gian

So any news story about how hard it is, is likely a US influence campaign.

Not necessarily. To build such systems is hard, they are not simple systems you can put togheter in a couple of weeks.

What is true is that it is difficult to distinguish between a true warning about the difficult to build such systems and a US influence campaign.

Or maybe people finally understand that it is useless to swap the phone every year.

Stop going to these centralized services. The centralization of ownership is the problem, not any specific website or owner.

True, we need the Fediverse, but the Fediverse is only a little harder to knock down, not impossible.
Expecially in the US where fighting in court could simply (and often) bankrupt you. All it is needed to take down and instance is asking the provider the owner of the IP and then sue him for something. A company could fight, a private owner no.

Elections are run by the individual states (unless something egregiously unconstitutional is going on) which allows the governor and even local election officials to make decisions that affect how hard it is to vote almost down to a street level basis.

Same here, it does not seems to be a problem.

If you don’t want people from blue areas to vote, you just put in fewer polling stations, and make them in less convenient places for areas that skew blue on the map.

That assumes that you already know how people would vote. Yes, historical data could give a hint but not a certainty. It is some times that polls are spectacularly wrong.

So adding 30 seconds to the voting time doesn’t really matter for a rural station that might need to service 100 people in a day, but for an inner city location that might need to service 100 people a minute those 30 seconds per person really add up.

True, but think about who could spare more time when voting (hint, probably not the people you want to vote) and you will realize that it is a stupid idea.

I agree with you in principal, verifying your identity before voting is important because elections are important. We should be having a conversation about creating a system that is both comprehensive and also doesn’t impose a burden on people without means. For example, a lot of people don’t have an ID to satisfy the proposed requirements and would have a difficult time getting these credentials before election day.

That is your problem number 2…

In addition, in order to get these documents a person would have to jump through a lot of bureaucratic loopholes and pay fees. Many of these people are poorer and are more affected by the dire economic situation. The systems are complicated and despite being involved in this sphere for a few years I couldn’t tell you the steps and fees required to get all of the documents. This isn’t a simple system where a person can just walk into a government office and walk out with a working ID.

and that is you problem number 1.
It is inconceivable to me that a situation like this could even exist in the US.
I get that many US people would start crying about “freedom” and everything else but the basic line is that a ID should be mandated by law for everyone. And it should be easy to obtain, I mean how difficult could be to do it ? Seriously.

It seems to me that these are not real problem, other countries solved them dozens of years ago, it is just that you people (assuming you are from US) don’t want to solve them.

If we’re going to have a system requiring Secure IDs (I’m not sure the EU analog, but you guys have a similar secure identity scheme being pushed) then we need to make getting Secure IDs dead simple because the average citizen needs to be able to vote and also shouldn’t be subjected to heavy administrative burden in order to participate in the democratic system.

A card with a chip and all the information in that chip, to read it you need just a reader.
Or a qrcode with all the information encoded ?
Even the old Italian ID (made of paper) was secure, it does not seems to be a problem without solutions, just copy from someone who already did it.

As for the problem with electronic black box voting stations, yes, they are a problem per se irregardless of who propose or built them. They would be a problem for the exact same reasons if they were proposed by Biden. But I still belive that a selection of who can vote done as you suggest is impraticable, you have no way of knowing who vote what before. A massive refusal to allow a certain population to vote would be noted in the end.

The check in the US is done when you register to vote. Once you are registered, a variety of proofs of ID can be used to vote at your polling location.

And why the double check ? It would not be better to just go to the polling station, show your id and then vote ?
(I undestand that it is a simplification, in the US people move way more often that here and this add some other problems)

Requiring a passport and birth cert or some other strong ID are unnecessary at the actual voting site. The main reason for doing this is to make voting take longer,

Considering that if I have no one before me to vote, it take about 30 seconds from the moment I enter the polling station and the moment I am handed the cards to cast the vote I would argue that saying that this way it will take longer is not really true.
And, btw, we do the check of the document against a printed list who containt all the names of the people who can vote at a polling station, splitted between man and women.

and be more strenuous, which means that you can have a greater effect on election results by manipulating the number of polling stations for an area.

Every difficulty you build to try to make harder for your enemy voters to cast their vote is a difficulty you set up also for your voters.
And simply manipulating the number of polling station in a certain area give you nothing: people who want to vote against you will come anyway and you cannot know if they will come before your voters of after and which voters eventually will lose their patience and just go home without casting a vote

Changing the system do not make it more secure by default. Here the SSN equivalent is calculated with your name, surname, date and place of birth and a check code, and it is not a secret how to calculate it (it was the very first program you write if you study IT at school for example).

The problem is not SSN number itself, but the fact that you need only it to do everything.

The Trump administration is building a computer system so that States can ‘verify’ a person’s citizenship prior to allowing them to vote.

As an Italian (but think most of EU citizens) who need to show my id card to vote, I don’t really see where is the problem if there is a check if the person could vote or not. I can agree that using the SSN maybe is not the right way but why should people who are not citizes allowed to vote ? For context, in Italy if I have my legal address (residenza) in Milan I cannot vote for the mayor of Rome, and btw, why should I ?

You clearly have a very restricted imagination about what ideas people could come up to use such hardware…

It is not this case, I agree, but to be honest it would not be the first time that some company create an artificial scarcity to keep the prices up.

This is the start of corporations trying to completely phase out owning your own hardware.

No, this is just a company that is trying to rename the old leasing concept.

This needs to fail hard or it will spread to every other major vendor. But in this timeline every evil deed seems to succeed and be rewarded. Be sure to hoard your old hardware, you’ll likely need it later.

In the enterprise world this is already a thing, companies already lease many devices (pc, laptop, copy machines, cars, phones etc), it not seems to be that much different.

In the private world, if you have the option to keep the laptop at the end the the rent period, you basically paid for the laptop in instalments, which again it nothing really new, it is already used for phones.

In my opinion the only real big problem is if they stop selling the laptop and only allow you to rent them

True only if the resource hog process grows progressively, else the daemon is in the same situation and the kernel limits are the only way since it stops the process before.

But yes, a daemon could be an interesting solution

The kernel has a way to assign resources to each and every process, try to google for “Linux kernel limits” or “linux cgroup cpu limit”.

The problem is knowing which process cause the load, but if you cannot even htop, then I doubt a daemon could do something.

You need to start somewhere.
If it work, maybe the same solution will be adopted from other parts of the country.

Most of EU countries has some sort of electronic identification system (in Italy SPID and CIE). You can simply ask to validate against it when creating an account and then you are good. You are verified and there is no dato to be leaked aside the data you decide to put into the system.

There are a lot of reasons that wouldn’t fly in the US:

I don’t think that Dacia target market are the US

Back at the time I used Mailman, it have a web interface and it should be easy enough to install on every distro. For example, KDE’s mailing lists are handled with it

Start with a email list and then try to get together in a pub or somthing like this on a regular basis.

If the LUG gains ground begin to look to some place where you can get together and eventually keep some hardware.
If possible, once the LUG has some regulars, look into joning some events, maybe as guest at a booth

Correction: Google backs everyone who let them to do what they want, they don’t really care if they are fascist or pedos as long as they don’t interfere with their money making machine

Yeah, me too. But home automation has its usercase: just think about an holiday home where you want to turn on the heating and the boiler the day before you arrive.
Sure, you can ask a local friend to do it for you but being able to do it remotely is nice.