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Comment Re:Honestly (Score 1) 157

> What options do you have to protect your self from Van eck phreaking?

One option to consider seriously is: paper ballot inserted, in a voting booth protected by opaque curtain, into an opaque paper envelope, which is then publicly dropped into a transparent urn, which is left under public view during the voting, and publicly shaked before the counting process.

That's how 90% of the votes are cast in France for decades [the "transparent" bit was added some 45 years ago]. Not only is it secure against Van Eck phreaking before its invention, it has great resilience against many kinds of fraud, and most voters are able to understand and check the process.

You still have to guard against quite a few things, including
* unsuitably opaque envelopes;
* bulletins printed on paper of different color/size/material [even if the envelope is opaque, it is usually not sealed, and sometime some portion of the bulletin (hopefully the back side, if the bulletin is folded) may be glanced at thru the opening; also the weight/stiffness of the bulletin may be revealing]
* hidden cameras in the voting booth; including those built into cellphones held by the voter [because the voter could be trying to prove what (s)he voted [in order to sell her/his vote or avoid retaliation if s/he did not vote as instructed].

Actually, in some locations much closer to you than half the circumference of planet earth, it may happen that voters are threatened to be beaten/killed is they do not vote as instructed; and maybe, on election day, a few of those who voted could be beaten publicly (often: regardless of what they actually voted, or based on their perceived opinion), in order to make the threat credible to those who did not vote yet. In these circumstances, the voters must be able to really trust the secrecy of their vote.

François Grieu

Comment Result is NOT statistically significant (Score 2, Insightful) 317

According to numerous online sources, raw numbers are:
51 out of 8187 found infected in the vaccinated group;
74 out of 8198 found infected in the control group.

The most basic course of statistics tells how to proceed from here: test if the null hypothesis (vaccine has no effect) remains plausible despite this evidence. Conditions are ideal for the chi-squared test.
We get Observed values 51, 74, 8147, 8123; Expected values 62.504, 62.496, 8135.5, 8134.5; then sum((O-E)^2/E) = 4.267, with two degrees of freedom.
Conclusion: the null hypohesis is rejected with only 88% confidence level.

This is not enough to confortably say that the vaccine has any benefit. Odds of the contrary are about 1/17.

This is much less reason to trust that the vaccine reduce infection rate by 31.1%, as reported in some press articles. Odds are 1/2 that it is less efficient than this.

    Francois Grieu

Supercomputing

Submission + - The largest (distributed) supercomputer ...

RockDoctor writes: Peter Gutmann at Auckland, New Zealand has made some estimates about what is probably the world's largest (distributed) supercomputer. Details are somewhat shady, not because of the secrecy habits of the spooks, or a government's desire to surveil it's citizens. No, the people who've built this (distributed) supercomputer are shadowy because they're simply criminals. The continuing Storm Worm botnet now seems to contain between 1 and 10 million computers, and with a broad-brush estimate of the likely machines involved he comes up with a description of a system that dwarfs all the largest publicly-described supercomputers of the world. I have my suspicions that the estimated "average" computer specification considered is somewhat over-the-top (I'd have to weld together at least two of the machines in my flat to even approach this specification, and I'd have to weld together at least 4 of the best video card in the house), but with an 8-fold difference in processor count between StormWorm and BlueGene/L , there's a lot of room for Gutmann to be both correct and on the low side in his estimates.
With a system like this, is it credible that they (the criminals running this system) are planning for example, to try breaking SSL-encrypted communications in real time?

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