The internal state of the machine is not observable and not auditable. Anything stored in a computer can be falsified and the voter cannot know that it recorded their vote correctly. Unless the printing you are referring to is that it prints a paper ballot for each voter that they can check and then drop in a ballot box, then there is a step in the process that scrutineers can't have eyes on. Even if the software is open source and the scrutineers got to watch it being compiled and installed on the machines, there are so many unobservables. Computers are literally billions of times more complicated and harder to audit than pencil and paper.

The only electronic voting system I would even begin to entertain trusting is one that basically just fills the ballot out for you to make sure it is legible, and that you can validate the paper ballot. Such a system could then also keep its own count, giving a much quicker unofficial count before the paper ballots are counted, but I don't really think it's worth it. It is still an extremely complex machine that it would be easy to hide some sort of surveillance/wireless connection in, and anyone who can inspect the running total counts can also use that to determine how each person that goes through the booth voted.

There is value in the brutal simplicity of pencil and paper, folding your ballot, and putting it in a box. It's a system anyone can understand and that the human eye can audit.

Heads up that you should still be able to sideload over ADB (the origin of the term on android, after all) without the wait, so setting up a new device before the 24 hours are up is still doable.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. The phonetic alphabet is called that because each letter/word in the alphabet was chosen to be one that started with the corresponding phoneme and that the set of words were between them phonetically unambiguous. Phonics is a way of teaching reading and writing that is based on the phonetics of words and how they relate to the written form.

This reads like a parody to me. They almost seem to be trying to find a way to warp and misunderstand even the most basic concepts to contort themselves to miss the point. I honestly am baffled as to how such a seemingly-contrived misinterpretation of absolutely everything at every step of the way could happen by accident. But I suppose the internet is a billion monkeys at a billion typewriters so maybe it had to happen eventually.

I believe the thread was automatically locked due to community reports and then a mod manually unlocked it?

No, I have been trying to actually be helpful and informative for people trying to understand this article and video, given that referring to what was done here as a digital system is functionally meaningless and misleading. I am pretty sure the pedantry started with you talking about CPUs being electronic.

But at this point I believe your use of language in this discussion to be so absurdly reductive that I do not think this conversation is salvageable. What you appear to take issue with seems to keep changing and refining until the argument appears to be that any system that communicates information is apparently a digital communications system, so long as you can imagine an arbitrary scheme to interpret at least one bit of information from the signal, regardless of whether that was the message intended to be communicated. It would appear we have ended up with a "digital" storage system wherein a human observes the signal and decides one bit of whether or not it looks like a bird. Though I suppose "bird" was the only symbol in the protocol, so it may actually be a zero-bit system.

If the scheme successfully communicates zero bits of information, you might as well stop bothering to listen for the signal, and miss nothing of value. In fact I should probably do exactly that with this thread.

Yes, that would be a digital modulation. That is decidedly not what is being done with the bird. The input data is the "PNG" of the bird, which is then not digitally modulated, but converted to an analogue signal and later redigitized. If the file has been converted to a series of pulses at different frequencies (the equivalent of your black and white squares) that would be a digital modulation. I am not arguing that this is not possible. My original comment explicitly says I would like to see a follow up with actual modulation. But just because it is possible to run dialup over an analogue phone line does not mean that calling your grandma on that same phone is a digital communication system. Some computers back in the day could modulate and record data on commercial audio cassettes. That does not mean that if I record something off the radio and play it back later that's a digital copy of the song.

I suppose you have caught me out slightly lacking in precision or pedantry. A digital to analogue modulation scheme is able to exactly reconstruct the original digital signal within the design tolerances for noise and distortion. Yes, eventually a signal may degrade or be corrupted, but prior to that point the reproduction is literally and exactly perfect. That exactitude is just about the definition of a digital system. This bird system is incapable of reproducing the input image of the bird exactly. It is not a digital communication system, unless you consider the "PNG" of the bird to have not been the message being carried.

It isn't a digital channel because it does not reproduce digital data. Unless it's a one-bit signal of "does this look like a bird? yes/no", but then the human making that assessment is part of the channel. To claim this is a digital system would require us to be so reductive as to redefine the meaning of the word.

Yes, the near-identical sentences (only drawing a distinction between the processes where one exists) would indicate that. The "heard by the bird" and "reproduced by the bird" steps were also the same. But this is necessary context to make clear the digital data ("bit-stream") that is being modulated into the signal.

It is far from "exactly the same". The similarity is only in that both go through the same analogue channel. The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly, while the spectrogram cannot.

The article title says they converted a PNG and the bird was able to "recall the file", and yet it produced an indisputably different file. That it looks vaguely the same to the cursory human observer does not make it the same file.

Precisely... And digital modulation's entire purpose is for a digital signal to survive those distortions bit-for-bit perfect. Even if we call the digitally-generated spectrogram digital information, the bird simply did not reproduce it exactly. Whatever time, frequency, and amplitude resolution you apply to the signal, if it's low enough that the bird reproduced the signal exactly within that discretized scheme, then it simply did not achieve 2 MB/s. I would bet that the Shannon capacity of this bird is simply nowhere near 2 MB/s.

Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.