This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the political spectrum. It had no chance.
Even if the revision is 'dead' now, the precedent is set: the Swiss government’s willingness to consider gutting core privacy protections rewrites the risk calculation for every privacy-focused provider headquartered there.
If you architect your infrastructure around non-retention, even a temporarily defeated law signals it’s time to future-proof elsewhere.
Anamon · 32d ago
There is no precedent here. There are politicians advocating for this kind of stuff everywhere, that doesn't indicate the likelihood of a law like this passing.
Anyone can suggest a law. The stage this one failed in is explicitly meant to gauge if there would be any reasonable support to get it passed. The answer was a resounding No.
Even if it proceeded, it would have quite likely lead to a popular referendum due to Switzerland's system of direct democracy. I'd say not many places in the world have as strong defenses against laws like this as Switzerland.
Of course, it doesn't mean that it's not important to highlight when such ideas do crop up, and especially naming and shaming who/where they come from. I'm glad Proton et al. spoke out.
m_mueller · 31d ago
I will say that the last few people’s votes on this didn’t go our way, e.g. “Vorratsdatenspeicherung”, storing telecommunications data for the case of an injunction. It’s always easy to use FUD to get people to give up some rights they think aren’t important.
Aeyxen · 32d ago
Yeah, I hope that as well.
Tika2234 · 32d ago
Th government will just try and try again with "softer" version of the law until they get what they want even if it is 10-20 years from now. I am not surprise government justify it something along the line of "think of the children".
j45 · 33d ago
It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
edent · 33d ago
The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.
Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".
AnthonyMouse · 33d ago
This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Aeolun · 32d ago
Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
AndrewDavis · 32d ago
Even that sounds easy compared to my country. In Australia a constitutional change requires a referendum, with a double majority condition to pass. Specifically it requires the vote in over half the states to be in favour, in addition to the overall national vote in favour.
klardotsh · 32d ago
That described Dutch system also sounds relatively easy compared to the US model, which requires 2/3 votes in each chamber of Congress (meaning the people-based one and the land-based one), *then* 3/4 of the states (so another land-based check) have to ratify it.
Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.
JumpCrisscross · 31d ago
> this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen
Would note that this is a very modern phenomenon, with Nixon having considered pushing for abolishing the electoral college in the 70s.
Aeolun · 32d ago
Yeah, I wasn’t clear enough. The first vote (before the election) requires a simple majority vote. The second vote (after the election) requires a 2/3 in favor vote in both houses.
I’m not sure if that’s worse than 3/4 states since the Netherlands isn’t so politically localized.
Deukhoofd · 31d ago
Also note that The Netherlands frequently does constitution changes, even with that complexity. Our current version for example dates from 2022, when (among other changes) the secrecy of correspondence was amended to include all telecommunication, as it only included communication of letter, phone, and telegraph before that.
Please reboot your government for the changes to take effect.
Youden · 33d ago
I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
AnthonyMouse · 32d ago
The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).
SllX · 32d ago
> After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?
[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.
dbrgn · 32d ago
Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
zahllos · 32d ago
Further additions to your comment. Expanding on your downside: Big reforms like giving women the right to vote only took effect in 1971 on the federal level. On a cantonal level, Appenzell-Innerhoden had to be forced into it in the 90s by the Tribunal Federal, but well.
I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).
Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).
Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.
SllX · 32d ago
Ah, so the referendum isn’t then scheduled for a date in short order if the requisite signatures are collected but held at the next regularly scheduled election? Fair enough.
Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.
j45 · 32d ago
Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
hluska · 32d ago
Democracy is fundamentally about putting in free labour. That’s just how it works, from the lowliest municipal elections up to federal. It’s a lot of unpaid labour.
That system works and has worked for a long time.
refactor_master · 32d ago
I think that’s an oversimplification. You can’t take the “free labor of performing democracy” and put it to equally good use doing anything else I can think of.
I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.
j45 · 32d ago
Agreed on oversimplification
It’s more putting the burden on the people
By free labor I meant the bureaucrats who are paid in the otherwise to make the laws
greyw · 33d ago
In Switzerland you can change the constitution with popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters to agree and half of the cantons.
AnthonyMouse · 33d ago
Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds. After you put the other protections in, naturally.
philistine · 33d ago
You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.
AnthonyMouse · 32d ago
Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.
kragen · 32d ago
Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.
saithound · 32d ago
This would be a wrong argument even if your premise about Switzetland was factually true (it's not).
It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.
You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.
(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)
kragen · 20d ago
I'm sorry I haven't answered your comment so far, because, even though it is mistaken in many ways, it seems to be in good faith, and I think it deserves an answer.
glenstein · 32d ago
Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.
im3w1l · 32d ago
Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.
