I found it clever and funny too.

Tip to moderators: funny is already both interesting and insightful. That's how humor works.

Right. The video didn't explain how this cryptography works. I'm no expert in this area, but I imagine this might work something like this.

Suppose one can devise a crypto scheme in which you need all of the ballots to compute the sum of the choices cast (uncast ballots get a special null value). So to boil it down to the simplest possible example, if there are only 2 choices a and b, and only 2 ballots cast, then sum routine allows us to compute which of the following 3 outcomes occurred: (2, 0), (1, 1), or (0, 2). For the middle outcome (1, 1), we cannot tell which ballot cast which vote..

I can see holes in the strategy I describe, but I bet these cryptographers have devised something cleverer that stands up to the kinds of attack discussed here.

That would be a fundamental flaw, but I doubt it's like you describe it. I don't think you'd be able count the individual ballots yourself: you'd only be able to verify that the declared aggregate count is indeed correct.

A quick look at the map shows a language bias of Farsi in the population. Iranians are some of the most prolific producers of web content in that region of the world. And virtually all of that is in Farsi. I don't know the details of how routing algorithms work, but if a majority of users in these regions browse Iranian web sites wouldn't that skew the routing tables towards routers in Iran?

Your summary seems quite accurate. Still, I have a sneaky suspicion some well-cultivated humor was lost in translation. FTFT:

I was rolling on the floor for all the wrong reasons..

Googled around for more information on this Caffeine architecture. The best I could come up was a paper on BigTable, purported to be the basis of Caffeine in news articles.

Apparently this same chutzpah caused the story to break in the first place. FTA:

Troll? Oh, common. An attempt at humor, even a sardonic one, does not make a troll.

Looking over how the moralizing comments in this discussion have been moderated up, it seems Tocqueville's observation in Democracy In America sadly rings as true today as when he first penned them.

By such mod standards, I guess, that quotation too is a troll.

I think the question should be "Why doesn't everyone set their Facebook settings as friends-only?"

The problem according to this article is that if your friend makes their friends list public while you have kept yours private, your friendship is still public. And as you friend more and more friends, the odds that you have such a friend (one who spills the beans) increases.

-- Related: On Facebook Friends' Privacy Settings Matter Much

Similar thoughts here. And we're clearly not alone. Here's how a friend puts it in his blog:

You don't need the government in order to have a monopoly or oligopoly that screws its customers. At the risk of stating the obvious, the government's role is often to lay down the rules of fair play: take our anti-trust laws, for example.

--
My first rule: be suspicious of hard and fast rules.

I don't understand. What would that fix? Net neutrality? Seems to me that would break net neutrality.