I have more than a surface level knowledge, I would like to talk about it and grow my knowledge more. NOT ALL THE DAMN TIME.
Please just let me have a break. Not everything has to be about politics. Life is not about politics.
Ultimately with a rigged voting system (Read up on the security practices, and closed source nature of voting machines. Of which some voting machine manufacturers have publicly stated they wanted a certain side to win. This has been a serious concern of mine long before orange man said so, and was a concern during the 2016 elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy), the sheep like nature of modern voters, and the pleasure addicted modern man. Nothing is likely to get better.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive for change. This doesn’t mean you should never strive to have a better knowledge of politics and ethics. You just can’t base your life around it.
I want to read memes because I want to enjoy myself. If I wanted your shitty take, I would go to a political sub reddit (I don’t know what we call it on here) and I would debate you there. Please just make funny memes here.
If you want a clearer source of concern, the FBI vets ever video poker device to make sure they are not cheating but voting machine software is somehow proprietary.
I took the post to be making fun of people who see posts about things like gay characters in fiction or minorities in the news as somehow inherently political.
Stop hanging out in spaces defined by political affiliation then. It’s your responsibility to chose spaces that meet your needs. Don’t hang out in the wrong place then sulk because it’s not what you want it to be.
Microsoft lied to consumers about Windows 10 being the last version ever, they do not allow you to opt out of data collection, and they are now forcing edge on the user despite being sued previously for forcing internet explorer on their users.
Closed source solution have a long history of exploiting the consumer. I chose lemmy because I want an open solution that prevents the monopolization users, and has a much better track record for not exploiting their users.
I didn’t come here to listen to political crap. Do I agree with a lot that is said? For the most part, yes. I think a lot of the same minded people are on lemmy for a reason.
However, this does not mean I want to be flooded with politics 24/7. I would like to be able to get away from politics at times.
You’re not on “Lemmy”. Your a pawb.social user on a Lemmy.ml community. Lemmy.ml is not Lemmy. Lemmy.ml is an Lemmy instance (just like pawb.social.) The purpose of the Lemmy.ml instance is for communists to come together to talk communist shit. The memes community within Lemmy.ml therefore is an absolutely perfect place for them to post left-wing memes. If you want to see memes by and for a general purpose audience then hang out at at Lemmy.world memes community. It’s notLemmy.ml user’s fault you think they are a general purpose Lemmy instance like Lemmy.world is. That’s your fault and the solution is for you to make an effort to find the spaces that serve your needs not to pick random spaces and tell them they are doing it wrong for not alligning to your incorrect expectations.
Depends whether or not you think most instances should take a stance against the far left. Personally I think the fact people treat Lemmy.ml as a generic all purpose sub rather than focusing that effort onto places like lemmy.world or lemm.ee is pretty messy and will only continue to create more and more issues. As for creating your own instance and defederating, why do that rather than just block their communities as a user if you want to avoid communist groups? Presumably there is a reason you wanted to be part of Beehaw?
Sorry for the late reply. I think most of the confusion comes down to the design of lemmy. Because of the federation aspects that allows content to be easily shared between instances, it seems to me (and seemingly most other people newer to lemmy) that lemmy is designed as a primarry single network of multiple maintainers. which may have separate networks that are de-federeated from the rest (mostly private communities or free speech absolutists instances)
Additionally, lemmy.ml does not explicitly say anywhere on their front page that they are intended as a political instance. Neither does memes@lemmy.ml make any mention that it is intended for political use. If you want to avoid people complaining about this, than some way to distinguish them is absolutely necessary, as I did not know about memes@lemmy.world because everyone on my instance just defaulted to memes@lemmy.ml.
If we want to avoid this, there needs to be a clearer indication that memes@lemmy.ml is intended for political use and individuals should use memes@lemmy.world for non political use.
I’m sorry if this is the wrong place for such a discussion, but I genuinely would like to understand your position better.
Do you think the 2020 election was manipulated to an extend that prevented the victory of Trump?
And if yes, then what is your explanation for the fact that no court said that there is any evidence for larger scale fraud? Meanwhile FoxNews (and others) are (so far) successfully sued for spreading misinformation about the voting machines.
I’m not particularly well versed enough to comment on that specific election.
I was speaking to voting machines in general. For reference, I work in I.T. and hold a current A+ and Security+ certification (https://www.comptia.org/). I don’t intend to show proof as I wish to remain anonymous.
From what I have been able to gather, these voting machines have severe security deficiencies. I’m more versed on older models from around 2006-ish. However these voting machines were taken to Defcon (a large cyber security convention), and what I was hearing about them was not particularly great (https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/). Hoping one of these years, I’ll be able to attend.
