[atlarge-discuss] To protect our mailing list and votes against manipulations

["J-F C. (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@club-internet.fr>]

Dear Members,
when I decided before going away to carry to its end the mission I was 
elected for, I wanted to:

1. get the icannatlarge Panel elected. This has been done. I observe that 
those who are the more vocal against it are among those who are benefiting 
from it. I hope they will however carry their duties.

2. clean the list from the wrong addresses. I have now, I suppose, most of 
the elements. I will try to spend the necessary time to provide every 
icannatlarge Panelists or the new Polling Committee with the complete list. 
The one we received it, with the indication of the wrong/changed mailing 
addresses. The first one is available upon a vote of the Panel (these are 
the terms imposed by Joop last year). Eric and Bruce can also deliver it. 
The updated list time and politeness of some permitting.

3. protect this community from the way it is manipulated in achieving 
nothing. First phase was carried yesterday. It demonstrated the use of 
robots. I am sorry, but the only way to catch them was the way I chose: 
robots had to react to an unexpected situation to be exposed. I must say I 
did not expect the community to be so controlled and the flak to protect 
the robots to be so important. This obviously reduced my ability to uncover 
everything. I apologize for the inconvenience and for telling it was a 
mistake of mine: I needed to look clumsy and to irritate the flak to limit 
the time of the necessary exposure for confirming discrepancies. There are 
now elements enough to seriously protect ourselves against current 
manipulations.

Intended actions.

1. Against the Manipulation of the Votes

I published the database of the votes. They are anonymous. But there are 
the voters IDs. There are 216 voters which is the second most significant 
vote I think of icannatlarge. I am surprised the community  only reacted on 
identities (who is who). This blurred the real issue which are 
manipulations (who made elected who). I expected some mathematicians would 
run the data into some matrix system to uncover patterns, the alleged 
tampering of mine, and how possibly voters for one could be suspicious, or 
only from local support (we are a small group), or regular random voters. 
Another thing: new elected persons were questioned as being "unknown", but 
no one questioned the results of old timers.

I have not the mathematical capacity, but may be can we find help to 
develop a program to analyses and certify the sincerity of our elections. 
This would take the VIDs of the votes, dates of the votes, etc. and both 
help discovering possible interferences or tampering and find patterns. 
This would make unacceptable a vote where each ballot would not be fully 
disclosed (anonymized at reception or through the online voting system), 
with its own identification and its MD5 at voting time (real time reported 
and registered).

2. Against the Manipulation of the List

the robots seems to work very simply. They permit "list coaches" to best 
deteriorate the climate and the efficiency of the list. To do that they 
provide figures on the "performances" of their selected "team". They can 
put them into Excel tables to get trends, correct attitudes, report to 
sponsors, use for their own benefit, may be also to forecast the danger 
represented by a list or by an individual. The motivation mechanics they 
use necessarily lead to troll feeding, clones and daily shifts 
impersonalizations.

These coaches cannot be exposed easily and there will always be new ones. 
The members of the teams are often real activists, with a special temper 
and an image, being used: they just do not know someone is partly pulling 
their own strings. This means the only way to protect ourselves is to 
expose the system and make it obsolete by being known and used by everyone.

For that I plan to build, to tune from experience and to make available a 
GPL program everyone will be able to run and possibly adapt for his own use 
(and check if he could himself be manipulated). It will read the mails of 
the list and produce the score of _everyone_. Again I am no mathematician, 
but I suppose that sweeping scoring parameters may help uncovering 
patterns. Again, immediate scores will mean nothing, but their evolution 
against the general list trend will probably mean a lot.


In making that type of analysis public, I expect to reduce the capacity of 
the our best "performers" to hamper the "internance" lists and to protect 
ourselves against e-terrorism. We are discovering the netocracy. Using 
inappropriate solutions from another world and being noisy about their 
survival, only permits some to try to manipulate us and to delay our 
action. I am not engaging into witch hunt, but certainly proposing a 
simple, but I bet efficient, fight against "witchcraft", and "brain spamming".

I suppose this will create me many opponents. :-)
Anyone with good C development skills and/or mathematical analysis 
competence is welcome.
jfc


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