Re: [LINK] Flash drives in the sea?
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 09:48:10AM +1000, Jim Birch wrote: John Franklin's search for the North West Passage when the entire ships crew perished after two years despite resorting to cannibalism doesn't rate? The search for the great south land? ... The search for evidence of the fate of the Franklin expedition, and the determination after 150 years that it was the lead that dissolved into the food from solder in the cans that did them in? Lasseter's reef? ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
Re: [LINK] AEC to release secret voting source code
On 11 July 2014 13:43, Stephen Loosley wrote: ???The AEC hardline position in trying to discredit Mr Cordover as a vexatious litigant is an abuse of the law under which the AEC operates and raises the very relevant question, what do they have to hide? On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 02:00:32PM +1000, Jim Birch wrote: The Palmer bug? :) More realistically, the way that the senate count works is open to procedural interpretation as variation in the counting order could change the result. (I would have thought.) The only random element in the Senate count is the process to follow when two or more candidates for election or exclusion have the same number of votes, and they aren't eligible to be bulk excluded and they also had the same number of votes at all previous stages of the count. Then (and only then) may one be selected by the State Electoral Commissioner for election/exclusion - perhaps by tossing a coin, but possibly deliberatively. Not only is that circumstance very unlikely, the selection would then most likely just affect a few subsequent stages of the count. To be significant it would need to set off a cascade effect in the order of subsequent exclusions to affect the actual election result. And in the event of a tie for the last place with all candidates having equal votes all the way back to the start of the count, then the State Electoral Commissioner gets a deliberative casting vote. Read the Senate Section of the Act (s273). It's hard to imagine that any of the MPs who enacted it had any idea exactly how the bulk exclusion process (13A) might be actually carried out. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/cea1918233/s273.html I was a contractor to AEC in the mid 1990s when this software was being developed. I can't understand why they never made it open-source, but my recollection was that the developers ended up with partial or complete ownership of the software even though they were paid to write it by the AEC. Someone might have stuffed up the assignment of IP terms in a contract... Chris ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
Re: [LINK] RFI: Email Duplicate-Download Problems
Roger, I'm guessing that the IMAP server is updating or renaming the stored messages when you access them, which is causing the POP server to see them as new. That's probably because it's recording in the message file that the message has been read. The combination of Dovecot IMAP server with Maildir mailbox repository is fairly popular and that uses a message file rename to signal that the message has been read. http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html Using a mix of POP and IMAP is probably bad anyway - with the setup you describe you probably just want to stick to POP. IMAP assumes that the mailbox and folders all live on the server and you access them from multiple devices, but if your quota is small or you want to back them up yourself, then the IMAP model isn't a good fit. Chris ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
Re: [LINK] AEC faces backlash over vote counting ???black box???
> At 10:27 PM 21/07/2016, Chris Maltby wrote: > >The other audit capability is the (incomplete) counts of senate > >first preferences by group that was conducted manually in polling > >booths on election night. This data is available for statistical > >comparison with the booth-by-booth final vote data and that would > >also show up any significant favouritism in the data entry process. On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 07:51:00AM +1000, JanW wrote: > I was going to suggest this as a QA measure: sample a subset of > the votes in each machine to test accuracy. That wouldn't be too > onerous and I suspect scrutineers would accept that as a reasonable > demonstration of the reliability of the software. > > In fact, I would push for this on every OCR/computer combination > used for the final count. Anyone who has used it knows how OCR is > UNreliable. If this is supposed to be interpreting the full spectrum > of hand-written numbers, I would be questioning things as well. > > We're not talking about a binary tick or unticked box. Think how > the US got into strife with the hanging chad fiasco in Florida and > how Al Gore did not become president of the US as a result. This > feels worse.. That idea has merit for picking up any systemic substitution of images. The unreliability of the OCR is catered for by two design features: first, the OCR system has to have confidence that it made a match for every mark on the paper (level unspecified), but any inconclusive matches would cause the entire OCR to be rejected, and second, the OCR is compared with a separate manual data entry of the same image and any mismatch would escalate the image for an additional data entry pass and possibly an examination by officials of the image or the physical paper. Chris ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
Re: [LINK] AEC faces backlash over vote counting ???black box???
The key (as David says) is auditability of the process. The new system of counting is effectively fully electronic, but scrutineers can watch the data entry process of a clerk which will be compared with a successful OCR of the scan. The scrutineer can also request and be shown the physical paper at any time. I would hope that scrutineers do this often enough to make the margin of error for failure to detect a significant tampering with the recorded data low enough to give assurance to the results. The other audit capability is the (incomplete) counts of senate first preferences by group that was conducted manually in polling booths on election night. This data is available for statistical comparison with the booth-by-booth final vote data and that would also show up any significant favouritism in the data entry process. Finally, it's worth noting that the old senate counting system of a manual sort into 1-above-the-line groups and others, done in the divisional counting centres, is subject to a reasonably liklihood of manual errors. The voided WA senate election of 2013 showed that a significant number of above-the-line votes had been mis-sorted at this stage and incorrect counts were then entered. Some were also famously misplaced. The data entry process for below the line votes was more accurate. The new counting system will see all papers subject to dual data entry, with at least one human operator and two if the OCR doesn't deliver a high enough confidence result. A mismatch will see an additional data entry step for the paper. If the process has the integrity we hope for, the final data set is likely to be more accurate than the old system. Finally, it's worth noting that the changes to formality rules should mean that there are a lot fewer ballots with all the below-the-line boxes filled, which are the slowest to enter and the ones most prone to voter and data entry error. It may be that the overall data entry time won't be all that much longer than in the past, as the vast bulk of papers will have just the minimum 6 numbers above the line, with fewer using the below-the- line option, and those who do probably numbering fewer boxes. The data entry software identifies all the non-printed marks on the paper and presents them one-by-one to the clerk, so a 6 or 12 mark paper is pretty quick to enter as distinct from the former process of entering the contents of every one of the 150+ below-the-line boxes. Chris PS You won't hear any argument from me against release of the actual vote counting software's source code (and of course the actual entered vote data set as well). ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
Re: [LINK] RFI: Spam-registration of IP-addresses
Hi Roger, I'm not sure that your xamax.com.au SPF details are good. xamax.com.au: "v=spf1 *ip4:103.27.32.5* +include:retailspf.smtp.com ?all" retailspf.smtp.com: "v=spf1 ip4:192.40.160.0/19 ip4:74.91.80.0/20 ~all" but the sending address at syd.hostingplatform.net.au is 103.27.32.232. You could try changing the ip4:103.27.32.5 to ip4:103.27.32.0/24. You might also want to set up a DMARC record so that you can receive reports of messages that fail SPF/DKIM/ARC checks. Yahoo is one of the fussiest, but also seems to permit the most real spam... Chris On 21/11/2020 7:14 am, Roger Clarke wrote: > If anyone can point me to relevant sources to help me understand and > address the following problem, I'd be very appreciative! ___ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