To speak about the older models, they lacked many anti tamper protections. There was one well known exploit were you could set the votes for a candidates negative before elections began. Ie, candidate A start with -3 votes, you vote for candidate A, they now have -2 votes. I believe I’ve heard of a candidate getting negative votes in the wild, however take that with a grain of salt because I’m going off memory and I was struggling to pull up any sources.
These voting machines also did not use any cryptographic methods to protect the vote count such as encryption or hashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function). That means on the system that would count up all the votes between districts, it was possible to change the vote counts in a fraction of second using a tool like this (https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky) because the votes were stored in a plain text .csv file. Note that tools like the rubber ducky were not publicly available when these models were first put into use, but were known to be used by organizations such as the NSA and Russia. See (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_f9p-_JWZw) for a walk through on how a tool like this could have been used.
Additionally, the closed source nature limits the publics ability to scrutinize these system. Originally it took a hacker breaking into an insecure ftp server that had accidentally been exposed to the public internet, to discover the source code and the lack of security protections involved. I also believe that many of the security verification process that was supposed to be run on these systems, was often skipped to cut down on costs. However I’m recalling from memory and the source is likely so buried, it would take me a week of studying to find.
In summery, our current voting system is poorly maintained and it would be easy for a state actor like Russia to fiddle with votes. Because of this, I take the results of any election with a grain of salt. I hope one day that our government would focus more on securing our elections, than spying on our citizens.
While you are correct that the cybersec practices on voting machines are embarrassingly bad, we don’t actually rely on them for the integrity of our elections in most districts. They are a convenience more than anything else, and at the first sign of any possible tampering, we can audit against paper ballots that get printed off the voting machines (which if you start altering those, it only takes one person to notice somethings off and the jig is up)
Even with their shit security, an attack would be exceedingly difficult to pull off. The machines are airgapped and audited, so you need physical access without supervision which by itself is a tall order. Then, consider that you will need to compromise dozens of machines at minimum to swing even the lowest turnout national election for the most obscure position. Finding enough people willing to risk a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison felony charge that are smart enough to do the job and not get caught is going to be a challenge too, because if one person gets caught, then once again, the jig is up.
What is far more realistically dangerous is convincing people that the election was compromised when it wasn’t. This gets you way more bang for your buck because it’s so much easier to do, and is the primary reason I think that nobody really bothers trying to compromise the voting machines.
The main point I’m trying to make is that compromising voting machines is not the hard part of rigging an election. It would require a conspiracy so complicated, that I’m not convinced there’s any group on earth that could successfully pull it off. Set aside cybersec arguments for a moment:
Let’s assume the worst case for security, that there is one machine per state that you can easily compromise to alter election results. This alone is doing a lot of lifting for this example.
Now, you have to cross your fingers and hope that the election is close enough that you can fudge the overall result without raising suspicion
Prior to the election, you have to plan which states to compromise, and what districts you will target for altering votes. You can only really do this in swing states and swing districts. It is usually not clear until very close to the election which places will be optimal.
Because you are at the mercy of RNGesus as for where you can compromise, you have to compromise a lot of extra states ahead of time to eliminate risk that you didn’t get enough swingable ones to pull of your plan. This increases head count and creates more liability.
If you swing any given district too far, you can raise suspicion and trigger a recount. If one district raises the alarm, the rest will follow. If you only compromised central machines and not the voting machines and ballots themselves, you fail.
If you can’t find enough districts to subtly alter, you fail.
Let’s assume you prepared for point 4 and compromised voting machines themselves. This requires massively more people involved, and if only one person gets caught, you fail.
To extend 6. every person involved in your conspiracy is a liability. A single double agent gets in your ranks? Fail. Somebody flakes? Fail. Somebody grows a conscious or gets busted and rats you out? Fail.
While yes, theoretically you could overcome all those obstacles, you’d have to get miraculously lucky and you’d need to not get busted for quite a long time after the election. Why even bother when you can just pay a few bucks to the right people and get news channels to convince the voters to put your guy in charge without committing any voter fraud at all?
Now all that said, I absolutely support improved election security. If nothing else, it will make it much harder to spread FUD about election integrity.
I’m not saying an attack can’t be done, or that it won’t happen. Honestly, I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t and I fully agree with you on the additional security measures.
What I am saying is that it’s very unlikely we wouldn’t find out what’s going on before the results are set in stone at any scale larger than the tiniest local elections (which if you altered a bunch of local elections enough to exert influence, you run into the same issue of being easily detected). This would still be massively damaging to the election process, especially if the attack goes deep enough to require the election to be re-run, but not the end of our democracy.
I have more than a surface level knowledge, I would like to talk about it and grow my knowledge more. NOT ALL THE DAMN TIME.
Please just let me have a break. Not everything has to be about politics. Life is not about politics.
