Just As The Postal Service Is Being Dismantled To Prevent The Handling Of Mail In Ballots, It Tries To Patent Blockchain Voting By Mail

from the i...-uh...-what? dept

We are living in truly dystopian times. As you may have heard, this week there have been a bunch of stories regarding the somewhat systematic dismantling of US Postal Service operations in what appears to be a coordinated effort by this administration to foil the process of sending and collecting mail-in ballots. But, apparently, rather than ensuring its own ability to handle mail-in ballots for this election, the US Postal service is trying to... patent blockchain-based voting?

As you almost certainly know, President Trump has been -- without any factual basis at all -- decrying mail-in ballots, despite the fact that they have been proven safe and effective. As we're in the middle of a pandemic -- made significantly worse by this administration's own incompetence -- whose main mode of transmission is gathering indoors, the need for more mail-in ballots is obvious to anyone who cares about a functioning democracy. Instead, the President has apparently focused on making it impossible. While that seemed like a conspiracy theory to many, he admitted he was holding up funding for exactly that reason:

"They want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent, that's election money basically. They want three and a half billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots," Trump said, repeating his false claims that mail-in voting would be "fraudulent."

"But if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because you they're not equipped to have it," Trump added.

Except, again, there is no evidence to support the claims of mail-in ballot fraud. Indeed, Trump and the first lady themselves have requested mail-in ballots in Florida (where he does not reside) and when questioned as to why it was okay for their to be mail-in ballots there, has said it works in Florida because there's a Republican governor.

So Florida has got a great Republican governor, and it had a great Republican governor. Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, two great governors. And over a long period of time, they’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. Florida is different from other states.

He's also supported mail-in ballots among his supporters in North Carolina. Of course, it's notable that North Carolina is basically the one place where there was some evidence of mail-ballot fraud... conducted by Republican operatives.

At the same time, however, beyond just blocking funding for the USPS, other efforts have been made to harm the ability to handle mail-in ballots. The Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who was only just appointed in May, fired a bunch of top USPS execs in a "Friday Night Massacre" a week ago. And this week, it seems like there's been a new story every hour or so. All over the country, the USPS started removing and dismantling expensive postal sorting machines for now clear reason.

There have also been reports in places like Montana and Oregon that the familiar blue postal boxes were being removed for unclear reasons.

To drive all of this home, the USPS has directly warned 46 states (and Washington DC) that it may have delays in handling mail-in ballots.

But have no fear (or, really, have lots and lots of fear), because in the midst of all of this, a USPS patent application for blockchain-based mail-in ballots has been released. Applied for back in February, but just now revealed, the patent application first noticed by Jamie Love is for:

A voting system that can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain.

Of course, as we've highlighted in the past, while some people keep pushing for blockchain-based voting it solves none of the problems of actual online voting, and leverages none of the benefits of the blockchain. Indeed, basically every blockchain-based voting system to date has been a dumpster fire of security concerns and, given everything else discussed above, you can bet the same would be true for any USPS-based blockchain voting system.

Even so, the timing of this release of this patent, in the midst of everything else going on with the USPS and efforts to suppress mail-in ballots (well, at least from those who don't support the President) is the kind of coincidental timing that even the worst Hollywood writers would reject as just too on the nose. Alas...

Filed Under: blockchain, democracy, donald trump, e-voting, elections, louis dejoy, mail-in ballots, patents, usps, voting

Cybersecurity Firm Hired By Voatz To Audit Its System Finds Voatz Is Full Of Vulnerabilities

from the bringing-new-attack-vectors-to-previously-excluded-voters dept

Mobile voting app Voatz is still a mess. Two years ago, West Virginia decided to give the app a spin to allow some voters to vote from home during the midterm elections. Nobody in the security world thought this was a good idea. The only people who did feel this was a safe, secure way to collect votes were state legislators and Voatz itself. Some early poking and prodding by security researchers immediately found problems with Voatz's handling of votes, including out-of-date SSH and unproven facial recognition tech that was supposed to verify voters by matching their selfies to their government IDs.

Two-and-a-half years later, not much has improved. Voatz is still courting state governments, trying to talk them into using its app to allow the housebound and those overseas to vote in their elections. An MIT study of the software found multiple issues, including flaws that would allow attackers to intercept votes -- and alter or trash them -- without anyone on either end realizing they'd been hacked.

Voatz responded badly, insulting the researchers and claiming its server-side software would miraculously prevent the described attack from happening. When the researchers pointed out Voatz was wrong about its own software, it published a blog post attacking the researchers as "publicity hounds" seeking to disrupt the election process.

Another month has passed and it's more bad news for Voatz. Voatz and Tusk Philanthropies hired cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits to perform a security audit of its software. Guess what? It's still a mess.

