Target audience and security (was: Re: [Demexp-dev] Thoughts on voting machines)

[David MENTRE]

Hello Brian,

Brian Hurt <address@hidden> writes:

> One thing you don't make clear: who is our target audience?  Are we 
> talking about online preference polling, online community organization 
> (eg Debian), "non-political" votes (eg American Idol), or official 
> political votes?

We are targeting a system where every person, from every country, could
"enter"[1] the system and asks questions, responses and vote on them, in
the open manner as defined on the democratic experience project
description.

We are *not* targeting an electrinic voting system for "classic"
elections. Other people and free software projects are doing it.

> This is a non-trivial question.  How much security do we need?  

We need a very very strong security. Enough security that you, as a
computer literate people, would trust the system. Enough peer review
that people would have confidence in it. 

We know that we must define and implement such a system and that is a
difficult and very risky task. But we have decided to do it because we
believe in our project. When Linus started Linux or Stallman started
gcc, it seemed impossible at that time to do what they have done, with
the *help of others*. [plug here some tens of young voices singing the
joy of becoming the designer of demexp security protocol] 

Yours,
d.

[1] The exact procedure to register somebody on the demexp server is not
    defined yet. However we have some ideas on it.
-- 
 David MENTRÉ <address@hidden>