AnthonyMouse · 32d ago
It's an additional check. That's good, but it isn't always sufficient, because sometimes you can convince 51% of people to do something wrong.
KetoManx64 · 32d ago
If you can convince 51% of the population to do something wrong than you're already screwed and have much bigger issues to worry about.
dgfitz · 32d ago
Brexit?
satellite2 · 32d ago
Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.
mahkeiro · 32d ago
Exactly this. In Switzerland, you generally have 3-4 vote periods per year with 0-8 different subjects). This is needed to make sure that people vote on the subject.
dataflow · 32d ago
Brexit was 52% of voters voting to leave, but that was only 37% of the electorate. [1] It wasn't >50% of the electorate, let alone >50% of the population.
...I'll argue that those that didn't participate in that vote elected to opt out. I.e. Don't cry if you didn't care to participate and then don't get what you wanted.
dataflow · 32d ago
This is a referendum that changes the fundamental rules of the game, not a pizza order. The onus isn't on the population to waste their time vetoing your bad or mediocre ideas, it's on you to come up with good ideas. And disgusting your constituents enough that they abstain entirely should very much not be a viable strategy. If you want to change the constitution, you gotta convince people that you're doing something good, including those who are hard to convince. That's literally the entire point. If you're not managing that, clearly your change isn't good enough to make.
Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.
maigret · 32d ago
People got lazy lately after a long peace time. Saying “it can’t get worse than that” with 5-10% unemployment. Yes this is not good, but it can get way worse than that. Also “my vote doesn’t count, and everyone is bad”. Enemies of democracy have pushed this a lot lately, internet make it trivially cheap and easy to spread. Nations like UK are in the find out phase.
j45 · 32d ago
It sounds so easy to do
dspillett · 32d ago
Constitutions can still be ignored, at least temporarily, by incumbent governments, as evidenced most recently by some actions of the current US administration.
Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.
timeflex · 33d ago
And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.
AnthonyMouse · 33d ago
These are independent problems.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
nerdsniper · 32d ago
Approval voting is also worth considering, where you put a checkmark in the box for any candidate you’d be okay with. Advantage over ranked choice is that communicating the scoring to citizens is simple: “$CANDIDATE received the most checkmarks.” Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.
Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.
AnthonyMouse · 32d ago
> Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.
Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.
Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.
Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.
Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.
amalcon · 32d ago
Score voting is just approval voting with an additional permitted tactical error.
In both systems, the correct tactic is to determine the two candidates most likely to win. Then, assign maximum score to whichever of those is better and to everyone preferable to that candidate.
It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
AnthonyMouse · 30d ago
> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
Because it is often correct.
Suppose there are candidates A, B and C. Candidates A and B are each polling around 6/10 and candidate C is polling around 4/10, but candidates A and B are quite similar to each other and share a base of support. According to your strategy, A and B are the two most likely to win, so if you prefer A then even though you still prefer B to C you refuse to express your preference and instead assign 10/10 to A and 1/10 to B and C. The voters who prefer candidate B do the same. The result is that A and B end each up at 3.5/10, C ends up at 4/10 and C wins. In other words, you've devolved back into first past the post and caused your least favored candidate to win because of your erroneous strategizing.
By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
amalcon · 30d ago
In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities. This is also a mistake, and it is a mistake no matter the voting system or the next step in your strategy.
You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me. If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
> you've devolved back into first past the post
Correct. The potential for this to happen is one of the drawbacks of rated voting systems. It's also, through a different mechanism, one of the drawbacks of ranked systems. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since both alternatives give some ability to hedge against incorrect assessments.
> By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10. Both give the same odds of winning to A and B (well, mine gives B slightly higher odds because its average is 5.5 -- but you get the point). The only difference is that your method outsources the randomness to the rest of the electorate, rather than generating it yourself.
AnthonyMouse · 30d ago
> In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities.
Your problem is that your voting strategy changes which two candidates are most likely to win. If everyone votes their actual preferences then it's A and B. If too many people vote according to your strategy, C becomes a frontrunner.
> You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me.
I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you. The higher that proportion is, the more likely it is that C wins instead of A or B. It doesn't have to be 100% of people to cross the threshold into changing the outcome.
> If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
That isn't a prisoner's dilemma. A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
> I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10.
But then the voting system is receiving less information from you. Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason. Also, most people are not going to do that and requiring them to in order to express their preferences is needlessly confusing.
> I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you.
My strategy does not change other voters' strategies. Secret ballots prevent this type of coordination. That's my point. The collective strategy of 1/3 of the electorate does change which two candidates are most likely to win, but my individual strategy does not meaningfully do that.
