Photographs are a peculiar substance, in this world of pseudoscience. Made from a few photons, a bit of film, and a couple chemicals, photographs have the ability to dissolve all the frustration and irritation that have happened in times past. They distill and purify, leaving behind only the best intentions and widest smiles.
Looking at the photos that my partners in crime have posted (we went to Japan over spring break) whittles away the cold and blustery winds, the rush accomodations (entirely my fault), and relaxes all the furrowed eyebrows at the little annoyances and frustrations that invariably pepper time spent with people.
I'll have my own photos posted soon. I don't have many, because it was more convenient to have the others take the pictures, but I'll do my part in contributing still moments shared amongst friends.
Can't get enough stupid? Try politics.
The student government (ASUC) here at Berkeley is going to have their annual elections soon. Given how political I tend to be, this shouldn't even be on my radar. But as it so happens, I'm one of the people who are going to be taking care of getting their electronic voting system working, safe, secure, etc. etc. all the other things we want out of software but can't have.
Ignoring my position for a minute, I took a look at what sort of discussion they were having on this one blog about Berkeley stuff (http://calstuff.blogspot.com). There's this one entry on EAP voting and whatnot, and if you read the comments they argue back and forth about unrelated and nonsensical things.
This is a shining example of why I think any website where people can post comments at is doomed to be filled with idiocy and nonsense. People who post comments are stupid, ignorant, or both. Just look at slashdot. Let's move on.
And as a note, I don't care about the politics, so I'll focus on the technical aspect.
Since two years ago, the first time the ASUC decided to try doing electronic voting, they came to the OCF to ask for computers and people. Keep in mind the OCF is a group of volunteers, i.e. we get no money, i.e. we aren't paid, i.e. it doesn't matter if you try to "fire" us because nothing really changes, etc. The first time, the person who was in charge massively dropped the ball and everything started falling apart. He tried to blame it on the OCF, nobody bought it, end of story.
I wasn't around last year so I have no idea what happened there...but it was once again the OCF to the rescue.
This year it is once again being handed to the OCF to handle. And this isn't so bad. It almost seems like the ASUC expects us to handle things, though, and this is bad. Since the precedent of handling ASUC elections isn't what's bugging me tonight, I'll save it for later (and possibly for www.randalrants.com, a new website I'm setting up that will be filled with oodles and oodles of my bitching; not for the feint of heart).
So looking through the comments the senators and such are making, they make it sound like enabling online voting is as simple as:
1) Buying an expensive, thorough firewall
2) Open up the IP range so it's not just campus machines
...and then just let the votes roll in.
Let's take a moment to think about this. Does something about these two statements strike you as being off? If so, you are in the group of people which we in the business call Those With a Clue. If not, then you are in the group of people which we collectively call Lusers. Let's think collectively, and hopefully we'll be able to upgrade some Lusers to TWaC's.
First, let's consider what is involved in buying an expensive, thorough firewall. To answer this, let's look at what a firewall is. It's essentially a piece of software that blocks incoming or outgoing network traffic...and that's about it.
Assuming you have a server that's running the voting system, and you want people to be able to connect to it and vote, what's the most likely medium you'll choose to use? A webpage! And how do you block access to everything but a webpage? Block everything except for port 80 you say? Close! Try blocking everything except for 443. You probably want SSL-enabled HTTP so you can actually have semi-secure data transactions and have something remotely close to resembling privacy. So how expensive is it to make a firewall with this policy? Here's an informal one, written in a mix of what ipchains output looks like and somewhat-readable-English syntax:
INCOMING:
From a validated computer to port 443 ACCEPT
Otherwise, DROP
OUTGOING:
To all DROP
So basically, drop everything (i.e. ignore) except for connections to the server on port 443, and don't let the server connect to any outside machines (just in case). Given that ipchains is free (so is its big brother, iptables), the cost of this firewall is equal to 0 + the time it takes to figure out a policy for it (which was just posted, and hence...free). Even a starving student (e.g. me) can afford free.
Now let's turn our attention to opening up the IP range the server will actually allow to connect. If we do this, then we open up ourselves to a whole slew of Russian, Chinese, Libyan, Alaskan, Cambodian, and whatever-other-country hackers want to take a stab at fooling around with somebody's election (just for fun). Let's casually ignore for a second that the elections server was actually compromised and taken over by hackers 2 years ago, and pretend that this won't be a problem...except when we do this we realize we've stuck our heads so far up our asses that we've given ourselves a colon cancer. Good job.
This is the part where I've lost all my readers and nobody sees the note that I'm going to put here that says, despite all the cruft and crap that comes with dealing with the ASUC and its many broken ways (we've only scratched the surface), I'm still going to do my best to make the elections work right (from a technical perspective). Chances are, some jackass politicians are going to mess it all up and turn my work into an abomination...but hey that's what life's all about right? Right. Just look at our government today. Hoo-ah!