Our security review resulted in seventy-nine (79) findings: forty-eight (48) technical and thirty-one (31) in the threat model. A third of the findings are high severity, another third medium severity, and the remainder a combination of low, undetermined, and informational severity.

More specifically, it's pretty much everything about the entire system:

Voatz’s code, both in the backend and mobile clients, is written intelligibly and with a clear understanding of software engineering principles. The code is free of almost all the common security foibles like cryptographically insecure random number generation, HTTP GET information leakage, and improper web request sanitization. However, it is clear that the Voatz codebase is the product of years of fast-paced development. It lacks test coverage and documentation. Logical checks for specific elections are hard-coded into both the backend and clients. Infrastructure is provisioned manually, without the aid of infrastructure-as-code tools. The code contains vestigial features that are slated to be deleted but have not yet been (TOB-VOATZ-009). Validation and cryptographic code are duplicated and reimplemented across the codebase, often erroneously (TOB-VOATZ-014). Mobile clients neglect to use recent security features of Android and iOS (TOB-VOATZ-034 and TOB-VOATZ-042). Sensitive API credentials are stored in the git repositories (TOB-VOATZ-001). Many of its cryptographic protocols are nonstandard (TOB-VOATZ-012).

This is software that's been used by governments to collect more than 80,000 votes in more than 50 elections. This is the software Sen. Ron Wyden has called "snake oil." When Voatz actually attempts to fix something, it sometimes makes it worse. From Motherboard's report on the Trail of Bits audit:

In at least one instance, a fix that Voatz put in place to address a vulnerability resulted in a new bug. In this instance, Trail of Bits initially identified an issue where an attacker with knowledge of the target's phone number could hijack the target's Voatz account during re-registration process, locking the target out of the account and giving the attacker access. Voatz fixed this issue, but the fix it put in place introduced a new issue that "can allow an attacker to bypass SMS verification during pre- and re-registration." Voatz said this issue was fixed, but Trail of Bits could not independently confirm because it did not have access to the updated, supposedly fixed code.

Voatz continues to seek shelter in the comforting embrace of denial, even when faced with findings from researchers it hired to audit its software. The company's CEO, Nimit Sawheny, told Motherboard that while he didn't dispute any of the technical details, Voatz is still safe to use because the deficiencies highlighted were "theoretical" and that he had not seen any proof yet that Voatz has been hacked.

Even theoretical holes can do real damage, once attackers figure out how to exploit the flaw. Just because Voatz hasn't been hacked yet doesn't mean it won't be. And it won't get more hack-proof if the company continues to downplay researchers' findings or -- in the case of the MIT study -- publicly attack people who are doing everything they can to ensure elections aren't disrupted (or hijacked) by malicious parties.

Worse, even as Trail of Bits was confirming the findings of the MIT report, the company's CEO continued to claim MIT's findings were mere "opinion" and that this report was filled with errors. This led to the following statement from the MIT team:

"It is profoundly troubling to hear that Voatz was aware that the vulnerabilities found in our research were still active at the same time they were misrepresenting and downplaying our findings to the Department of Homeland Security, state elections officials, and the public," the authors of the MIT report told Motherboard in a statement.

Bringing voting options to people who previously had no choice but to sit out elections is important. But that doesn't mean the American public should be forced to settle for half-assed solutions just because something better isn't available at the moment. No parent wants to hear their child is ugly and full of security flaws, but Voatz's insistence on attacking researchers and their findings does not make the company seem any more trustworthy or capable of providing a secure mobile voting option.

Filed Under: blockchain, cybersecurity, electronic voting, mobile voting, security
Companies: voatz

Surprise! MIT Study Claims Voatz E-Voting Technology Is A Security Dumpster Fire

from the we've-kinda-been-over-this dept

You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a single respected cybersecurity expert that thinks voting via smartphone is a good idea. There's just too many potential attack vectors as your voting data floats from your personal device, across the internet, and into the final tally repository. Despite this there's an endless chorus of political leaders, cities, and states who continue to insist they know better. From West Virginia to Washington State, the quest for great inclusivity in voting access often results in people ignoring these warnings in the belief that they're helping.

The West Virginia effort has been handed over to internet voting vendor Voatz, whose smartphone voting system had already been criticized for being risky and insecure. Last November, Senator Ron Wyden wrote to the Pentagon to raise concerns about Voatz’s security and to ask for a full audit of the app.

Criticism of the company grew much louder this week after MIT researchers released a paper (pdf) showing how Voatz's technology has some fairly basic problems that would let an attacker intercept votes as they’re transmitted from mobile phones to the voting company’s server -- without anybody being the wiser:

"We find that Voatz has vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user’s vote, including a sidechannel attack in which a completely passive network adversary can potentially recover a user’s secret ballot. We additionally find that Voatz has a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality. Our findings serve as a concrete illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting, and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections."