> they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case. Hedging by assigning a non-maximal score increases the chance of the worst case compared to that approach, in exactly the same way that it reduces the chance of that compared to assigning a minimal score.
I'll grant that my specific tactic is predicated on a preference for achieving the best outcome rather than avoiding the worst one, but the best tactic for someone who finds avoiding the worst-case to be more important also only requires extreme votes.
> A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it. The secret ballot prevents any kind of enforced coordination. This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
> Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason.
You don't know the exact score each candidate will end up with absent your vote -- if you did, you could analytically determine a single-vote strategy that gives the best available outcome. Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression. It's just expressed in terms of the uncertainty in what the rest of the electorate is doing, not in terms of a coin flip. It does not meaningfully increase the error bars (in a large election -- say, >1k voters) because the former uncertainty quickly dwarfs the latter.
ClayShentrup · 24d ago
> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.
of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.
> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.
It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
And it does because you are part of the electorate, situated the same as the others, so the strategy you devise should be the one that yields the result you want given that similarly situated people will reach the same conclusion:
Special note for the critics of superrationality: Your vote isn't going to change the outcome, so according to classical game theory you should stay home instead of wasting your time doing something that doesn't matter. Therefore, voting at all is an exercise of superrationality. If you're not willing to use it in your voting strategy then you shouldn't use it in deciding whether to vote to begin with and so you should either use a superrational voting strategy or you should stay home.
> If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case.
You're not thinking probabilistically.
Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
Option 1, candidate A is at 4.99/10, candidate B is at 5/10, candidate C is at 4/10.
Option 2, candidate A is at 4/10, candidate B is at 4.99/10, candidate C is at 5/10.
If it's option 1 and you assigned 10/10 to candidate B, your preferred candidate loses. If it's option 2 your preferred candidate can't win and if you assign 1/10 to candidate B, your least preferred candidate wins.
But if you assign 10/10 to candidate A and 5/10 to candidate B then in option 1 that could still be enough to see candidate A win, and in option 2 it could still be enough to see candidate C lose.
Moreover, the score allows you to express how concerned you are about each outcome. If you're pretty okay with candidate B but have a moderate preference for candidate A then you can give candidate B 7/10. If candidate B is almost as bad as candidate C you can give candidate B 3/10. It allows you to hedge: How much advantage for candidate A are you willing to give up to reduce the chances of candidate C? You seem to be assuming that the only possible answers are "all of it" or "none of it", but there are other options.
> Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it.
If affects the chance of the worst-case outcome in all cases because it increases candidate C's chance against candidate B, and you don't know what the other voters are going to do. If candidate A has less support than expected due to inaccurate polling then it turns into a race between B and C regardless of whether B's supporters give A 1/10 or 5.5/10. Meanwhile you assigning a lower score to B is reducing B's chances against C regardless of why the race turns out to be between B and C.
> This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
No it isn't. In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does. In this case, if the other party defects -- and sometimes even if they don't -- then your defection harms you, because their defection (or something else) put candidate A behind candidate C. Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
> Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression.
It has less information content. If you roll a D10 and then assign 10/10 to candidate B if it's above a 6 and 1/10 if it isn't, the voting system only gets a single bit of information from you, whereas assigning the equivalent score gives it >3 bits of information. That only matters if the election is very close, but it always only matters if the election is very close.
In 2024 there were dozens of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes:
> It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.
Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.
Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.
Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.
> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.
There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.
> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.
> It has less information content.
Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).
If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.
The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
AnthonyMouse · 29d ago
> This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors.
You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging. There are legitimate non-mistake reasons to do that.
> Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me.
You're not trying to get them to copy you, you're trying to devise a strategy that maximizes your advantage in the event that other people in exactly the same situation as you come to the same conclusion. In other words, knowing that people using the same reasoning as you will copy you, what reasoning do you choose to use?
> The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives.
It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
Or to consider it another way, think of it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. You sure you want to make "defect" your first move when the aggregate outcome will be public and there will be future elections?
> My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
Voting is a perverse incentive for you. It takes time to cast a vote, the chances of it determining the outcome are entirely negligible and so is any notion that the candidates will know, much less change their behavior, based on whether you as an individual cast a vote. It's why so many people stay home, and everyone who doesn't is spending their own time to do otherwise because they altruistically prefer that the system work than that they save the time it takes them to do something that yields no personal benefit.
> You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1.
You're ignoring the probabilistic part. It's not scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the same time. You don't know if it's scenario 1 or scenario 2, that's the thing that's indeterminate, and you have to fill out your ballot not knowing that. Then if you assign 10/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 1, you've given the election to B over A. But if you assign 1/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 2, you've given the election to C over B. Neither of those are in your interest, so you have the personal incentive to reduce their probabilities by assigning candidate B a score in the middle of the range.
