Elon Musk’s Starlink could be used to transmit Australian election voting results (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by suddenlyme@lemm.ee to c/australia@aussie.zone

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Elon Musk’s Starlink could be used to transmit Australian election voting results

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[-] Lasagna@lemmy.ml 49 points 2 weeks ago

What a great idea! Musk messing around with election infrastructure in the USA definitely wasn’t suspicious.

[-] suddenlyme@lemm.ee 16 points 2 weeks ago

I know right! It is very concerning

[-] dumblederp@aussie.zone 24 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

starlink internet / news.com.au / "Dutton25 campaign eats a fat shit over election results"

Musk is a fuck head and we should avoid starlink because of Musk rather than the service itself.

[-] nonentity@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 weeks ago

I’m not at all a fan of the ketamine clown, but it’s literally just a dumb pipe.

If you’re truly concerned about the integrity of data passed over it, treat it as one of many multiplexed channels, and use out-of-band cryptographic validation, which any serious voting system design should include regardless.

[-] Photuris@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 weeks ago

We should 100%, unironically go back solely to paper ballots. Even if they take months to tally up.

[-] rcbrk@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 weeks ago

These are Australian elections -- it is 100% paper ballots.

https://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/counting/

The starlink thing is just a backup link for communicating election-night preliminary count data counted by election staff at the booths. Then the ballots are transported to counting centres for the official count. Full legal results aren't known for a couple of weeks.

[-] Salvo@aussie.zone 9 points 2 weeks ago

Still not a good enough reasons to use Starlink.

We should be investing in making sure all Voting Locations have proper telecommunication infrastructure.

Most voting locations are schools and most schools are connected to the NBN.

[-] zero_gravitas@aussie.zone 5 points 2 weeks ago

In the article, the AEC says Starlink is only a backup.

Also, there's a lot of remote polling locations where the only options are satellite-based - so if they're planning to use the NBN satellites (Sky Muster), but a backup is required, Starlink makes sense for that.

[-] Lasagna@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 weeks ago

Sure. But I do wonder why he’s so keen to get involved here. Don’t trust it for one bit.

[-] jonne@infosec.pub 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah exactly, sick of seeing the stupidest conspiracies about starlink. If you use https, there's fuck all he can do to the stuff you send over it, except maybe block it. I'm all for not using it because he's a Nazi you shouldn't give money to, but the only tampering he did was splash a bunch of money around for ads and dirty tricks (like promising money in exchange for votes, which should definitely be illegal but the FEC decided not to look into?).