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AnalogBytes Conference: Section One, Technological Foundations of Democracy

Hi, Habr

Firstly, I want to introduce a new conference. Secondly, I want to talk about what will be on it, and why in general we started a separate blog for it. Thirdly, I want to give a discount on tickets to Habrovsk citizens.


Moscow, March 5, 2020, InfoSpace About

six months ago, we and a number of comrades with whom we regularly met at work, travel, conferences, and so on, realized that we regularly discuss the impact of technology on society - and not in the context of “ now, children don’t get out of smartphones already, but nowadays they drove football ”, but in a much more interesting one.

More specifically, how can social processes change when modern technologies are connected to them. Obviously, this is an interesting junction between the socio-political and the technological, where there are unresolved issues on both sides. They tried to ask the outside world. It turned out that, surprisingly, these issues are systematically discussed little and poorly, in Russia - almost nothing, except for one-sided activism.

We are practical people, so we made a simple conclusion from this: if you want something done well, do it yourself.

Therefore -  the AnalogBytes conference. Soon, March 5th. Under the cut will be the first block of reports (the division into sessions is very arbitrary, but somehow you need to divide it), and in front of it there are some speakers and moderators who will be speaking in front of us (random selection and random order):

  • Lex Kravecki , author of The Probabilistic Justification of Direct Democracy
  • Philip Kulin , author of the monitoring of the blockings of Roskomnadzor and the Escher II channel
  • Dmitry Solopov , founder of Kommersant FM and co-founder of Business FM
  • Sergey Nesterovich , sudo.su
  • Artyom Gavrichenkov , Qrator Labs
  • Dmitry Belyavsky , Cryptocom, author of domestic cryptography in OpenSSL
  • Aleksey Shcherbakov , author of the report on the elections in MHD 2019 ( on Habr )

And this is not even half the list.

So, the first group of reports.

Why is democracy and technology in one phrase? Yes, in general, because, firstly, in modern society they are inseparable - democracy is the preferred form of government, if only because all the others we tried turned out to be worse, and we will not get away from technology. Therefore, the question remains only one - how does one affect the other, helps and interferes, and is it also possible to go somewhere further within this particular set?

Here we understand democracy in a broad sense - not only as a form of determining the personalities of the president and parliamentarians, but as a form of managing society at all levels.

Let's go in order.

Lex Kravecki, “The Mathematical Foundations of Direct Democracy ”




As you know, in any discussion, the null hypothesis is that it "makes no sense to discuss at all." In principle, it is the same with democracy: if you say this word, there are people who want to explain that you can’t trust ordinary people the freedom to choose anything other than sausage in the store, they already have problems with sausage.

Here you can argue for a long time and with foam at the mouth about ochlocracy, an enlightened monarchy and all kinds of authoritarianism, but Lex went a little further - and wrote the work “The probabilistic justification of direct democracy” (it is on the website of the publication “ XX2 Century ”, where he works as an editor, and in his LiveJournal ).

It is possible to agree or argue with the conclusions and conclusions, but the main reason why the conference program committee liked this approach is an attempt to finally translate the discussions into a practical plane and engage in analytical justification, and not just links to historical experience on a scale from the managing director to Hitler (sorry).

Round table: Pavel Rassudov, “ Theory and Practice of Direct Democracy ”




Actually, right after Lex’s report, we plan to engage in discussion and debate - at a round table moderated by Pavel Rassudov, the former chairman of the Pirate Party of Russia.

The participants are, of course, Lex Kravetsky, lawyers (it will be interesting to hear their point of view on our technological ideas), now several other people are participating in the approval process, including from the state (here, of course, there is an obvious problem: few officials dared so much to go into an open discussion on similar topics).

Oleg Artamonov, “ Problems and Prospects of Electronic Voting ”




Although your humble servant on the schedule is almost early in the morning, before the round tables, the meaning of my report is rather a continuation of the previous two topics.

Well, that is, ok, let's say you and I decided that direct popular democracy at some serious level, above the voting of apartment owners in the HOA, makes sense. How to implement it now? The obvious way is electronically, because almost every voter in the country has a smartphone.

And here the question arises - is it possible to do this technologically? In compliance with all procedures, secrecy of voting, protection against falsification of results, including by the organizers themselves, and so on?

There are two popular answers to it, and both are incorrect - “no, never!” and "blockchain will save us all."

I’ll give an introductory lecture on how such remote electronic voting systems are built architecturally ( this is all and a lot more), about which problems it’s very important not to forget what has not yet been solved and what are the prospects for the whole thing.

