Vulnerable electronic elections, dream tech director and Arabic mathematics

The theme of the release is the security of digital elections.

On September 8, elections to the Moscow City Duma will be held in Moscow. For the first time in Russia, some citizens will vote via the Internet. To do this, the Moscow authorities in just a few months have developed legislation and the very system of digital elections and argue that the only thing that can threaten it is hackers. Testing of protection against them will take place on August 21 - hackers who manage to find vulnerabilities will receive 2 million rubles.

The Bell figured out whether hackers are really the main danger in electronic elections. To do this, we studied the world experience of electronic elections - from paperless machines to Internet voting.

The full material can be read here , but here is a short thesis version with minor additions:

• The main problem of electronic paperless voting is its paperlessness. In the event of a failure, incorrectly counted votes cannot be verified or withdrawn. The US is already moving away from completely paperless voting towards more accountability. The Moscow Internet elections will not have a paper trail – instead, blockchain technology is used for reporting, but this creates more questions than answers.
• The glitches are not necessarily hacker-related—in North Carolina, over 4,000 votes were not counted due to a misconfigured voting machine, in other US elections, the touchscreen flashed Mitt Romney when tapped on Barack Obama, and in Belgium, cosmic rays (and this is no joke) threw in several thousand votes in the federal election by switching a bit in the counter.
• The goal of hackers is not always election manipulation. Much more valuable are the voter registers, which contain almost the entire adult population of the respective countries. Experience shows that government agencies around the world are grossly incompetent in protecting the data of their citizens - even if big money is spent on elections. Nearly 200 million voters were recently leaked in the United States, in 2016 the Mexican authorities leaked the data of over 90 million people, and the Filipino - more than 55 million, and even with fingerprints. Against this background, a leak into search engines of a database of 11 million Kazakhstanis that happened this summer looks like a trifle.
• The most effective protection against errors in software and hackers is an independent audit of the source code of the system and its availability to everyone. So do system developers in Switzerland, as well as in Estonia - in the latter, up to a third of citizens vote through the network.
• Moscow authorities do not yet give access to source codes. This makes it impossible not only to find vulnerabilities, but also to make sure that there are no backdoors, which is critical if the metropolitan government wants the trust of voters.

+1 to startup productivity

A good CTO, like a CEO , changes roles over time.

It's almost unbelievable that the same person can be a good leader at different times in a company's life , according to Madewithlove's blog:

• At the very beginning, someone is required who can quickly create working solutions that are only slightly different from prototypes. At this stage, you do not have a CTO, but a very good developer.
• Very soon, you will need to replace him with a manager who can deliver a stable, scalable product that meets security requirements. At this point, for the first time, startups seek advice or even hire CTOs from outside - often on a part-time basis.
• If everything goes well, the user base grows exponentially, and consultants are indispensable. Only now we need a real full-time manager. He's still a player-manager who knows how to code, but his focus is shifting towards team management.
• The first product is successful in the market, variants or new products appear. The manager has to manage already several teams. From tasks, he moves to building processes. Now he is simultaneously responsible for both the technical part and the product.

Read later

• Arabic mathematics is a forgotten splendor. An article debunking the myth that science in the Arab countries in the period from the end of the 8th to the middle of the 15th century only borrowed from the Greeks. One of the heroes of the article is Omar Khayyam, who not only wrote about wine, but also classified cubic equations.
• What every developer should understand at the beginning of their career. The Stackoverflow blog entry is about what code should be, whether there are “bad” programming languages, and what programmers do for 8 hours a day in general.
• Lonely Moderation Hacker News. How two introverts managed to turn the largest news forum in Silicon Valley into a place for meaningful discussion - article by The New Yorker.