> If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on.
Because that's a trade off. There is no single "most important value". You want both for A to score higher than B and for B to score higher than C. Assigning a lower score to B makes one of the things you want more likely and the other one less likely. If you judge them to be equally important and equally probable then you should assign B a score in the middle to hedge your bets. If you judge one to be more important or more likely then you should weight the score in proportion to how much of your vote you're willing to spend to make one possibility more likely at the expense of the other. Assigning the maximal or minimal score assumes that you prioritize one thing entirely at the expense of the other. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.
> Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum.
Except that you're trading each of those increments against the probability of the other thing you want.
> The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
Also, what benefit is being achieved by forcing ordinary voters to choose their vote using random number generation instead of simply allowing them to write down the number they would have used as the threshold?
amalcon · 29d ago
> It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.
> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.
Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.
So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.
> There is no single "most important value".
You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.
> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.
ClayShentrup · 24d ago
> an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge
1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game.
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.
amalcon · 24d ago
> 1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):
- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.
- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.
- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.
> and that leads to a greater NET utility
This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.
The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...
Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:
- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.
- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.
- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly
The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.
ClayShentrup · 24d ago
yeah this is all explained here. score voting is even better than approval voting, obviously.
tactical error is GOOD, because it donates more utility to society than that non-strategic voter loses. AND for a lot of not-so-math-savvy voters, an honest score ballot is actually a better vote than a botched attempt to use strategic approval thresholds.
Constitutions are amended all the time. The French even have a proces for reboots of the Republic.
These are goods things.
puzzledobserver · 33d ago
The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
landl0rd · 32d ago
No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
maigret · 32d ago
France disagrees. They iterated 5 times on it and it fixed big flaws each time.
What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
AnthonyMouse · 32d ago
> The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
A constitution isn't just words, it creates a structure that exists in actual reality. The day before the tyrant comes you have multiple branches and levels of government. That stuff doesn't instantaneously cease to exist if they try to rip up the piece of paper, and its purpose is to fight against anyone who tries to rip it up.
If it fails at that purpose, your constitution contained insufficient checks and balances.(Notice that several of the ones in the original US constitution have been removed, and that was a mistake.)
brnt · 30d ago
Another way to view the US constitution is that parts were amended away in roundabout ways (e.g. through state legislation) and precisely because it is so set in stone that we now have the problems that we see.
landl0rd · 32d ago
France had a vastly bloodier path to that constitution as you know. And france’s constitution today is pretty bad. It fails to protect basic freedoms like speech and arms. It moves too much responsibility to the feds. Etc.
tekla · 32d ago
Constitutions that are easy to amend are basically universally a piece of toilet paper.
flir · 33d ago
That's how you ossify.
AnthonyMouse · 33d ago
If preventing the government from abusing the population is ossification then the government should be made entirely out of bones.
beeflet · 32d ago
In the USA we have amendments to the constitution, which take considerable political effort to change. These amendments can restrict the types of laws that may be passed.
This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.
_Algernon_ · 32d ago
This is not true in practice. Inertia and international law / agreements bind future lawmakers. If one government joins the EU, the next still has to follow EU law even if EU law changes.
j45 · 32d ago
An existing law can be different to change, than where non exists and its greenfield for something half baked to roll in.
Hard_Space · 32d ago
This was my understanding, which is why I was so surprised to read of Trump's edict preventing state-level AI laws for ten years.
tempodox · 32d ago
That prevention is called the Constitution. It regulates what kinds of law can or cannot be made.
hulitu · 32d ago
> It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has.
As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.
bdangubic · 33d ago
every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed outright
dragonwriter · 32d ago
Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.
KennyBlanken · 32d ago
Proton being about as brave as putting an apple on one's head and a blindfold on....in front of an infant with the parts of a Glock in front of them and no ammunition
What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.
Aeyxen · 32d ago
Proton didn't just market 'Swiss privacy,' they built real engineering around non-retention—no logs, no trackers, nothing to subpoena. If Switzerland erodes that, the only defensible move for actual privacy builders is to exit and redeploy somewhere the law aligns with technical reality. Anything else is security theater.
If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.
blablabla123 · 32d ago
To be fair Protonmail has much more to offer than "just" privacy friendly legislation. The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads. That in my opinion already puts it ahead among the main mail providers. Also it has the Proton bridge, VPN etc. etc. I'd say it really depends on the personal threat model and willingness to DIY. My main complaint with it is bad interoperability with gpg though. (I'm not sure how anything less is supposed to help with end-to-end privacy...)
