Category: Artificial Intelligence, Data Science & Society
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Sort the mail-in ballot envelopes, or don’t?
How mail-in ballot envelopes are handled by local election officials can make a huge difference in the cost of recounts and can also affect the security of elections against one form of voting fraud. Counties that count thousands or millions of mail-in (or dropbox) ballots can do it two ways: Sort-then-scan: Sort the ballot envelopes…
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Decoding China’s Ambitious Generative AI Regulations
By Sihao Huang and Justin Curl On April 11th, 2023, China’s top internet regulator proposed new rules for generative AI. The draft builds on previous regulations on deep synthesis technology, which contained detailed provisions on user identity registration, the creation of a database of undesirable inputs, and even the generation of “special objects and scenes”…
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Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?
Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things. One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.” Based in part on this kind of…
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Unrecoverable Election Screwup in Williamson County TX
In the November 2020 election in Williamson County, Texas, flawed e-pollbook software resulted in voters inadvertently voting for candidates and questions not from their own districts but from others in the same county. These voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote for candidates they were entitled to vote for—and their votes were wrongly counted…
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Next Steps for Mercer County Following Voting-Machine Failure
Hand-marked optical-scan paper ballots are the most secure form of voting: with any other method, if the computerized voting machines are hacked, there’s no trustworthy paper trail from which we can determine the true outcome of the election, based on the choices that voters actually indicated. Even those voting methods that appear to have a…
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Toward Trustworthy Machine Learning: An Example in Defending against Adversarial Patch Attacks (2)
By Chong Xiang and Prateek Mittal In our previous post, we discussed adversarial patch attacks and presented our first defense algorithm PatchGuard. The PatchGuard framework (small receptive field + secure aggregation) has become the most popular defense strategy over the past year, subsuming a long list of defense instances (Clipped BagNet, De-randomized Smoothing, BagCert, Randomized…
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Switzerland’s E-voting: The Threat Model
Part 5 of a 5-part series starting here Switzerland commissioned independent expert reviews of the E-voting system built by Swiss Post. One of those experts concluded, “as imperfect as the current system might be when judged against a nonexistent ideal, the current system generally appears to achieve its stated goals, under the corresponding assumptions…
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What the Assessments Say About the Swiss E-voting System
(Part 4 of a 5-part series starting here) In 2021 the Swiss government commissioned several in-depth technical studies of the Swiss Post E-voting system, by independent experts from academia and private consulting firms. They sought to assess, does the protocol as documented guarantee the security called for by Swiss law (the “ordinance on electronic voting”,…
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How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities
(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system. Swiss Post is the “vendor” developing the system, the Swiss cantons are the “customer” deploying it in their elections, and the Swiss Parliament and Federal Chancellery are the “regulators,” …
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How NOT to Assess an E-voting System
by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long history of being peaceful, transparent and well run. So it may surprise you to learn that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is…