisnt it... Adam's Ruins everything talked about this https://youtu.be/Fj4anUL-LvY https://youtu.be/Fj4anUL-LvY
- Rebelgecko 8y agoCalifornia has their own tax software you can use online, although it doesn't cover as many use cases as TurboTax.
- piker 8y agoYes, kind of. US Tax-Exempt entities directly engaged in "unrelated business activites" can be subject to "unrelated business income tax" or UBIT at the federal level. But that's unlikely to deter an agency of the federal government which would not be subject to UBIT.
- devoply 8y agoWhen the military is building voting systems you should be a little leery.
- dragontamer 8y agoDARPA's experimental computer network protocols (Arpanet) seem to be working quite fine these days. I know DARPA is military, but they contribute so much to general research that its kinda normal to use their stuff.
- nwah1 8y agoThe benefit of open source is that it is verifiable by peer review. I would take an open source and peer reviewed voting system that was originated by the NSA and CIA and every other spook organization over one that was closed-source and hand-coded by Larry Lessig or whomever is your favorite person of integrity.
- KurtKoolbrain 8y ago> "impervious to certain kinds of hacking" guess that about sums it up. it's DARPA after all folks..