While Voatz has repeatedly complained that its blockchain technology should have protected this from happening, the researchers found said implementation wasn't actually implemented in the way the company claimed, providing no additional security protection to the vote transmissions. On top of those issues, computer science professor Alex Halderman found other issues with the certificate pinning and servers Voatz implemented:

The New York Times, which first reported the research, notes that a copy of the findings had already been submitted to the Department of Homeland Security and the various election officials who've signed off on the platform. Like many e-voting companies, Voatz claims transparency isn't really necessary because it utilizes an array of anonymous experts to audit the company's systems. But the findings of those audits have yet to be made public, even to the officials using the systems. See the problem yet?

For its part, Voatz's response has been to double down on its previous positions while insulting the researchers that disclosed the problem, insisting that server-side protections would thwart the theoretical attack (cybersecurity experts were quick to disagree). The company issued a blog post in which it accused the researchers (MIT's Michael Specter, James Koppel and Daniel Weitzner) of being publicity hounds and attempting to "deliberately disrupt the election process":

"It is clear that from the theoretical nature of the researchers’ approach, the lack of practical evidence backing their claims, their deliberate attempt to remain anonymous prior to publication, and their priority being to find media attention, that the researchers’ true aim is to deliberately disrupt the election process, to sow doubt in the security of our election infrastructure, and to spread fear and confusion."

When every single respected infosec researcher and journalist is telling you e-voting can't be adequately secured and your solution to that problem is flawed and will only make that problem worse, insulting and ignoring researchers isn't a great look. Compounded by the GOP's refusal to pass any election security bills of note, and you can start to see how we're just begging for problems on what could potentially someday be a catastrophic scale.

Filed Under: blockchain, e-voting, mobile voting, research, security
Companies: voatz

Blockchain Voting: Solves None Of The Actual Problems Of Online Voting; Leverages None Of The Benefits Of Blockchain

from the oh-come-on-now dept

Just recently we wrote about why blockchain-based DRM was a terrible idea, and it could be summed up by the simple fact that a blockchain solves none of the "problems" of DRM today, and leverages none of the actual benefits of a blockchain. And... now I feel like writing basically the same exact post around blockchain voting. Like blockchain DRM, blockchain voting is one of those ideas that gets tossed around a lot. For decades, lots of people who actually understand computer security have explained why online voting is a horrifically bad idea in that it involves effectively unsolvable problems. It's not that it's a "hard" problem, it means that online voting is effectively impossible without massive changes to almost everything we do in ways that we can't really comprehend right now. There are some serious researchers who are thinking about this, but to date, there is nothing even remotely close to to being acceptable, and there may never be.

And yet, the "simplest" way that some people understand the risks of online voting is basically "it would be bad if someone could change your vote and no one would know." That's an easy to understand point to make, but the problems with online voting go way, way beyond that. Do a simple Google search on why online voting is a terrible idea and you'll get dozens of on-point results, but if you want a nice, simple explanation of just the first pass of potential risks with online voting, check out this video from a couple years ago by Princeton professor Andrew Appel, who has been studying voting security for many, many years:

It's 21 minutes, and if you're unsure of why internet voting is dangerous or think there's a simple solution, I'd urge you to watch it. But for those who don't, I'll just toss up one single slide from the presentation, which is not even remotely comprehensive in the list of potential problems with online voting:

That doesn't even get at a number of other potential issues (some of which are discussed in the video). And yet -- as with blockchain-for-DRM -- there's always someone who thinks that the only real problem is the double spend problem. Enter Alex Tapscott and the NY Times. Alex Tapscott is the son of Don Tapscott, who has written a number of fairly influential books related to technology and innovation, including "Growing up Digital" and "Wikinomics." In 2016, he teamed up with his son, Alex, and wrote a book called "The Blockchain Revolution," which is a fun read (they sent me a copy), if a bit overly excited in its analysis of potential implementations of the blockchain. As I've said in the past, I'm a believer that blockchain/tokens can completely revolutionize a few areas of the internet, but people have yet to really figure out which areas can take advantage of what is unique about the blockchain (beyond highly volatile currencies).

My favorite review of the book on its Amazon page includes this lovely sentence: "After the opening chapter, it turns into a rambling acid trip of delusional fantasies about exactly how blockchain will inevitably fix all the things wrong with society and the world."

Anyway, along comes Alex Tapscott and on election day, the NY Times gave him precious space to spew utter nonsense about how it's time for online voting... via the blockchain.

The key weakness of early online voting systems was the inability to solve what cryptographers called the “double spend problem.” When we send a file on the internet, we’re actually sending a copy of that file; the original remains in our possession. This is acceptable for sharing information but unacceptable for recording votes in elections. The possibility that individuals could cast their ballots multiple times for a candidate made these systems useless — just as vulnerable as paper ballot systems. Points of failure included susceptibility to hackers, coding bugs, and human error. With enough resources, any rogue could “stuff” a digital ballot box with illegitimate votes.