Alexey Shcherbakov, “ E-voting lessons at the 2019 Moscow City Duma ”




Of course, we are not the first in this world to think about how to make electronic voting - moreover, many have already done it: elections to the CSR of 2012, to the Moscow State Duma in 2019, and focuses in Iowa a month ago. In almost all cases, it turned out badly, and it is very important to understand - firstly, why, and secondly, how to do it .

So, about how you do not need to, says Alexei Shcherbakov, an expert in the group that prepared the report for Roman Uneman on the elections to the Moscow City Duma in 2019.

By the way, I highly recommend two articles of this group on Habré for seed - “ Analysis of blockchain-voting data of 2019 in the Moscow City Duma ” and “ Parallel audit in the course of Electronic voting"(We also called Oksana to speak, unfortunately, she already had other plans for these dates).

Dmitry Belyavsky, “ Difficulties in clearing data in real systems ”




Dmitry Belyavsky, an expert in cryptographic systems and author of guest encryption in OpenSSL, will give another detailed analysis of how to do it .

True, it will come from the other side: how not to try to deceive a correctly designed system (spoiler: because you will not succeed, and everyone will be very ashamed).

The report promises to be noisy because Dima, without false modesty, took one of the most resonant topics of last year - WADA's accusations against the Moscow anti-doping laboratory of falsifying the results of analyzes of Russian sportsmen.

Despite the fact that WADA did not even smell like any blockchain and other buzzwords in IT systems, Dmitry will clearly show what exactly and how people were caught trying to trick a complex modern database. The report was filled with specific technical details, and the 62-page official WADA report served as the basis for it .

Artyom Gavrichenkov, “ Protecting Accessibility of Voting Systems ”




And the first of the two final reports is the technical aspects of ensuring the basic functioning of highly loaded systems. You can call it our Highload ++ affiliate.

Artyom Gavrichenkov is a co-founder of the well-known company Qrator Labs, which protects corporate systems from DDOS attacks, and he will tell you what to do to ensure that a highly loaded voting system (just imagine that we have reached the presidential election in Russia is about 110 million users, which will fall on the server, and at least hundreds of people who will try to deliberately try to break these servers in order to disrupt the process) survived the most eventful day of their lives.

Vitaly Ardelyan, “ Ensuring the Reliability of Highly Loaded Systems ”




The second report on the same topic was from an expert in the development of highly loaded corporate systems Vitaly Ardelyan.

Somewhere else a month ago, I would probably have to explain to an outsider - not an IT - public, why we pay so much attention to this purely IT topic. But it seems that the organizers of the caucus in Iowa, whose information system crashed for a day and did not go up for 24 hours and kept the results of these same caucus, explained for us: the scandal was on such a scale that echoes were heard even in Russia (mainly in the form of mocking comments about the “wrong” results, which turned out to be necessary to recount - and that is characteristic, the tone and content of the comments in the USA themselves did not differ much this time).

Conclusion


This is the first of the three blocks of the conference, and the largest.

In total, we are currently planning 11 reports and 3 round tables - a complete list is on the site , and in the next two articles, tomorrow and Monday, I will give announcements.

If we divide the conference by topics, then in all we touch on three of them:

  • Direct democracy by electronic means - is it possible?
  • Society and technology - issues of the media, media and education in the digital age
  • Freedom and fragmentation of the Internet - including attempts to regulate the Web

We will try to organize the most open discussion format - not only between speakers, but also with questions from the audience (and, of course, each speaker can be caught after the presentation), so if you are interested in the topics you have mentioned, be sure to come in person.

Moreover, we will try to organize the most honest discussion format - we are not just categorically against filtering speakers for their political views or positions on the issues discussed, we try to recruit people with different, including opposing, views on the problem.

We will try to ensure the maximum presence on the site of the media - and not only Russian ones, for example, the film crew of the German television channel ZDF has already been accredited (if you are the media or a well-known blogger and also want to be accredited, write to abconf@abconf.ru ). We want these issues to be covered and discussed as widely as possible.

The conference will be held in Moscow, a ten-minute walk from the Kropotkinskaya metro station, on March 5, all day long - from 9:30 a.m. to 5-18 p.m. The schedule is on the site .

Admission, alas, is generally paid. Tickets in denomination cost 5,000 rubles, but for Habr we want to make a discount - enter the abchabr promotional code upon purchase . (here, now everyone will definitely notice where to click)




Without exception, all reports and round tables will be recorded on video and posted here in our blog on Habré. But, firstly, with a delay (operators and editors also need time to work, not to mention decoding the text), and secondly, nothing will replace live communication with speakers.

So come.

PS I'm not a UFO, but still ask: if you have an irresistible desire to open a political discussion in the comments about personal views and preferences - try to keep it all the same. If you want to publicly say something constructive and are not satisfied with the format of the comment - come on March 5, come to the start of the round tables to me, and I promise to make sure that they give you a microphone.

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