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Dastardly Destructive And Down Right Hateful

userexec

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what is stopping them from doing to same thing over on start engine or the next general election.
Their morality is definitely not up to spec, but they can come in handy from time to time. Watching how they manipulate counts when the stakes are lower allows the programmers to protect against attacks they wouldn't have considered for when those stakes go up. Voting machines definitely have had this issue. Some of the exploits demonstrated for manipulating them are so simple it just makes you shake your head. It's always better to have script kiddies hit it repeatedly and then analyze what went wrong than to wait until the result is really important and end up giving a professional hacker a really easy day.

Elio will probably be using reCaptchas, IP/UA banning, combination geolocation/timestamp, or any of a range of other strategies on any open voting from here on out.

I'd be interested to see what sorts of protections Reg. A+ campaign hosts like StartEngine could employ within the limitations imposed by the regulation, because they're going to need them. Elio will probably be okay--the regulations are just too new and it isn't a controversial enough campaign to attract the kind of attention that would really pull out all the flaws of how the technology and legislation are currently meshing. But if my little tracker (that I didn't think would cause any issues considering it was all public data being displayed on their website if you took the time to write it down and check it against your watch) exposed an area that hadn't been ironed out yet, I'm willing to bet there are a lot more.

I really doubt we'll see them in any meaningful way by July 31st, but we'll probably see them within the next year or two.
 

Ekh

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Lilly May, I'm sure you're right that in THIS instance, the hackers were as you put it Grown Up Bullies, though how actually grown-up they are is a matter of question. Let's face it, the color of a car prototype means something to us, but doesn't mean much in the great scheme of things. But if they're messing with the fund-raising stuff by faking large dollar amounts or even pretending to be 100 people expressing interest, now that's serious because it directly affects the ability of Elio Motors to plan and conduct their business. Now you have something that could easily be called interfering with financial markets -- and THAT is criminal, even if hacking per se is not.

I do believe in general that the tidal wave of hacking, some of which is sponsored by our own government, some by others, and some by plain old criminals threatens our entire way of life. Identity theft has ruined the lives of millions. Hacking businesses and government agencies is hard police, but it's time we made an all-out effort at the national level to find and punish hackers of all kinds. New laws -- and new, drastic punishments are going to be needed in the immediate future. Organized hacking, individual hadking -- doesn't matter -- it's all vile, and must be curtailed.
 

Ekh

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Their morality is definitely not up to spec, but they can come in handy from time to time. Watching how they manipulate counts when the stakes are lower allows the programmers to protect against attacks they wouldn't have considered for when those stakes go up. Voting machines definitely have had this issue. Some of the exploits demonstrated for manipulating them are so simple it just makes you shake your head. It's always better to have script kiddies hit it repeatedly and then analyze what went wrong than to wait until the result is really important and end up giving a professional hacker a really easy day.

Elio will probably be using reCaptchas, IP/UA banning, combination geolocation/timestamp, or any of a range of other strategies on any open voting from here on out.

I'd be interested to see what sorts of protections Reg. A+ campaign hosts like StartEngine could employ within the limitations imposed by the regulation, because they're going to need them. Elio will probably be okay--the regulations are just too new and it isn't a controversial enough campaign to attract the kind of attention that would really pull out all the flaws of how the technology and legislation are currently meshing. But if my little tracker (that I didn't think would cause any issues considering it was all public data being displayed on their website if you took the time to write it down and check it against your watch) exposed an area that hadn't been ironed out yet, I'm willing to bet there are a lot more.

I really doubt we'll see them in any meaningful way by July 31st, but we'll probably see them within the next year or two.
Could you offer your services, like ASAP? They're tight for money (I've volunteered some of my services), but maybe for this they could pay. I'm certain they don't have in-house expertise to deal with this -- and you showed by the "fluency" of your creating the A+ interest tracker.
 

userexec

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it's time we made an all-out effort at the national level to find and punish hackers of all kinds. New laws -- and new, drastic punishments are going to be needed in the immediate future. Organized hacking, individual hadking -- doesn't matter
I'd agree to some extent, but we'd have to be very careful. Even with the laws as they are, ethical hackers often face consequences for discovering flaws in systems and alerting the companies to those flaws without ever exploiting them. It's one of the reasons voting machines were so incredibly easy to hack: Nobody was allowed to hack them, so you ended up with the proverbial criminals in gun-free zones situation. That and whenever our government tries to legislate on technological issues, it's almost always a complete trainwreck. It's a really nasty catch-22. Ban hacking outright and the hackers' jobs get ridiculously easy over time. Don't ban it at all and the hackers' jobs are really hard, but you end up with tons of them at all levels.
 
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