Except... that's not the key weakness in early online voting systems. It is one problem, but kinda far down the list. Look at that still from Appel's video above. Double spending isn't even there, really. Yet, Tapscott's piece acts as if it's the biggest problem, and easily solved with blockchain.

Since the NY Times published that article, plenty of folks with actual computer security expertise have stepped up to debunk it. Ben Adida, the Executive Director of a new organization called Voting Works, attempting to build secure, open source voting machines, actually debunked it a year ago (that's how good he is):

In a typical election setting with secret ballots, we need:

1. enforced secrecy: a way for each voter to cast a ballot secretly and no way to prove how they voted (lest they be unduly influenced)
2. individual verifiability: a way for each voter to gain confidence that their own vote was correctly recorded and counted.
3. global verifiability: a way for everyone to gain confidence that all votes were correctly counted and that only eligible voters cast a ballot.

Let’s say we have a Blockchain-style distributed database. How far does that get us to meeting these needs?

A distributed database of all cast votes, where everyone sees the same state of the world, would certainly be useful for (3) global verifiability and to some degree for (2) personal verifiability. That said, it won’t get us all the way there on those, and it won’t get us anywhere on (1) enforced secrecy.

Specifically, to combine personal verifiability with enforced secrecy, we need some mechanism that gives each voter enough confidence that their vote made it all the way to the tally, but not so much that they can sell their vote to a buyer/coercer. A public ledger of plain votes is a terrible idea, since that makes vote selling trivial. A public ledger of vote tracking numbers of sorts is better for privacy, though it doesn’t really provide actual verifiability that the contents of the ballot weren’t tampered with. Clearly, we need something more, and that something simply isn’t provided by a distributed ledger.

In a typical election setting with secret ballots, we need:

1. enforced secrecy: a way for each voter to cast a ballot secretly and no way to prove how they voted (lest they be unduly influenced)
2. individual verifiability: a way for each voter to gain confidence that their own vote was correctly recorded and counted.
3. global verifiability: a way for everyone to gain confidence that all votes were correctly counted and that only eligible voters cast a ballot.

Let’s say we have a Blockchain-style distributed database. How far does that get us to meeting these needs?

A distributed database of all cast votes, where everyone sees the same state of the world, would certainly be useful for (3) global verifiability and to some degree for (2) personal verifiability. That said, it won’t get us all the way there on those, and it won’t get us anywhere on (1) enforced secrecy.

Specifically, to combine personal verifiability with enforced secrecy, we need some mechanism that gives each voter enough confidence that their vote made it all the way to the tally, but not so much that they can sell their vote to a buyer/coercer. A public ledger of plain votes is a terrible idea, since that makes vote selling trivial. A public ledger of vote tracking numbers of sorts is better for privacy, though it doesn’t really provide actual verifiability that the contents of the ballot weren’t tampered with. Clearly, we need something more, and that something simply isn’t provided by a distributed ledger.

That's only part of Adida's thorough takedown of the concept.

Tim Lee at Ars Technica highlighted another batch of problems:

Tapscott focuses on the idea that blockchain technology would allow people to vote anonymously while still being able to verify that their vote was included in the final total. Even assuming this is mathematically possible—and I think it probably is—this idea ignores the many, many ways that foreign governments could compromise an online vote without breaking the core cryptographic algorithms.

For example, foreign governments could hack into the computer systems that governments use to generate and distribute cryptographic credentials to voters. They could bribe election officials to supply them with copies of voters' credentials. They could hack into the PCs or smartphones voters use to cast their votes. They could send voters phishing emails to trick them into revealing their voting credentials—or simply trick them into thinking they've cast a vote when they haven't.

[...]

But let's think about how this would play out in practice. Suppose it's mid-November 2020 and Donald Trump has narrowly won reelection. A few thousand voters in key swing states come forward to say that they intended to vote for Trump's opponent but their vote was recorded for Trump instead. Thousands of others say they tried to vote for Trump—or against him—but their votes weren't counted.

Was that due to hackers meddling with the vote, technical snafus, or user error? Were some of them just misremembering how they had cast their ballots? There would be no way to know for sure.

An important property for an election is finality: you want a well-understood process that makes people confident in the result. The paper-based process used in most states today isn't perfect, but it's pretty good on this score. Each vote is recorded on a paper ballot that's available for anyone to look at. Everyone understands how paper ballots work. People can observe the vote-counting process to verify that no ballots were altered. So not only does the process usually lead to an accurate count of peoples' votes, it also builds public confidence in the integrity of the result.