SomeUserName432 · 31d ago
> The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads.
I'm currently paying for proton mail, but I'll be migrating away for it once my current period expires, exactly because it's not full-featured.
It has the worst search I have ever seen in a mail client. Even after enabling content search it's as good as utterly useless.
blablabla123 · 31d ago
Well yeah, I mean it has browser-based e2e encryption which is why search only applies to subjects/addresses. For more Proton bridge is needed. IIRC it's possible to also search the message bodies directly but it's quite slow.
nottorp · 32d ago
Techradar popped up a full screen something with "you may also want to read..." when i hit the browser back button.
Entshittification continues...
OutOfHere · 33d ago
And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be elsewhere.
Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
miohtama · 33d ago
Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy
It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.
dehrmann · 33d ago
> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy
Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.
globalnode · 32d ago
I wouldnt trust their state, the one that argued for infecting their entire population with covid to achieve herd immunity, the one that bent the knee to the US when they wanted a sex scandal to arrest Assange, the one who wont release information they have about blown up gas pipelines in their back yard. I shouldnt pick on Sweden, all countries are like this now.
looofooo0 · 32d ago
I think Sweden was one of the best countries how it handle Covid. Assange is a farce on the other hand.
anal_reactor · 33d ago
Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under certain circumstances. What if we created a political system where you can trust the government to do a good, honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the government aren't always aligned with goals of the society, but what if that wasn't the case.
maronato · 32d ago
Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.
The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.
bvnierop · 30d ago
The problem is that while the goals of today's government may align with all of society (which is already never going to happen), that says nothing about a future government. That future government may have far more nefarious interests and then use data gathered under the government that was trusted to achieve their goals.
beeflet · 32d ago
yeah, what if? :P
maronato · 33d ago
What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?
The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.
globalnode · 32d ago
I guess the human temptation to want to know what people are saying behind your back goes beyond political/economic systems.
odiroot · 32d ago
Not sure about the others but UK is a bona fide social democratic country.
KetoManx64 · 32d ago
"Crony capitalist", it's not actual capitalism when the government has its fingers and regulatioms in everyone's finances.
mantas · 32d ago
Social democracy is also capitalism.
I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.
Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.
McDyver · 33d ago
> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.
They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal
mrweasel · 33d ago
The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.
bawolff · 32d ago
That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.
codethief · 33d ago
That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?
mrweasel · 33d ago
There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.
You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.
It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.
codethief · 32d ago
Thanks so much!
jeroenhd · 32d ago
Should be noted that Denmark is not the only country that weasels its way around bans on mass surveillance like that.
Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.
Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.
"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.
hammock · 33d ago
What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back (again)?
bawolff · 32d ago
It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.
Calwestjobs · 33d ago
only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.
by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.
catlikesshrimp · 33d ago
Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?
The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.
JumpCrisscross · 33d ago
> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?
Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
overfeed · 32d ago
How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture.
The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
JumpCrisscross · 32d ago
> How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture
Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.
ben_w · 32d ago
Imagine you're standing on a simplified earth that's a perfect sphere, with no air resistance, and have a gun that has a muzzle velocity of orbital speed.
There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.
You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.
What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?
The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.
overfeed · 32d ago
> You fire randomly in the horizontal plane
Why randomly, if you're aiming for objects in an known orbit?
ben_w · 31d ago
Because you wrote:
> with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
If you miss one — and you probably will without active guidance, imagine aiming said gun at an SUV seven time zones away — everything's in a different place by your next close approach. Your ball bearings and the target both, thanks to chaotic pertubations, boosts, drag, etc.
Calwestjobs · 33d ago
Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.
Aeyxen · 32d ago
If privacy service providers have to keep logs anywhere, they lose all technical credibility—doesn't matter if you're registered in Panama, the Netherlands, or Mars. Perhaps, we should design systems where compliance is impossible and data simply doesn’t exist by default.
mrweasel · 33d ago
Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of services.
magicalhippo · 33d ago
As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.
Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.
The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...
Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.
rad_gruchalski · 33d ago
There are 5 million people living in Norway and you have 10 parties in the parliament? Talk about divided country.
mrweasel · 33d ago
Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.
It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.
kubb · 33d ago
I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options results in way more division. You can probably imagine why.
No comments yet
ath3nd · 32d ago
That's much less divided than, say, the US, with its two party system.
Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.
I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more
representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.
LAC-Tech · 32d ago
This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems; you can think of it as a side effect of proportional representation.
unethical_ban · 32d ago
500,000 people aligned to a party platform isn't wild.
Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.
pastage · 33d ago
A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few bins.
arrowsmith · 32d ago
This is quite normal in Europe.
