salvadors

> I even logged … scans of post received (and categorised in Google Drive but linked from Google Calendar)

Oh, very nice idea. What's your workflow for doing this?

> theres no website I can go to and check my vote

If such a site existed, vote buying and/or coercion would be a lot more prevalent.

It's illegal for your employer to require you to work. That's not quite the same thing.

I suspect the primary compensation they hoped to get for that particular speech was _not_ financial.

> What about a plumbing business which dispatches jobs within a 5 mile radius. If the employee moves 2 hours away, suddenly the company has to pay 4 hours a day of commuting.

As you say, if the company has a fixed office at the centre of that radius, they can still tell the worker that their days begin when they arrive at the office, and then the 'worktime' begins once they get there, ready to travel out to the first customer. That's how many businesses operate anyway — and how the business at the centre of this case used to work. The case was brought once they closed that office down.

Having to get off the train for 75 minutes, with all your luggage etc., is effectively "changing train" to most people, even if you end up getting back on the same train.

Who said anything about keeping it quiet? Are you doubting that this already happens?

> anything less than perfect is broken

Why?

Even without getting into complex election fraud, parties in many countries already know how to buy votes in a paper-ballot system: you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want.

And even without that, there's a much simpler calculation in play in Estonia. Keskerakond (the party closely allied with Putin's party), only got 7.7% of the e-votes in the most recent election: the demographics of online voters has very little overlap with their supporters. If only the paper-based votes were counted, Keskerakond would have won the election.

Sure, they'd still have the complication of actually forming a government; but it's much more likely they'd be able to do that with a first-place showing (and possibly without Savisaar).

With those sorts of numbers, if I were a Keskerakond strategist, I'd be doing everything I possibly could to discredit e-voting too. And the more "useful idiots" I could find, who'll merrily interfere in the elections a country they know very little about because it suits their own ideals, the better.

As I said, this particular approach isn't a solution to every potential problem.

However, I'm much less concerned with this threat than with the much simpler virus that simply changes your vote in real time.

Most people I know don't leave their ID card connected at all time; so the virus would need to wait for the next opportune moment, rather than silently casting this vote whilst you're not at my computer — thus significantly increasing the chances that at least some people would notice it. If it also had to load the voting software again to send the vote (I don't know enough about the protocols around this to know if it would have to or not), then it would be even more likely that some people would notice.

And on top of that, don't forget that the ID-card software shows on launch how many times you've digitally signed things. Most people almost certainly don't pay much attention to that number, but I'm sure some people would notice it rising unexpectedly from the virus, and an investigation could happen.

The Estonian voting system already allows you to verify your vote from a second device for a short time period.

This certainly doesn't protect against all attacks (and it's only one part of the security system) — but it _does_ help against the threat of a virus that invisibly intercepts your vote to turn it into something different. If people started reporting that their phone showed a different vote to what they thought they'd cast via their laptop, then the election would be in trouble.

The fact that it only shows you this for a short time period also gets around the problem of you being able to show to a third party how you voted (in cases of vote-buying or coercion), because under the Estonian system you can also vote as many times as you like (with only the final vote being counted). So you could use this verification to 'prove' to someone that you voted the way they wanted you to — and then log in again an hour later and vote for someone different.

They are being so. It's an ongoing process.

I guess you didn't read past the first screen or two, then?

The section on "The Technical Origin" explicitly references that as the starting point for this project.

> does it matter if it was 1492 vs 1500? ... If suddenly the exact date does become important, it'll take our kids 90s to look it up

The issue is more subtle than that. In lots of cases the value of knowing the information is when it lets you make connections that you wouldn't otherwise have _realised_ were important.

Let's say you're reading something that happens to mention The Alhambra Decree. You've never heard of this before, so you do a quick Wikipedia lookup, where the first paragraph says:

"The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year."

If that "1492" is a well primed trigger point for you — especially in a context involving Spain — you're much more likely to pause for a second and wonder if this might be related to anything else you know about that year. And, although the remainder of this page never mentions Columbus at all, it doesn't take you much searching to discover that there are indeed some very interesting connections between the two, some of which lead to further questions about Columbus' own religious background and leanings.

But if that 1492 doesn't have that trigger effect, you're much less likely to draw any connection here, and simply nod and return to your original reading.

We do that all the time. There are so many things that pass us by constantly because we simply don't even realise there's anything worth paying attention to. The more hooks we create in our brains for those to get snagged on in passing, the deeper you start to understand things, and the more interesting life becomes.