Blockchain voting would be much, much worse. Hardly anyone understands how a blockchain works, and even experts don't have a good way to observe the online voting process for irregularities the way an election observer does in a traditional paper election. A voter might be able to use her private key to verify how her vote was recorded after the fact. But if her vote wasn't counted the way she expected (or wasn't counted at all) she'd have no good way to prove that she tried to vote a different way.

Just a few months back, we also wrote about the terrible idea that West Virginia was experimenting with, via a company called Voatz (which is mentioned in Tapscott's article) that was building a "blockchain-based" system to allow military personnel overseas to vote via their mobile phones. And of course, as we noted at the time, it had all the same problems of all these systems. What it adds in "convenience" (if anything) is completely outdone by the security nightmare it creates.

Again, I still think blockchains have some potential to do some pretty useful things, but the idea that they can solve any old basically impossible under current realities technology problem by sprinkling magic "crypto" and "distributed" pixie dust on the problem is not a good look. Which should lead people to asking why the NY Times is publishing it without any fact checking at all?

Filed Under: blockchain, voting

Why A Blockchain-based DRM Has Always Been A Terrible Idea

from the and-why-copyright-maximalists-gravitate-towards-it dept

I've threatened in the past to write up a post explaining why a blockchain-based DRM is a terrible idea that will flop -- and it appears I finally need to do so, with the sort of announcement that Sony is preparing to use the blockchain for "next-gen DRM." I should note that, unlike some people, I'm actually not a blockchain skeptic. I think that it does have a few potentially revolutionary and disruptive uses. But... I also think that nearly every use of the blockchain that has been championed so far is incredibly silly and pointless. In most cases, what people claim they're using a blockchain for would better be served with... a database. If you're just replacing a database with a blockchain-based system, all you're really doing is adding unnecessary inefficiency and complexity.

So while a blockchain does have efficiency and complexity weaknesses compared to a database, it does have two potential advantages -- but only if those advantages are necessary to the service being built. The first advantage is that the blockchain can be truly distributed, rather than centralized. For years, we've discussed the problems of too many centralized systems, whether it's the siloing of information, the weird incentives it creates for the central database controller, or simply the fact that a centralized system creates a single point of failure and/or point of attack for a would-be assailant. A blockchain can help limit (though not eliminate) some of those problems -- and that can open up some incredible new services. The second big thing that a blockchain does better than a database is that it creates a more trustworthy way to prevent the "double spending" problem.

The issue there is that with anything digital, it can always be copied and/or manipulated in some way. If you are trying to construct something that requires scarcity -- such as a digital currency or a specific ledger of asset ownership -- then you want to be sure that the system really has a 100% accurate record, and won't allow the same bit of digital currency to be held by multiple people (or allowing it to be spent multiple times by the same person) or, that the same asset is listed as being owned by different entities. One of the cool features of the Blockchain is that it is designed such that people can be fairly cryptographically certain that we don't have that sort of "double spending" problem. You do have to trust the math and the code, but the code is open and people are constantly checking it. Now, you can claim a centralized database can prevent these kinds of things too, but you have to totally trust whoever is in control over that centralized database. And you might. Most of the money you probably have is really in a centralized database at your bank. But, there are some advantages to have that record be on a publicly distributed ledger a la the blockchain.

The issue, of course, is finding services and applications that can really take advantage of these benefits of the blockchain, and so far, they are few and far between, though there are plenty of future possibilities where they could be super useful.

For years now, we've heard some people arguing for a blockchain-based DRM. This idea is at least marginally better than simply replacing a database with an unnecessary blockchain, because at the very least, it is an attempt (a weak one, but an attempt) to leverage one of the advantages I discuss above: the double spending issue. Obviously, as lots of people will tell you, the legacy copyright industries have decried the fact that the internet makes content super easy to copy, making their legal monopoly over the distribution of that content less than monopolistic. Thus, the folks who wish to go back to a world in which content is locked up, hear about how a blockchain "solves" the double spending problem, and they get excited: why couldn't we use that as DRM? After all, isn't the point of that aspect of the blockchain that it stops copying of digital assets?

But, that's about as far as the thought process goes. Because from there, it completely breaks down. There are few actual details about Sony's blockchain-based DRM idea, but it's not difficult to understand why it will fail. First, it's important to understand something that copyright supporters frequently forget: the copyright on something is different from the content itself. Copyright system supporters like to conflate the content itself and the "intellectual property." But as we've explained in the past while a "copyright" may have property-like elements, the underlying content does not.

The blockchain-based system for solving the double spend problem is a useful solution when it's the record or ledger entry that you don't want copied. But that's not what any DRM system would be. Because the "record" is the copyright information -- not the music/movie/book/etc. And who cares whether or not you can copyright the copyright information? You're solving the wrong problem? The content itself can still get copied. There's no way to stop that, because even if you were to somehow encode the actual content in the blockchain (a pointless idea), you'd still have the analog hole to deal with, as the content would inevitably escape the blockchain.