Ultimately with a rigged voting system (Read up on the security practices, and closed source nature of voting machines. Of which some voting machine manufacturers have publicly stated they wanted a certain side to win. This has been a serious concern of mine long before orange man said so, and was a concern during the 2016 elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy), the sheep like nature of modern voters, and the pleasure addicted modern man. Nothing is likely to get better.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive for change. This doesn’t mean you should never strive to have a better knowledge of politics and ethics. You just can’t base your life around it.
I want to read memes because I want to enjoy myself. If I wanted your shitty take, I would go to a political sub reddit (I don’t know what we call it on here) and I would debate you there. Please just make funny memes here.
If you want a clearer source of concern, the FBI vets ever video poker device to make sure they are not cheating but voting machine software is somehow proprietary.
I took the post to be making fun of people who see posts about things like gay characters in fiction or minorities in the news as somehow inherently political.
fair
Stop hanging out in spaces defined by political affiliation then. It’s your responsibility to chose spaces that meet your needs. Don’t hang out in the wrong place then sulk because it’s not what you want it to be.
I’m on lemmy because closed source solutions such as reddit, microsoft, apple, tesla, etc, have a record of exploiting their consumers.
Apple sells over priced products, designs them to fail, and then claims to protect your data while they secretly steal it (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-sued-for-collecting-user-data-despite-opt-outs/ar-AA146IUj).
Microsoft lied to consumers about Windows 10 being the last version ever, they do not allow you to opt out of data collection, and they are now forcing edge on the user despite being sued previously for forcing internet explorer on their users.
Closed source solution have a long history of exploiting the consumer. I chose lemmy because I want an open solution that prevents the monopolization users, and has a much better track record for not exploiting their users.
I didn’t come here to listen to political crap. Do I agree with a lot that is said? For the most part, yes. I think a lot of the same minded people are on lemmy for a reason.
However, this does not mean I want to be flooded with politics 24/7. I would like to be able to get away from politics at times.
You’re not on “Lemmy”. Your a pawb.social user on a Lemmy.ml community. Lemmy.ml is not Lemmy. Lemmy.ml is an Lemmy instance (just like pawb.social.) The purpose of the Lemmy.ml instance is for communists to come together to talk communist shit. The memes community within Lemmy.ml therefore is an absolutely perfect place for them to post left-wing memes. If you want to see memes by and for a general purpose audience then hang out at at Lemmy.world memes community. It’s not Lemmy.ml user’s fault you think they are a general purpose Lemmy instance like Lemmy.world is. That’s your fault and the solution is for you to make an effort to find the spaces that serve your needs not to pick random spaces and tell them they are doing it wrong for not alligning to your incorrect expectations.
Sounds like most instances need to defederate from lemmy.ml then. Or I need to make my own instance and defederate.
Depends whether or not you think most instances should take a stance against the far left. Personally I think the fact people treat Lemmy.ml as a generic all purpose sub rather than focusing that effort onto places like lemmy.world or lemm.ee is pretty messy and will only continue to create more and more issues. As for creating your own instance and defederating, why do that rather than just block their communities as a user if you want to avoid communist groups? Presumably there is a reason you wanted to be part of Beehaw?
Sorry for the late reply. I think most of the confusion comes down to the design of lemmy. Because of the federation aspects that allows content to be easily shared between instances, it seems to me (and seemingly most other people newer to lemmy) that lemmy is designed as a primarry single network of multiple maintainers. which may have separate networks that are de-federeated from the rest (mostly private communities or free speech absolutists instances)
Additionally, lemmy.ml does not explicitly say anywhere on their front page that they are intended as a political instance. Neither does memes@lemmy.ml make any mention that it is intended for political use. If you want to avoid people complaining about this, than some way to distinguish them is absolutely necessary, as I did not know about memes@lemmy.world because everyone on my instance just defaulted to memes@lemmy.ml.
If we want to avoid this, there needs to be a clearer indication that memes@lemmy.ml is intended for political use and individuals should use memes@lemmy.world for non political use.
Thanks for putting it so eloquently.
For example, memes on lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml
I’m sorry if this is the wrong place for such a discussion, but I genuinely would like to understand your position better.
Do you think the 2020 election was manipulated to an extend that prevented the victory of Trump?
And if yes, then what is your explanation for the fact that no court said that there is any evidence for larger scale fraud? Meanwhile FoxNews (and others) are (so far) successfully sued for spreading misinformation about the voting machines.
I’m not particularly well versed enough to comment on that specific election.
I was speaking to voting machines in general. For reference, I work in I.T. and hold a current A+ and Security+ certification (https://www.comptia.org/). I don’t intend to show proof as I wish to remain anonymous.
From what I have been able to gather, these voting machines have severe security deficiencies. I’m more versed on older models from around 2006-ish. However these voting machines were taken to Defcon (a large cyber security convention), and what I was hearing about them was not particularly great (https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/). Hoping one of these years, I’ll be able to attend.