E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.
zukzuk · 33d ago
Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.
speedgoose · 33d ago
If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation, that has no connection to USA, please let me know.
They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli company need in there ?
theMMaI · 33d ago
Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some critical infrastructure for banks.
mrweasel · 33d ago
Oh, I missed that.
speedgoose · 33d ago
I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.
immibis · 32d ago
That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)
There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.
But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.
By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)
mrweasel · 33d ago
Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.
Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
theMMaI · 33d ago
There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.
devwastaken · 33d ago
Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.
immibis · 32d ago
All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.
KomoD · 32d ago
Correction:they do in fact have to respond to court orders, but they can't give any info as they simply do not have it.
ignoramous · 32d ago
Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.
What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)
LMYahooTFY · 32d ago
Doesn't Mullvad accept cash without identifying information?
eagleislandsong · 32d ago
Yes, they do. They accept Monero too.
Batman8675309 · 33d ago
Proton isn’t giving up VPN users. It’s giving up mail users. There’s a huge legal difference.
petre · 33d ago
Lichtenstein is closer and uses the CHF.
FirmwareBurner · 33d ago
And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.
sealeck · 33d ago
But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).
LAC-Tech · 32d ago
I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.
sealeck · 32d ago
This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.
LAC-Tech · 32d ago
Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.
It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.
bawolff · 32d ago
But it isn't.
To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".
It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.
sealeck · 32d ago
It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.
s1artibartfast · 32d ago
They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy
sealeck · 32d ago
Yes, because it's a tax haven. That doesn't mean it would be sensible for Proton to move there!
0xDEAFBEAD · 32d ago
How delightfully paradoxical to see democracy vote itself out of power.
ncr100 · 33d ago
Who sponsored this??
Best I could find as a non Swiss:
> Threema and Proton
In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision.
Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".
(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)
Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?
netsharc · 32d ago
Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...
This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.
Calwestjobs · 33d ago
Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if it does not save anything ?
cfn · 33d ago
The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).
> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.
See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
LexiMax · 33d ago
To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?
pkaeding · 32d ago
This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.
zadokshi · 32d ago
proton account to proton account.
> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium
Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.
I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.
jeffparsons · 32d ago
> I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.
Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.
Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.
Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.
MYEUHD · 32d ago
> Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.
Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail.
Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account.
Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients
I'm not too familiar with it, but we're building Marco (https://marcoapp.io) and a customer just showed it to me recently.
Tika2234 · 32d ago
I hold Proton CEO to his word. I will also terminate my paid account with Proton if they dont leave (to give weight to his word). And Swiss will be on my ban list as well for ANY online services.
crossroadsguy · 32d ago
What they would tout as their USP then? Ex-Swiss Privacy?
croemer · 33d ago
Title needs a dash after Google, otherwise it reads weirdly
pmkary · 32d ago
No more "Swiss-Privacy" then.
juancroldan · 33d ago
Another day, another digital illiterate politician trying to regulate the digital world
tempodox · 32d ago
> a "major violation of the right to privacy" that will also harm the country's reputation and its ability to compete on an international level.
Exactly. Were the fear mongers and authoritarians so successful that the infected organism starts acting against its own wellbeing?
https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...
If you architect your infrastructure around non-retention, even a temporarily defeated law signals it’s time to future-proof elsewhere.
Anyone can suggest a law. The stage this one failed in is explicitly meant to gauge if there would be any reasonable support to get it passed. The answer was a resounding No.
Even if it proceeded, it would have quite likely lead to a popular referendum due to Switzerland's system of direct democracy. I'd say not many places in the world have as strong defenses against laws like this as Switzerland.
Of course, it doesn't mean that it's not important to highlight when such ideas do crop up, and especially naming and shaming who/where they come from. I'm glad Proton et al. spoke out.
Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.
Would note that this is a very modern phenomenon, with Nixon having considered pushing for abolishing the electoral college in the 70s.
I’m not sure if that’s worse than 3/4 states since the Netherlands isn’t so politically localized.
https://www.denederlandsegrondwet.nl/id/vlxuov0ja0xh/grondwe...
After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.
I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?
[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).
Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).
Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.
I like the sound of the upside a lot though.
Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
That system works and has worked for a long time.
I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.
It’s more putting the burden on the people
By free labor I meant the bureaucrats who are paid in the otherwise to make the laws
It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.
You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.
(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)
[1] https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-referendum-electorate-lea...
Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.
Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.
To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.
The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.
"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.
Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.
Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.
Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.
Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.
Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.
In both systems, the correct tactic is to determine the two candidates most likely to win. Then, assign maximum score to whichever of those is better and to everyone preferable to that candidate.
It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
Because it is often correct.