The other reason why a blockchain-based DRM solution is so dumb is because it actively goes against what the public wants. The reason a disruptive or transformational technology works is because it provides the public with something much better than they had before. A blockchain-based DRM solution provides a worse solution. There is no demand for such a thing. Sure, there may be "demand" on the label side, but that doesn't translate to usage.

The final reason why a blockchain-based DRM solution is utterly stupid is conveyed quite nicely by Cory Doctorow in his BoingBoing post about this announcement, in which he notes that what Sony is proposing appears to be a privacy nightmare:

Sony also implies that every transaction in which someone buys a creative work will end up in the ledger. This has extremely grave privacy implications, but it also has nothing to do with preventing copyright infringement. People who lawfully acquire copyrighted works have the right to sell them, lend them, and give them away -- and they are not liable if (for example) their data (including copyrighted works) is stolen and released online.

The fact that Sony publishes a list of the reading, viewing and listening habits of every one of its customers does not give it any basis for seeking damages from those customers if works they purchased show up in someone else's hands.

The whole idea of a blockchain-based DRM is based on a faulty understanding of either the blockchain, copyright, or (most likely) both. It involves people who wish to return to a world of artificial scarcity around content not thinking past the fact that a blockchain lets you solve the double-spend problem, without understanding why that doesn't make any sense at all in the world of copyright, where it's the content that's the issue, and not the copyright.

Filed Under: blockchain, copyright, cryptocurrency, distributed systems, double spending, drm, ledger
Companies: sony

Voting By Cell Phone Is A Terrible Idea, And West Virginia Is Probably The Last State That Should Try It Anyway

from the industrialized-incompetence dept

So we've kind of been over this. For more than two decades now we've pointed out that electronic voting is neither private nor secure. We've also noted that despite this several-decade long conversation, many of the vendors pushing this solution are still astonishingly-bad at not only securing their products, but acknowledging that nearly every reputable security analyst and expert has warned that it's impossible to build a secure fully electronic voting system, and that if you're going to to do so anyway, at the very least you need to include a paper trail system that's not accessible via the internet.

Having apparently learned nothing, reports emerged this week that West Virginia is considering launching an initiative that would let some state residents vote via cellphone. To be clear, the effort initially appears focused on letting troops stationed overseas vote. Not surprisingly, more than a few folks were quick to highlight to CNN how this would be an arguably terrible idea:

"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN in an email. "It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote."

Marian K. Schneider, president of the election integrity watchdog group Verified Voting, was even more blunt. Asked if she thought mobile voting is a good idea, she said, "The short answer is no."

Given security analysts routinely aren't sure whether or not our existing voting systems may have been compromised by actors foreign and/or domestic, and the federal government just got done making it clear election security isn't a priority with an idiotically-partisan vote, it seems like a pretty terrible time to begin trying to implement new online voting efforts. And if you've watched West Virginia's blistering corruption when it comes to sectors like the telecom industry, the state is probably the last state in the union that should be attempting such a voting system overhaul.

Judging from online conversations, the company that's building the new West Virginia system (Voatz) may not be the best choice either, since it doesn't appear capable of securing its own website:

Comforting. Ideally, the system would involve a user first registering by taking a photo of their government-issued ID and a selfie-video of their face, which are then registered via the app. Voatz claims the company's facial recognition software will then ensure the photo and video submitted are of the same person, with users then able to cast their ballot using the Voatz app. Documents the company circulates at trade shows indicate the company utilizes the blockchain to ensure its systems are more secure and "fundamentally different than touchscreen or online voting." But the company has failed to clarify how.

There's roughly a million and one ways this entire process could go to hell, from SS7 vulnerabilities to man in the middle attacks everywhere along the chain between your device and the Voatz database. And if there's not a hard paper trail, it opens the door to any number of undetectable changes that could happen during transit. Of course this has all been repeatedly stated countless times over the last few decades, but it's a message that's still not apparently getting through.

Filed Under: blockchain, e-voting, electronic voting, mobile voting, security, west virginia
Companies: voatz

Kodak's Supposed Cryptocurrency Entrance Appears To Be Little More Than A Rebranded Paparazzi Copyright Trolling Scheme... With The Blockchain

from the blockchain-can-solve-it dept

For a few years now I've debated writing up a post about why a "blockchain-based DRM" is an idea that people frequently talk about, but which is a really dumb idea. Because the key point in the blockchain is that it "solves" the "double spend" problem of anything digital, there are always some who have argued that it could be useful in stopping the infinitely copyable nature of digital content. But... actually doing that is a much more difficult proposition. Instead, we just get simplistic ideas around using a blockchain ledger merely to establish a form of a rights database. Which... is fine, but hardly all that compelling a use of the blockchain (a regular old database is probably a lot more useful and efficient for that use case).

