dstroot (u/dstroot) - Readit News

dstroot commented on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections blog.citp.princeton.edu/2... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

anon291 · 19 days ago

It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.

dstroot · 7 days ago

"trust" is a fuzzy concept - people use iMessage and have no concept of how it's architected or how it works. But they trust it. Why? because trust is something that is transferable. If you trust me, and I tell you iMessage is safe then you have a high likelihood of trusting iMessage. If this is reinforced by other people you trust, even better. There would be ways to create a voting system in the open, and have it validated by third parties. If you've ever bought stock it's because underlying the transaction, and auditor has certified their financials...

dstroot commented on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections blog.citp.princeton.edu/2... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

p-e-w · 19 days ago

Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes.

That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.

Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.

dstroot · 7 days ago

I find that argument lacking. Each of those people is also a potential weak link or even an adversary from a security standpoint. Would I rather have 10,000 weak links or one software system with rigorous testing and logging?

dstroot commented on Tesla ending Models S and X production cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla... · Posted by u/keyboardJones

breve · 11 days ago

Why is making humanoid robots a moat? Other companies have been making robots for longer, humanoid and otherwise, and doing it better.

Has Optimus signed up for any sports yet: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/02/china/china-humanoid-robo...

Is Optimus close to what Boston Dynamics is doing with Atlas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIhzUnvi7Fw

dstroot · 11 days ago

Anyone who owns a tesla vehicle with "full self driving" is probably chuckling to themselves about Tesla ever making useful general purpose robots any time soon. Disclaimer, I own two tesla's with FSD and it's far from "full" or "self". I am very sceptical of robotaxis unless they have the appropriate sensors & SW (e.g. Waymo) which Elon has not done.

Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?

dstroot commented on CISA’s acting head uploaded sensitive files into public version of ChatGPT politico.com/news/2026/01... · Posted by u/rurp

lysace · 11 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhu_Gottumukkala

He was the 'CTO' of South Dakota and later the CIO/Commissioner of the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications under governor Kristi Noem.

Edit: (From a European perspective) it seems like the southern states really took over the US establishment. I hadn't really grasped the level of it, before.

dstroot · 11 days ago

South Dakota has a population of less than 1 million people and the complexity of a CTO job of a state like South Dakota would be quite low. It is < 0.3% of the US Population and likely has de minimis benefit programs.

dstroot commented on Tesla ending Models S and X production cnbc.com/2026/01/28/tesla... · Posted by u/keyboardJones

sgjohnson · 11 days ago

Tesla will become a case study on how to completely waste the first-mover advantage.

For many people, the very term EV itself is still ubiquitous to Tesla.

And somehow Tesla is still worth more than every other non-Chinese automaker combined. $1.5T.

GM? $80B. Stellantis? $40B. Toyota? $280B. Mercedes-Benz? $60B. BMW? $55B. Volkswagen Group? Also $55B.

I’m sure I’ve missed plenty of others, but I could miss some 18 $50B automakers, and Tesla would still be worth more than all of them combined.

If Tesla was valued fairly, it would probably be at the tune of $5B. But I’ll never bet against it, because the markets can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent. And for some unbeknownst to me reason, the markets value Tesla as a hot tech company, not a 3rd rate automaker, which is what it actually is.

And to add insult to injury, even GM Super Cruise is widely renowned as better and safer than Tesla’s current “FSD”.

dstroot · 11 days ago

And Elon canceled the S and X models but not the Cybertruck? C’mon…

dstroot commented on Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections blog.citp.princeton.edu/2... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

gpt5 · 19 days ago

The most important feature of public elections is trust. Efficiency is one of the least important feature.

When we moved away from paper voting with public oversight of counting to electronic voting we significantly deteriorated trust, we made it significantly easier for a hostile government to fake votes, all for marginal improvements in efficiency which don't actually matter.

Moving to internet voting will further deteriorate the election process, and could move us to a place where we completely lose control and trust of the election process.

We should move back to paper voting.

dstroot · 19 days ago

I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.

dstroot commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam

dstroot · a month ago

https://www.danstroot.com.

dstroot commented on Scott Adams has died youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_Jr... · Posted by u/ekianjo

jchallis · a month ago

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

dstroot · a month ago

I will probably be downvoted for posting something that “doesn’t add value” but I have to say that is a beautiful post about a difficult topic. I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.

dstroot commented on The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app xdaforums.com/t/discussio... · Posted by u/Magnusmaster

Fiveplus · a month ago

So, if you cannot cryptographically prove to a remote server that your device is running essentially unmodified, vendor-signed software, you are locked out of the economy?

The irrefutable part here is that the security model works. Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own hardware. The genius of the modders in that XDA thread is undeniable, but they are fighting a war against the fundamental architecture of modern trust and the architecture is winning.

dstroot · a month ago

Consumer level security always has to contend with the lowest common denominator. As my 80 year-old mother‘s technical support team I can testify that she will download and install anything she sees on Facebook. The consumer security world has to protect us from people like her. It’s also the reason I will only allow her iOS devices.