It’s usually:

• legacy systems won’t work on newer windows versions, so they have to stick to what works
• legacy drivers that won’t work on newer windows versions, so certain hardware can only interface with those older windows
• updating code for more recent machines is expensive and time consuming, especially as you’ll need to keep the old version running for who knows how long until you fully replace it. CERN recently went through a lot of trouble due to Red Hat dropping support for older systems (which they still use) and started migrating to Debian.

Throwing AI around won’t help much unless someone with a working brain trains the thing only on the stuff that the FAA needs for their systems to work

I haven’t seen any around my area, though I’ve seen it advertised on TV

Yes, for it requires intense physical training for a proper casting of “Fist”

Even those only whisper in hushed cants about the before times, when every inscription was carefully annotated in scrolls that could become as long as entire towers

FREEZE!

Also from HOMM3, it’s the tower hero sprite during combat

Apprentice mages usually begin by aiming at their own feet and yelling the incantation, some immediately turn to aim at the sun “just because”

Easy, it was another, greater mage. It’s mages all the way down

I think it has something to do with how paramours would “hide in the closet” when the spouse came back home.

linkie please

Open browsing is letting anyone read what the site has.

My suspicion on why, is because AI bots and crawlers can just read the contents of the posts and send it back to whoever prompted, thus “stealing” clicks that would otherwise go into reddit proper and generate ad money

Cheers, mate

That does not explain at all “how to compromise a significant enough number of machines that never connect to the internet and whose firmware/code is audited by several parties and institutions before being compiled and installed on them”, but I’ll indulge you

• Brazilian urns are not “closed source”. As I stated in other comments, the source is open, entities can audit it before and after elections and universities have permanent access to the code.
• The voting machines never connect to the internet. They don’t even have a RJ45 slot.
• The “prove this has not been tampered with” is a possible problem, but given how the installation of the software happens, with human oversight of multiple parties, chances of that happening are reduced.
• For counting, after a check that everything went ok, the urns are locked and taken back to electoral tribunals, where the removable disks (USB) are read in a separate machine, which are then transmitted to the central processing system. There is a possibility of a “disk swipe” here and I don’t know if there are any systems to check against that possibility.
• There is a possibility of MITM attacks during data transmission, but checking back whether the file was correctly received (checksum) is trivial. His worries are again on “a system no one but a very select few can see”. This is not the case for the Brazilian system, all involved systems are audited before, during and after elections, including by political parties. It doesn’t fix the “average person won’t understand how it works” problem, tho.
• That Scottish case was funny for the fact that the result was a fucking spreadsheet
• I fully disagree with him that it’s easier to cast doubt on electronic voting than paper voting, see that “pencil lead under the nail” trick for filling blank votes or nullifying otherwise valid votes.
• Voting from your own device is a stupid idea and thankfully it’s not even being considered here

All in all, of the problems Tom raised, only 2 are really valid for Brazil (prove the installed system wasn’t tampered with, prove there was no USB disk swipe) and both are dealt with with multi-party oversight, which is the same thing used to protect the validity of paper voting.

No it can’t, and that’s the point.

Wrong, Brazil is proof of that.

To pull off falsification would require a massive conspiracy that would almost 100% be leaked.

It doesn’t matter if it leaks or not or how big the conspiracy is, if it happens it immediately casts doubt on the validity of whole process. Besides, “accidentally” getting rid of one or two votes, or “finding” one extra vote, has a bigger chance of going undetected and, even if caught, can be excused as “oops, my bad!”

Brazil’s electoral frauds rarely aimed for presidential votes, they were much more often for state deputies and city councilors, where the difference between the last one getting elected and the first one out is usually very small. In the 1994 elections, the state of Rio de Janeiro had to null the results for state deputy and federal deputy. Fraud was rampant. https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/ha-30-anos-fraude-eleitoral-no-rio-apressou-projeto-da-urna-eletronica,e9c86b3b8ba6575111c5fed66407caf9qn1fx78n.html

Some notable examples of fraud happening with paper, as per that article:

• using a pencil lead under the nail to mark something on blank votes;
• having the urn start out with a bunch of votes before voting even begins;
• corrupt poll workers filling some of the reserve voting papers before closing the booth.

You said in another comment something about “deeper social issues”. Guess what Brazil has in spades?

Compromising a machine is much more likely

You’re free to point how to compromise a significant enough number of machines that never connect to the internet and whose firmware/code is audited by several parties and institutions before being compiled and installed on them, some time before elections proper and also after the elections

A couple of things to understand about Brazilian elections:

• Voting is mandatory for all citizens aged 18-70, though failing to vote nets you a 4 BRL fine (less than a dollar)^[1]
• Every Brazilian citizen has an ID with photo (I’ve only recently learned that USA doesn’t have something like a nationwide ID);
• Election happens on a sunday and people who have to work on said day can ask to leave for 2 hours in order to vote;
• Voting is standardized and organized at a federal level, even for municipal voting. The electoral tribunals exist solely for dealing with elections;
• The majority of funds spent on campaigns come from the electoral fund, which is distributed to parties according to how many elected deputies, senators and governors they have (a great way to ensure big parties stay rich and well funded). Up until 2014, corporations could still donate to campaigns. After that, only citizens may donate and only up to 10% of their earnings.
• The electronic urns are audited before and after elections^[2], they are completely offline and save votes to an internal disk. Since their inception, despite many claims, no fault or fraud has ever been found on the hardware or software. Even fucking bozo and his flunkies couldn’t find any security breach back in 2022, while he was in power.
• With how urns are distributed, it’s easy to account if the total amount of registered votes is equal to the amount of voters that showed up. This first verification is done once voting time is over by the 4 poll workers that care for each urn/section.
• Voters have to do both ID and biometric verification (fingerprint) before voting
• No cell phones or kids go in the booth with you (take a wild guess why “no kids”)

There was a saying in Brazil, up to the 90s, that “elections are won in the counting” - fraud was rampant, especially at municipal/state level and the electronic urns got rid of that.

Paper can only be considered more secure if you have special paper and special printing like money bills, otherwise they can be falsified much more easily.

There is value in the brutal simplicity of pencil and paper, folding your ballot, and putting it in a box. It’s a system anyone can understand and that the human eye can audit.

Which can also be easily falsified

Killed by a rogue byte to the face

I want that thing to never do a captcha again, please