The problem is not that its impossible to establish trust in an electronic voting system. A qualified individual with the necessary knowledge in formal verification, cryptography, and computer science (maybe I am missing a field or two here) might be able to audit a system and verify that it adheres to certain standards and criteria.

But I cannot do that, the average adult certainly cannot, and the bottom 5% percentile (of whatever criterion/metric might be applicable here) is so far removed from the problem that they are probably already having trouble operating such a machine.

We were able to organize our own elections in elementary school to elect class representatives, and every kid understood how they work, and was able to observe the election process themselves, establishing trust in the system. If I have any doubts if my vote is going to be counted correctly in an election, I can go to my polling station and monitor the election as an independent observer or join the election board and do the counting myself. Every citizen eligible to vote has all the necessary tools available, both in terms of access to the polling station and counting of the ballots (which is public), and in terms of mental capacity and required prior knowledge. (Well, the last two points at least apply to a large majority of voters). I don’t need to trust the local government or dubious “experts”. The public’s ability to establish trust in the election system is essential in a democracy, and establishing trust cannot be delegated.

We had computers in elementary school. Around 3 or 4, they were standing in a corner of the classroom. I think my teachers husband just brought them in after his workplace decommissioned them. When you finished a task early, you were sometimes allowed to play around on them. I remember Paint, playing Pinball and Solitaire, and just clicking around/discovering the Windows UI. This was around the year 2000, we had no Internet, the computers were running Windows 95/98. I am not sure if we used them for any class-related activities. WordPad was installed, but no other Office stuff, I believe.

I am glad that I grew up when computers were still understandable. Nowadays, kids get iPads, which teach them to be obedient consumers, but they will learn nothing about computers themselves. Too many layers of abstractions, all intended to obscure the underlying technology, and lock down the devices.

Children have a natural desire to explore, which is completely wasted with modern devices. Let them open Paint.exe with Notepad and see what happens!

Yes, that’s true for the git repo itself, but a git forge can provide a multitude of related services, including issues and pull request management, CI/CD pipelines, wikis, static content hosting, package registries, etc. which are not as easily migrated.

The Top 3 are 2200 (20.12.2024), 2030 (29.11.2024), 2010 (30.12.2024).

I just use the texlive docker image instead. It is also huge, but at least it is decoupled from system updates

I had the same idea, but the solution I thought about is finding a way to define my DNS records as code, so I can automate the deployment. But the pain is tolerable so far (I have maybe 30 subdomains?), I haven’t done anything yet

Germany. I found an article about a case where the parking offender tried to appeal the penalty (translated):

The taxis picked up passengers waiting at the stops and drove them to other stops along the route. This went on for an hour, then the car parked not far from a sign saying “Please keep a sufficient distance from the tracks” was towed away and the route was clear again. This interactive view on Google Street View shows the location.

When the VGF then demanded €973.13, €25 of this was a flat-rate fee for expenses – and the rest was the cost of the rail replacement taxis. After hearing witness statements, the court ruled out any manipulation by the taxi industry, and the court also found no evidence of any delay in towing the car.

Where I am from, the transportation company will call Taxis to get the people to their destination station in case a car blocks the tramline, until the car has been towed. The car owner has to pay the Taxi invoices.

Does Bernie suffice?

It’s real hardware dimming.

The graph shows weekly active users. So you wouldn’t be counted unless you actively boot Bazzite.

One has to find the right balance between security and comfort, and this entirely depends on the threat model one has. Nowadays, I will always enable full-disk encryption on all of my devices, even if I then decide to store the keys in TPM and unlock the disk at boot.

I have at least 5 half-broken HDDs sitting around, completely unencrypted, I have no idea if they still work, but they are surely full of private data that I would like to have purged. I fear mechanical destruction might be the only solution for some of them, but just wiping them manually is more effort than doing nothing, so I guess they will still be around for some time. And with SSDs, there is no reliableway delete all data.

With encryption? Just delete the key and you are done.

The threat model changes in the future? Easy, the data is already encrypted.

And the amount of traffic lights to handle that traffic volume

Wait, so 0.2% of all Aurora Users are me?

I did the same last week (and am still in the process of setting up more services for my new server). I have a few VMs (running Fedora CoreOS, with podman preinstalled), and I use ansible to push my quadlets, podman secrets, and static configuration files. Persistent data volumes get mounted using virtiofs from the host system, and the VMs are not supposed to contain any state themselves. The VMs are also provisioned using using ansible.

Do you use ansible to automatically restart changed containers after pushing your changes? So far, I just trigger a systemctl daemon-reload, but trigger restarts manually (which I guess is fine for development).

I would assume/hope that it’s pretty simple to collect all the cables again? Just “walk” once across the field, pick up all the cables, roll them up, and you are done? I am kind of wondering why the operator couldn’t just roll up the cable from their side again after the end of the flight. But I can understand that that is not a priority at that point.

Very helpful. I was just looking at this the other day.

It’s second place, directly after 2024-09-28 with 99 special equipment destroyed.

However, 312 other vehicles is a new record (and second place is 210 other vehicles, which is shared between 2025-03-28 and 2025-04-15 (this Tuesday)).

Not the case I was thinking about, but here is a similar case:

[translated] Parking in a stupid way can be expensive. In Frankfurt, the regional court has ruled that a car driver must pay for the use of 28 cabs.

[…]

The cabs collected people waiting at the stops and drove them to other stops along the route. This went on for an hour before the car parked not far from a “Please keep enough distance from the track” sign was towed away and the route was free again. […]

When the VGF then demanded 973.13 euros, 25 euros of this was a lump sum for their own expenses - and the rest was the cost of the rail replacement cabs. The court ruled out manipulation by the cab company after hearing witnesses, and the court was also unable to recognize any dilly-dallying during towing.

The car driver did not have any legal grounds for not paying for the cabs, this only went to a court because they tried to accuse the cab company.

Someone in my city did this. Their car blocked the tram. The tram company ordered taxis for all passengers, and the car owner had to foot the bill.