Suppose there are candidates A, B and C. Candidates A and B are each polling around 6/10 and candidate C is polling around 4/10, but candidates A and B are quite similar to each other and share a base of support. According to your strategy, A and B are the two most likely to win, so if you prefer A then even though you still prefer B to C you refuse to express your preference and instead assign 10/10 to A and 1/10 to B and C. The voters who prefer candidate B do the same. The result is that A and B end each up at 3.5/10, C ends up at 4/10 and C wins. In other words, you've devolved back into first past the post and caused your least favored candidate to win because of your erroneous strategizing.
By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me. If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
> you've devolved back into first past the post
Correct. The potential for this to happen is one of the drawbacks of rated voting systems. It's also, through a different mechanism, one of the drawbacks of ranked systems. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since both alternatives give some ability to hedge against incorrect assessments.
> By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10. Both give the same odds of winning to A and B (well, mine gives B slightly higher odds because its average is 5.5 -- but you get the point). The only difference is that your method outsources the randomness to the rest of the electorate, rather than generating it yourself.
Your problem is that your voting strategy changes which two candidates are most likely to win. If everyone votes their actual preferences then it's A and B. If too many people vote according to your strategy, C becomes a frontrunner.
> You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me.
I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you. The higher that proportion is, the more likely it is that C wins instead of A or B. It doesn't have to be 100% of people to cross the threshold into changing the outcome.
> If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
That isn't a prisoner's dilemma. A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
> I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10.
But then the voting system is receiving less information from you. Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason. Also, most people are not going to do that and requiring them to in order to express their preferences is needlessly confusing.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
My strategy does not change other voters' strategies. Secret ballots prevent this type of coordination. That's my point. The collective strategy of 1/3 of the electorate does change which two candidates are most likely to win, but my individual strategy does not meaningfully do that.
> they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case. Hedging by assigning a non-maximal score increases the chance of the worst case compared to that approach, in exactly the same way that it reduces the chance of that compared to assigning a minimal score.
I'll grant that my specific tactic is predicated on a preference for achieving the best outcome rather than avoiding the worst one, but the best tactic for someone who finds avoiding the worst-case to be more important also only requires extreme votes.
> A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it. The secret ballot prevents any kind of enforced coordination. This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
> Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason.
You don't know the exact score each candidate will end up with absent your vote -- if you did, you could analytically determine a single-vote strategy that gives the best available outcome. Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression. It's just expressed in terms of the uncertainty in what the rest of the electorate is doing, not in terms of a coin flip. It does not meaningfully increase the error bars (in a large election -- say, >1k voters) because the former uncertainty quickly dwarfs the latter.
of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.
just use VSE results.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
And it does because you are part of the electorate, situated the same as the others, so the strategy you devise should be the one that yields the result you want given that similarly situated people will reach the same conclusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
Special note for the critics of superrationality: Your vote isn't going to change the outcome, so according to classical game theory you should stay home instead of wasting your time doing something that doesn't matter. Therefore, voting at all is an exercise of superrationality. If you're not willing to use it in your voting strategy then you shouldn't use it in deciding whether to vote to begin with and so you should either use a superrational voting strategy or you should stay home.
> If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case.
You're not thinking probabilistically.
Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
Option 1, candidate A is at 4.99/10, candidate B is at 5/10, candidate C is at 4/10.
Option 2, candidate A is at 4/10, candidate B is at 4.99/10, candidate C is at 5/10.
If it's option 1 and you assigned 10/10 to candidate B, your preferred candidate loses. If it's option 2 your preferred candidate can't win and if you assign 1/10 to candidate B, your least preferred candidate wins.
But if you assign 10/10 to candidate A and 5/10 to candidate B then in option 1 that could still be enough to see candidate A win, and in option 2 it could still be enough to see candidate C lose.
Moreover, the score allows you to express how concerned you are about each outcome. If you're pretty okay with candidate B but have a moderate preference for candidate A then you can give candidate B 7/10. If candidate B is almost as bad as candidate C you can give candidate B 3/10. It allows you to hedge: How much advantage for candidate A are you willing to give up to reduce the chances of candidate C? You seem to be assuming that the only possible answers are "all of it" or "none of it", but there are other options.
> Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it.
If affects the chance of the worst-case outcome in all cases because it increases candidate C's chance against candidate B, and you don't know what the other voters are going to do. If candidate A has less support than expected due to inaccurate polling then it turns into a race between B and C regardless of whether B's supporters give A 1/10 or 5.5/10. Meanwhile you assigning a lower score to B is reducing B's chances against C regardless of why the race turns out to be between B and C.
> This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
No it isn't. In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does. In this case, if the other party defects -- and sometimes even if they don't -- then your defection harms you, because their defection (or something else) put candidate A behind candidate C. Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
> Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression.
