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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34919 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Colorado Department of State has put out a press-release on a whoopsie:

The Colorado Department of State is aware that a spreadsheet located on the Department’s website improperly included a hidden tab including partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems.

The Colorado Public Radio elaborates on what kind of passwords these were, and to which machines:

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office says a spreadsheet on the department’s website improperly included a tab with partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems, known as BIOS passwords.

The Colorado Department of State calls these "partial" passwords and says no worries re election integrity:

“This does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado’s elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted,” wrote a spokesman for the office, Jack Todd, in a statement Tuesday. ... “There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system,” he wrote.

The BIOS passwords, that were stored unencrypted on an Excel spreadsheet that was up on the department's website (but in a hidden tap!), are "partial" in a sense that one needs another password to access "every election component".

I am not a certified IT geek, so I asked Claude for top three security concerns if a hacker got my computer's BIOS password:

Evil Maid Attack: They could modify boot settings to load malicious software before your operating system starts, potentially bypassing your OS security measures. This could allow them to install rootkits or keyloggers that are very difficult to detect.

Hardware Security Bypass: They could disable security features like Secure Boot or TPM (Trusted Platform Module), making your system more vulnerable to other attacks and potentially compromising disk encryption.

Data Theft: By changing boot order to external devices, they could boot into a different operating system to potentially access your hard drive data, even bypassing some OS-level password protections.

Those sound serious. That's OK, though, because I need my usual password to get into my account, so the BIOS password for my computer is just "partial", right? Claude patiently replies "Nope":

With BIOS access, an attacker can bypass your Windows password in several ways... [gives several examples of what one can do when booting from an external drive]. Think of it this way: Your Windows password is like a lock on your house's front door, but BIOS access is like having keys to all the windows and back doors. No matter how strong your front door lock is, if someone can get in another way, it won't help.

The Colorado Department of State, in their press release, give a paragraph describing why one shouldn't worry that this may compromise the voting equipment:

Colorado elections include many layers of security. There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system. Under Colorado law, voting equipment must be stored in secure rooms that require a secure ID badge to access. That ID badge creates an access log that tracks who enters a secure area and when. There is 24/7 video camera recording on all election equipment. Clerks are required to maintain restricted access to secure ballot areas, and may only share access information with background-checked individuals. No person may be present in a secure area unless they are authorized to do so or are supervised by an authorized and background-checked employee. There are also strict chain of custody requirements that track when a voting systems component has been accessed and by whom. It is a felony to access voting equipment without authorization.

I have highlighted all that impressive-sounding security: secure rooms, secure ID badge, secure area... So with all that carefully thought-out security protocol, how the F*@& did the BIOS passwords got stored unencrypted on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in the first place? Let alone how that Excel file got onto the Department of state website? According to the Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold:

Griswold said the mistake was made by a “civil servant” in the Secretary of State’s Office, who no longer works there. “Ultimately, a civil servant made a serious mistake and we're actively working to address it,” Griswold said. “Humans make mistakes.”

Which mistake, Secretary Griswold? The act of compiling of the unencrypted BIOS passwords onto a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet? The act of hiding that tab and leaving it on a Microsoft Excel document meant for sharing with broader audience? The act of uploading that document to the Department's website, free to download to anyone on the web? I am far more interested in answers to that first question, because it says quite a lot about the level of professionalism that underlies the security system of Colorado voting equipment.

What is the job of the Colorado Secretary of State?

The basic mission of the Department of State is to collect, secure, and make accessible a wide variety of public records, ensure the integrity of elections, and enhance commerce.

The Colorado GOP, therefore, wants to know if Secretary Griswold will resign. Her response:

[Republicans in the state House] are the same folks who have spread conspiracies and lies about our election systems over and over and over again," Griswold told Colorado Public Radio. "Ultimately, a civil servant made a serious mistake and we're actively working to address it," Griswold said, adding, "I have faced conspiracy theories from elected Republicans in this state, and I have not been stopped by any of their efforts and I'm going to keep on doing my job."

So that's a no, then. Plus, a nice implication that this whoopsie is also part and parcel of the "conspiracies and lies about our election system".

Is it too late to switch to that system we had the Iraqis use, with the ink-on-the-finger that stains the skin for the following week?

Mods, can we get a moratorium on using chatbots to pad out one's word-count?

This does not seem like "padding out the word count". I use AI in this same way when I need an expert-ish opinion on something. I won't always post the exact text of the AI, but it seems fine to do that, especially if you are just gonna ape the conclusions anyways. This was a responsible use of AI.

I'd much rather people wrote thier own inexpert understanding than open the can of worms that is giving people the opportunity to pull an "I didn't say that, Claude did" but it looks like i am in the minority.

If someone says what claude says, they said it. If claude was wrong, they failed to check the claims and they were wrong. If people want to become extensions of their AIs that's fine. But they're still accountable for what they post.

This just seems 1:1 equivalent to a citation.

I find it annoying when people just cite LLM output, but the alternative is they still post LLM blather and lie about it being their own writing, so i will take the minor annoyance instead of the large integrity violation.

I'd still hold people accountable for any rulebreaking that the AI does at their behest. Its certainly not a get out of jail free card. But they aren't going to stop using a useful tool. "I spoke to an AI about security systems" becomes instead "I spoke to a knowledgeable friend about security systems". And then we are just having either less honest conversations, or dumber ones if they don't do the research in the first place.

This isn't padding, though? What's the difference between asking Claude for a technical answer as done here, or summarizing one's own inexpert googling?

I will happily go along with the community norms on the matter, once such become clear. My objective is to be completely upfront where I got the info, and I tried to include only the parts that are relevant to my point. I also put them in block-quote mode, so that they are easy to skip.

It’s already against the rules. Report it if that’s what you suspect.

The OP contains a section explicitly using a chatbot to get a "default answer" to a technical question. That seems like a legitimate use of AI to me, not "padding out the word-count", but apparently @TequilaMockingbird disagrees.

Personally I'm surprised by it not because of any rules about word count or padding, but confusion about why you would trust a chatbot about any information about the real world to begin with. I would never assume that anything an AI tells me about a real world matter is true - not without first checking it myself, or asking a human expert. AIs are just too unreliable.

There has been a lot written about hallucination because some people want chatbots to be worse than they are. With experience you can generally tell when you are asking a question that a LLM will hallucinate about.

The information environment is fraught, and time and effort are not unlimited. It doesn't seem all that different from using wikipedia to me; you're trading hallucination risk for deliberate deceit risk. It's a way of getting a provisional "normie" answer from which to proceed. It looks to me like the information was reasonably accurate, and if it isn't, we can generally rely on Cunningham's Law to secure a correction.

People tend to get banned for that when it's caught / suspected, the problem is that it's hard to detect, and prove objectively. What made you think that this is what happened here?

"I asked Claude" "Claude patiently replies"

Claude is an AI chat bot built by Anthropic.

The OP didn’t hide it, used it to summarise information, which the bot has done correctly as far as I can tell (except maybe the user applied answers about home pc bioses to voter machines)

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