But, last week, there was an awful lot of hype, fuss and confusion around what was billed as Kodak launching its own cryptocurrency / blockchain effort called KODAKone and Kodak Coin, that would "create an encrypted, digital ledger of rights ownership for photographers to register both new and archive work that they can then license within the platform." More significant details were lacking, but Tim Lee, over at Ars Technica was among the first (if not the first) to realize that "KODAKone" appeared to be little more than a last minute rebranding of a planned initial coin offering (that had basically no interest) put together by an offshoot of a paparazzi photo agency:

The evidence strongly suggests that Kodak Coin is the re-branding of an initial coin offering called RYDE coin that never got much attention and was apparently aborted days before Kodak Coin was announced. Until recently, the project had a page on the crowdfunding site Start Engine. The page is no longer there, but Google cached a copy of the site on January 3.

As recently as last week, RYDE coin was being pitched as a way of expanding the licensing business of its creator, paparazzi photo company WENN Media. Now the RYDE page has disappeared, and WENN Media's parent company, WENN Digital, has partnered with Kodak to create a blockchain platform that sounds a lot like RYDE—except that there's no mention of celebrity photographs.

The site cmyk Trends has many more details showing that this was actually cooked up by WENN and another company, Ryde GmbH, that appears to be something of a copyright trolling operation:

It is a partnership with WENN Digital, which in turn is a venture between WENN (a UK based Celebrity and Entertainment News Agency) and Ryde GmbH, Germany. Ryde was founded by Jan Denecke, a lawyer specialized in media and copyright law. Ryde (google "Reward Your iDEas") apparently has software that finds unlicensed material on the internet, politely informs the web site owner of the infringement and collects the settlement. This technology will probably be the policing element in the beautiful new world of digital rights licensing with Kodak Coins for payments.

It appears that "Kodak" here is just for the brand name. Since Kodak's bankruptcy a few years back, it's gone heavily into the name licensing business as a way to make money -- and it appears that's exactly what happened here, though it's possible that Kodak may also set up some computers to handle the "mining" needed for Kodak Coin behind all of this.

While the details are still a little murky, it appears that the system will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, which has been designed to handle business transactions, digital asset transactions certainly being prime candidates. The Ethereum blockchain has its own crypto-currency Ether, which could certainly be used for payments, but "Kodak Coins" may resonate better with photographers and help the acceptance of the system. So it looks more like an opportunity for Kodak to monetize its remaining brand value, rather than a technology contribution. While WENN Digital is handling the business, Kodak will get an unspecified royalty from all transaction and will start its own "coin mining operation" in Rochester. The term "coin mining" is somewhat misleading. Crypto currencies require consensus based certification of each addition to the blockchain. The computers providing that service - and using lots of energy in the process - get rewarded with new coins. I am speculating, but somebody has to provide the service for a new coin until the big boys get interested. With Bitcoin mining using as much electricity as Denmark (some 32 TWh), becoming a player in coin mining would be a real change for Kodak.

And, of course, as with so many silly "now we're doing blockchain!" announcements, this one caused Kodak's stock price to soar, bumping up the valuation of the company over $200 million the day of the announcement, and the stock price has stayed up there since.

Of course, as Lee noted in his story about this, the original pitch for RYDE's ico, which has since been scrubbed from the web, focused heavily on digital rights management for paparazzi, and it was only after the last minute rebranding that it became about all photographers.

The pitch for the RYDE project highlighted WENN's success in the paparazzi business. "Our paparazzi photographers are the best in the business," the RYDE coin page said. "With RYDE coin, we hope to develop our blockchain platform to deliver registration, licensing, infringement, and other unique revenue streams in order to benefit the community of countless paparazzi and media conglomerates with whom we do business."

By contrast, the Kodak Coin press release and website don't say anything about paparazzi photographs. Bolstered by the Kodak brand, they're pitching Kodak Coin as a universal platform for licensing photographs. The press release mentions that WENN "works with approximately 2,500 professional photographers," without being too specific about what kind of photography they're doing.

So all that raises some pretty big questions. Obviously, there's a lot of ridiculous speculation on the stock market side for any company that says "blockchain" -- so some of this is to be expected. But does anyone really think that a blockchain-based photography rights database, combined with what certainly sounds like some light copyright trolling ("software that finds unlicensed material on the internet, politely informs the web site owner of the infringement and collects the settlement") is really worth that much money? So far, other public companies that have focused on copyright trolling as a business model haven't found it to be that lucrative. But, perhaps all they were missing was Kodak's respected brandname and some fuzzy hype around the blockchain.