It has less information content. If you roll a D10 and then assign 10/10 to candidate B if it's above a 6 and 1/10 if it isn't, the voting system only gets a single bit of information from you, whereas assigning the equivalent score gives it >3 bits of information. That only matters if the election is very close, but it always only matters if the election is very close.
In 2024 there were dozens of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes:
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_State_legisl...
This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.
Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.
Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.
> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.
There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.
> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.
> It has less information content.
Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).
If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.
The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging. There are legitimate non-mistake reasons to do that.
> Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me.
You're not trying to get them to copy you, you're trying to devise a strategy that maximizes your advantage in the event that other people in exactly the same situation as you come to the same conclusion. In other words, knowing that people using the same reasoning as you will copy you, what reasoning do you choose to use?
> The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives.
It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
Or to consider it another way, think of it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. You sure you want to make "defect" your first move when the aggregate outcome will be public and there will be future elections?
> My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
Voting is a perverse incentive for you. It takes time to cast a vote, the chances of it determining the outcome are entirely negligible and so is any notion that the candidates will know, much less change their behavior, based on whether you as an individual cast a vote. It's why so many people stay home, and everyone who doesn't is spending their own time to do otherwise because they altruistically prefer that the system work than that they save the time it takes them to do something that yields no personal benefit.
> You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1.
You're ignoring the probabilistic part. It's not scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the same time. You don't know if it's scenario 1 or scenario 2, that's the thing that's indeterminate, and you have to fill out your ballot not knowing that. Then if you assign 10/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 1, you've given the election to B over A. But if you assign 1/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 2, you've given the election to C over B. Neither of those are in your interest, so you have the personal incentive to reduce their probabilities by assigning candidate B a score in the middle of the range.
> If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on.
Because that's a trade off. There is no single "most important value". You want both for A to score higher than B and for B to score higher than C. Assigning a lower score to B makes one of the things you want more likely and the other one less likely. If you judge them to be equally important and equally probable then you should assign B a score in the middle to hedge your bets. If you judge one to be more important or more likely then you should weight the score in proportion to how much of your vote you're willing to spend to make one possibility more likely at the expense of the other. Assigning the maximal or minimal score assumes that you prioritize one thing entirely at the expense of the other. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.
> Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum.
Except that you're trading each of those increments against the probability of the other thing you want.
> The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
Also, what benefit is being achieved by forcing ordinary voters to choose their vote using random number generation instead of simply allowing them to write down the number they would have used as the threshold?
"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.
> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.
Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.
So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.
> There is no single "most important value".
You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.
> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.
1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game. https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.
I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):
- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.
- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.
- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.
> and that leads to a greater NET utility
This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.
The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...
Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:
- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.
- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.
- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly
The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.
http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
it would help you to spend at least 30 seconds researching a complex field like voting methods before asking a deeply misguided question like this.
These are goods things.
It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.
Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.
Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.
What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
A constitution isn't just words, it creates a structure that exists in actual reality. The day before the tyrant comes you have multiple branches and levels of government. That stuff doesn't instantaneously cease to exist if they try to rip up the piece of paper, and its purpose is to fight against anyone who tries to rip it up.
If it fails at that purpose, your constitution contained insufficient checks and balances.(Notice that several of the ones in the original US constitution have been removed, and that was a mistake.)
This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.
People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has. As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.
What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.
If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.
I'm currently paying for proton mail, but I'll be migrating away for it once my current period expires, exactly because it's not full-featured.
It has the worst search I have ever seen in a mail client. Even after enabling content search it's as good as utterly useless.
Entshittification continues...
Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...
It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.
Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.
The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.
The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.
I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.
Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.
They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal
You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.
There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and retained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark
It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.
Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.
Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.
"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.
by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.
The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.
Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.
There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.
You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.
What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?
The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.
Why randomly, if you're aiming for objects in an known orbit?
> with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
If you miss one — and you probably will without active guidance, imagine aiming said gun at an SUV seven time zones away — everything's in a different place by your next close approach. Your ball bearings and the target both, thanks to chaotic pertubations, boosts, drag, etc.
Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.
The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...
Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.
It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.
No comments yet
Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.
I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.
Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.
E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.
There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.
But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.
By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)
Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)
It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.
To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".
It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.
Best I could find as a non Swiss:
> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".
(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)
Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?
This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.
> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.
See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium
Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.
I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.
Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.
Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.
Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.
Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail. Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account. Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients
https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge
I'm not too familiar with it, but we're building Marco (https://marcoapp.io) and a customer just showed it to me recently.
Exactly. Were the fear mongers and authoritarians so successful that the infected organism starts acting against its own wellbeing?