To speak about the older models, they lacked many anti tamper protections. There was one well known exploit were you could set the votes for a candidates negative before elections began. Ie, candidate A start with -3 votes, you vote for candidate A, they now have -2 votes. I believe I’ve heard of a candidate getting negative votes in the wild, however take that with a grain of salt because I’m going off memory and I was struggling to pull up any sources.
These voting machines also did not use any cryptographic methods to protect the vote count such as encryption or hashing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function). That means on the system that would count up all the votes between districts, it was possible to change the vote counts in a fraction of second using a tool like this (https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky) because the votes were stored in a plain text .csv file. Note that tools like the rubber ducky were not publicly available when these models were first put into use, but were known to be used by organizations such as the NSA and Russia. See (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_f9p-_JWZw) for a walk through on how a tool like this could have been used.
Additionally, the closed source nature limits the publics ability to scrutinize these system. Originally it took a hacker breaking into an insecure ftp server that had accidentally been exposed to the public internet, to discover the source code and the lack of security protections involved. I also believe that many of the security verification process that was supposed to be run on these systems, was often skipped to cut down on costs. However I’m recalling from memory and the source is likely so buried, it would take me a week of studying to find.
In summery, our current voting system is poorly maintained and it would be easy for a state actor like Russia to fiddle with votes. Because of this, I take the results of any election with a grain of salt. I hope one day that our government would focus more on securing our elections, than spying on our citizens.
Thank you for explaining. If I understand you correctly, you make a similar point as John Oliver does here.
just finished watching it. That video is spot on (and the information is a little more current).
While you are correct that the cybersec practices on voting machines are embarrassingly bad, we don’t actually rely on them for the integrity of our elections in most districts. They are a convenience more than anything else, and at the first sign of any possible tampering, we can audit against paper ballots that get printed off the voting machines (which if you start altering those, it only takes one person to notice somethings off and the jig is up)
Even with their shit security, an attack would be exceedingly difficult to pull off. The machines are airgapped and audited, so you need physical access without supervision which by itself is a tall order. Then, consider that you will need to compromise dozens of machines at minimum to swing even the lowest turnout national election for the most obscure position. Finding enough people willing to risk a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison felony charge that are smart enough to do the job and not get caught is going to be a challenge too, because if one person gets caught, then once again, the jig is up.
What is far more realistically dangerous is convincing people that the election was compromised when it wasn’t. This gets you way more bang for your buck because it’s so much easier to do, and is the primary reason I think that nobody really bothers trying to compromise the voting machines.
deleted by creator
The main point I’m trying to make is that compromising voting machines is not the hard part of rigging an election. It would require a conspiracy so complicated, that I’m not convinced there’s any group on earth that could successfully pull it off. Set aside cybersec arguments for a moment:
Let’s assume the worst case for security, that there is one machine per state that you can easily compromise to alter election results. This alone is doing a lot of lifting for this example.
Now, you have to cross your fingers and hope that the election is close enough that you can fudge the overall result without raising suspicion
Prior to the election, you have to plan which states to compromise, and what districts you will target for altering votes. You can only really do this in swing states and swing districts. It is usually not clear until very close to the election which places will be optimal.
Because you are at the mercy of RNGesus as for where you can compromise, you have to compromise a lot of extra states ahead of time to eliminate risk that you didn’t get enough swingable ones to pull of your plan. This increases head count and creates more liability.
If you swing any given district too far, you can raise suspicion and trigger a recount. If one district raises the alarm, the rest will follow. If you only compromised central machines and not the voting machines and ballots themselves, you fail.
If you can’t find enough districts to subtly alter, you fail.
Let’s assume you prepared for point 4 and compromised voting machines themselves. This requires massively more people involved, and if only one person gets caught, you fail.
To extend 6. every person involved in your conspiracy is a liability. A single double agent gets in your ranks? Fail. Somebody flakes? Fail. Somebody grows a conscious or gets busted and rats you out? Fail.
While yes, theoretically you could overcome all those obstacles, you’d have to get miraculously lucky and you’d need to not get busted for quite a long time after the election. Why even bother when you can just pay a few bucks to the right people and get news channels to convince the voters to put your guy in charge without committing any voter fraud at all?
Now all that said, I absolutely support improved election security. If nothing else, it will make it much harder to spread FUD about election integrity.
deleted by creator
I’m not saying an attack can’t be done, or that it won’t happen. Honestly, I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t and I fully agree with you on the additional security measures.
What I am saying is that it’s very unlikely we wouldn’t find out what’s going on before the results are set in stone at any scale larger than the tiniest local elections (which if you altered a bunch of local elections enough to exert influence, you run into the same issue of being easily detected). This would still be massively damaging to the election process, especially if the attack goes deep enough to require the election to be re-run, but not the end of our democracy.