Filed Under: blockchain, copyright, copyright trolling, cryptocurrency, digital rights management, kodakcoin, ryde
Companies: kodak, ryde, wenn digital, wenn media

Guy Who Wants Everyone To Believe He Created Bitcoin, Now Patenting Everything Bitcoin With An Online Gambling Fugitive

from the because-reasons dept

As you may recall, there was a giant fuss last year, when an Australian guy named Craig Wright not only claimed that he was "Satoshi Nakamoto" -- the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin -- but had convined key Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen that he was Nakomoto. That was a big deal because Andresen was one of the first developers on Bitcoin and regularly corresponded with Nakamoto (Andresen's own name sometimes popped up in rumors about who Nakamoto might be). Even with Andresen being convinced, plenty of others soon picked apart the claims and found the claims severely lacking in proof.

Then, last summer, Andrew O'Hagan published an absolutely massive profile of Wright that only served to raise a lot more questions about Wright, his businesses, his claims to having created Bitcoin, and a variety of other things. However, as we noted at the time, buried in that massive article was a bizarre tidbit about how Wright was actively trying to patent a ton of Bitcoin related ideas. As we noted, the article stated that Wright's plan was to patent tons of Bitcoin stuff, reveal himself as Nakamoto and then sell his patents for a billion dollars.

Of course, part of that plan fizzled because basically no one believes Wright was Nakamoto. But, apparently the patenting has continued. Earlier this months, Reuters released a big "investigation" showing that Wright is rushing to get as many Bitcoin-related patents as possible, and has partnered with an online gambling mogul who's a fugitive because of his business dealings (add this to the long list of sketchy connections between Wright and other businesses):

Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who made the Satoshi claim, has the backing of Calvin Ayre, a wealthy Canadian entrepreneur, according to people close to Wright and documents reviewed by Reuters. Ayre has been indicted in the United States on charges of running online gambling operations that are illegal in many U.S. states – an accusation he rejects.

Wright’s expertise combined with Ayre’s support make a potentially formidable force in shaping the future of bitcoin and blockchain, the ledger technology that underlies digital currencies. Wright and his associates have lodged more than 70 patent applications in Britain and have plans to file many more, according to documents and emails reviewed by Reuters and sources with knowledge of Wright’s business. The patents range from the storage of medical documents to WiFi security, and reflect Wright's deep knowledge of how bitcoin and blockchain work.

Their total compares with 63 blockchain-related patents filed globally last year and 27 so far this year by multinationals from credit card companies to chipmakers, according to Thomson Innovation.

And, because it's patents we're talking about, there's a shell company here, because shell companies are quite popular in the patent trolling world. But Reuters claims that Ayre and Wright are behind this particular shell company and point to lots of close connections between the two. The report further notes that there are plans to file 150 patent applications, and maybe up to 400, and again repeats the claim from last year about the "ONE BILLLLLLLLLION DOLLARS!" sales plan:

The range of patent applications lodged by Wright and colleagues is wide. Five, registered on Dec. 14, were made by EITC Holdings with the bland description “computer-implemented method and system,” public filings show. One, registered on Dec. 28, was described as “Determining a common secret for two blockchain nodes for the secure exchange of information” - apparently a way to use the blockchain to exchange encrypted data. Other applications by Wright and his associates relate to sports betting and a blockchain-based operating system for simple electronic devices.

Emails from Wright to Ayre’s associate Matthews, reviewed by Reuters, set out plans to file 150 patents. A person with direct knowledge of Wright’s businesses said he and associates ultimately aim to file closer to 400. None has been approved so far and it’s not clear whether the patents would be enforceable if granted, but Wright’s associates have been quoted as saying the patents could be sold “for upwards of a billion dollars.”

The Reuters article argues that this "rush to patent applications poses a threat to the original conception of bitcoin as a technology available to all." Of course, that also seems like a pretty big strike against the idea that Wright is Nakamoto.

But it also seems like a misunderstanding about patents themselves. First off, just because you file for a ton of patents, it doesn't mean you're going to get them. And, thankfully, lately the USPTO has actually gotten much, much better at rejecting really bad patents. These things may be worth talking about if he's actually granted these patents -- and, even then, it may only really matter if he (or any later holder of the patents) seeks to enforce them. The really crazy thing, though, is that this once again demonstrates the sheer silliness of our patent system. Rather than actually trying to build a viable business by leveraging the useful features of Bitcoin/blockchain, you have someone trying to lock it up by putting tollbooths wherever possible. Tons of work is being done to advance Bitcoin and blockchain these days, because of all the opportunities it will create... not because of patents. And, once again, it shows the folly of believing that patents are a key incentive for innovation. That's rarely the case. Often, they're a key incentive for putting hurdles in the way of actual innovations, so that you can shake the actual innovators down for cash.

Filed Under: bitcoin, blockchain, calvin ayre, craig wright, patents, satoshi nakamoto

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from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: bitcoin, blockchain, daily deal