People need to stop giving wackos a platform. Seriously.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
227 points (93.5% liked)
Technology
60078 readers
4458 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The only platform I support Lindell appearing on is Kimmel's. Kimmel spent the whole time dunking on him while he sat there and laughed like they were buds
I mean it is kinda funny
Oh Manic Mike... Tell me your don't understand technology without explicitly telling me you don't understand technology.
Yep, his plans will be foiled by a dasterdly Ethernet cable.
“I dont understand things. this is what we should do!”
This isn't some sort of technical misunderstanding. This is pure horseshit and Lindell knows it too. Republicans know how stupid their base is, and that they don't have the capacity to question brazen nonsense like this.
“Stop election fraud”. How about prove there’s fraud first?
Narrator: there isn’t.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who helped finance Donald Trump's baseless election protests, "demonstrated" the technology at an event he hosted in Missouri this week (see video).
Lindell said the gadget, which he calls a "WMD" for "Wireless Monitoring Device," detects nearby Wi-Fi networks and MAC addresses.
A Daily Beast article said Lindell's plan might violate Louisiana state laws on criminal trespassing and the use of unmanned aircraft to conduct surveillance.
It's not clear why a router connecting to the Internet would be evidence of election fraud, but Lindell provided that as an example multiple times.
The WMD will put that to the test by detecting and reporting in real time Wi-Fi connections in county and state election offices.
DePerno is facing criminal charges for an alleged attempt to illegally access and tamper with voting machines.
The original article contains 666 words, the summary contains 136 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
If I've learned anything about system intended to be secure, it's that you want as many hastily-assembled wireless-enabled devices loitering around them and definitely won't just be an excuse to try and bust in through whichever vulnerabilities the Russian GRU and Chinese MSS have discovered or engineered. Not saying this significantly increases the attack surface over what may already be exposed but no need to add these devices into the mix.
⛧
The original article contains 666 words...
Satanic plot detected.
Lindell said the gadget, which he calls a "WMD"
🤨
The WMD will put that to the test by detecting and reporting in real time Wi-Fi connections in county and state election offices
Is this supposed to see which devices are connecting to the wifi, or the WiFi networks themselves?
It seems to say that it would report any wifi devices MAC address, which would include the devices connecting to the network and the routers providing the network.
But you'll have no idea what they are. They could be anything from a router, to a smart light bulb, to a thermostat, to a security camera, to a cell phone, etc.
I'm sure plenty of polling places will "light up the alarm" - what polling place doesn't have some wifi network for SOMETHING? And some people will have cellphones trying to connect to that network etc.
I don't know specifics about voting machines, but from a security perspective, their network connections should 100% all be hard wired. Wireless just adds more security holes. They should be hard wired and wifi sniffers will never touch that.
So either you get no alarm and it could still be hardwired to the internet, or the alarm goes off and you don't know if it's the voting machine or Billy Joe's iPhone trying to connect to the voting centers open wifi network.
The whole thing is entirely pointless.
It's just dumb people playing on the fears of other dumb people.
Imagine you had no idea what an IP/MAC address or SSID was.
Then imagine Fox News start reporting that Mr Pillow's WMDs have found countless instances of voter fraud, show a big list of MAC addresses.
You'll easily have a large number of people convinced they've seen indisputable proof of voter fraud all over the country
Can we please all assemble as close as possible to these things and use unencrypted connections to download very very gay porn?
This is such a weird timeline we’re in
Ok, bear with me on this one: What if… what if the voting machines use Ethernet connections and not Wifi? 🤯😱
Wifi sniffers = Russian malware Trojan horses to hack voting machines / tallying computers.
That way republicans will have the irrefutable proof that those machines were hacked (while conveniently leaving out that republicans hacked it).
Here's a fucking simple solution: use paper vote. It's difficult to fraud at scale.
It's not about the voting method. These people want to invalidate votes they don't like. Arizona Republicans went on a wild goose chase of looking for bamboo fibers in printed ballots which would "prove" they were printed in China.
From what I know about American politics I can believe their motive is to invalidate votes they don't like instead of actually preventing election fraud.
My suggestion of paper voting is a tongue-in-cheek recommendation for them to prevent election fraud because it would prevent them from being the ones to do it (at scale).
Even simpler solution: don't take claims of voter fraud seriously when it's the mypillow guy.
2020 election had 160 million votes. There were 2 cases of fraud for Trump. How about you prove the existing system is fraudulent before suggesting a change?
My understanding is America uses voting machines, which by their very nature is easy to attack without being tracked. How were the 2 cases of fraud detected and did they involve a voting machine?
This will vary by state but most states use paper ballots which are counted by voting machine, but the ballots themselves are kept as a backup. This is how recounts happen in very close elections, but also notable that recounts are mostly a roll of the dice to see if enough human errors stack up in the right direction to change the outcome in favor of the otherwise losing candidate
the ballots themselves are kept as a backup Ideally they are transported and kept under watch by many different parties with a stake in the result. Is the backup watched until it's deemed no longer needed?
recounts are mostly a roll of the dice to see if enough human errors stack up All the different parties should be watching out for errors, a human error should be difficult to happen when many humans wanting their party's votes to be counted :s
Ideally they are transported and kept under watch by many different parties with a stake in the result. Is the backup watched until it’s deemed no longer needed?
My understanding based on what I remember hearing a family member who works the polls explain is that they are locked up, then transported by the manager of that poll to presumably the county clerk who then takes possession of them and again they are kept under lock and key. These paper ballots also have to match up with a separate ledger of voters and signatures from that polling place, so even if someone added or subtracted ballots in between it would be identified. They would have to replace the ballot, which I believe is also numbered so they'd have to also forge an identical ballot of the correct ballot number to replace it with.
All the different parties should be watching out for errors, a human error should be difficult to happen
My understanding of the process is they'll have two teams of people repeating eachother's work on sets of 50 ballots, verifying the ballot matches the ledger tallying the votes then check if their counts match for every batch of 50, if the two teams counts do not match they recount the batch of 50 until the two teams counts match. So miscounting and not catching it is difficult, but if you've got 200,000 ballots and you assume an error rate of 1/10000 that's potentially 200 votes that might flip due to pure human error. It's a roll of the dice for the candidate, but if you lost a key county by 75 votes then you've got decent odds of the recount changing the outcome of that county election
Thanks for your explanation. A counting machine is still concerning but I'm a little less concerned now.
I mean there hasn't been any at scale fraud of electronic machines. All of the Ambulatory Tupee's claims have been shown to be false.
How do you determine that? Voting result aligning with 3rd party polling?
I don't know about those claims nor the specifics of the machines used in America. I fundamentally believe you can't have trustworthy electronic voting due to the undetectable weak-points at every stage. Why Electronic Voting Is a BAD Idea - Computerphile
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Maybe stick to pillows, Mike.
He's not even consistently good at that. I got one as a gift and it was really uncomfortable.
Yeah, that totally seems like something you should use drones for. WTF lol
So the URL in the video is https://electioncrimebureau.net/
I have had a dig around some of Mike's 'projects', Frank* etc. They all look to have one thing in common ( rather 2, but first thing first), they seem to be there to drive money into Mr pillow's pockets and promote his agenda - does he have plans to run for office?
Secondly - I feel like my brain decreased in size and got smoother while reading some of the shit posted as 'News' on FrankSpeech
Surprised he doesn't want to strap pillows to them
Well, what if I told you there was a device that's been made for the first time in history that can tell you that that machine was online?
I'd say you were a time traveler from the 70s?
This is why all our tech legislation sucks, its made by these people who don't even understand how the internet works.
This will be fun. My voting place is close to an airport and in a NFZ.
sounds like the police dog thing. you get the dog to bark for any reason and you're allowed screw people over
How about you stop using machines to cast your votes? No wifi necessary for pen & paper ballots.
Bush vs Gore came down to "hanging chads" on paper ballots, paper ballots are just as insecure if not more than voting machines where there is no ambiguity on whether someone is voting for a particular candidate.