Sensitive survey questions

Do you steal from your employer? Do you lie on your taxes? Have you cheated on your wife?  If you want to gather statistical information about these questions, you can't ask directly.  Most respondents will lie.  I'm aware of three methods for addressing the problem, two of them are quite clever.

Bogus Pipeline

The first one is not particularly clever.  Hook the subject to a machine.  Tell them it's a lie detector even though it's not. Ask them to respond honestly and pose a few baseline questions to which you know the answer (What's your name? What day is it? etc). After each answer, have the machine indicate that it detected truth.  Now ask the subject to respond deceptively and ask more baseline questions. After each response, have the machine indicate that it detected a lie.  Now hide the machine's truth/lie indicator and ask your questions.  Most subjects will tell the truth.

This is called a bogus pipeline. It's complicated to implement, requires physical access to the subject and not as accurate as other techniques.

Randomized Response

Ask the subject to flip a coin but don't tell you what it is.  If it's heads, they should answer truthfully. If it's tails, they should answer yes (or whatever the socially unfavorable answer is).  Now ask your question.  Applying some simple math to the aggregate responses, you can accurately calculate the percentages you want to know.

This one's pretty helpful, but it requires the subject to have a coin (who uses coins anymore?).  The subject must also be smart enough to recognize that the coin gives him deniability. It seems obvious, but it's not obvious to everyone.

Unmatched Count

Construct an innocuous survey along these lines: "How many of the following statements are true about you? I own a dog. I drink coffee. I've been married. I have brown hair."  Construct a second survey, identical to the first but add your sensitive statement, "I cheat on my taxes".  For each subject, randomly give them one survey or the other.  Calculate the average answer for each type of survey.  The difference between the two averages tells you the percentages you want to know.

This one's my favorite. Since the subject only tells you their final count, it's obvious to them that they've divulged no sensitive information.  The math for analyzing the results is similarly easy.

Do you know of any other techniques?

Switching to OpenBSD

Short story:

After 12 years, I switched from macOS to OpenBSD.  It's clean, focused, stable, consistent and lets me get my work done without any hassle.

Long story:

When I first became interested in computers, I thought operating systems were fascinating. For years I would reinstall an operating system every other weekend just to try a different configuration: MS-DOS 3.3, Windows 3.0, Linux 1.0 (countless hours recompiling kernels).  In high school, I settled down and ran OS/2 for 5 years until I graduated college. I switched to Linux after college and used it exclusively for 5 years. I got tired of configuring Linux, so I switched to OS X for the next 12 years, where things just worked.

I was pretty happy with OS X.  It gave me Unix and mostly got out of the way so that I could write software.  I wrote about enjoying Apple's simplicity.  Snow Leopard even spent an entire release cycle just fixing bugs and improving performance.

But Snow Leopard was 7 years ago. These days, OS X is like running a denial of service attack against myself.  macOS has a dozen apps I don't use but can't remove. Updating them requires a restart.  Frequent updates to the browser require a restart.  A minor XCode update requires me to download a 4.3 GB file.  My monitors frequently turn off and require a restart to fix.  A system's availability is a function of mean time between failure and mean time to repair.  For macOS, both numbers are heading in the wrong direction for me. I don't hold any hard feelings about it, but it's time for me to get off this OS and back to productive work.

So where do I go now?  We own 5 Chromebooks and they have great availability.  Updates are infrequent, small, fast and nearly transparent.  Unfortunately, I need an OS where I can write and compile code.  I also want it to run on older, commodity hardware so I can replace a broken laptop for $400 instead of $2,000.

I considered several Linux distributions.  Lubuntu seemed promising, but it was too bloated for my taste.  A couple years ago, I tried Ubuntu on a Dell XPS Developer Edition for a few months.  Even with hardware designed for Linux, it was too fragile. Desktop Linux has also become even more complex than when I used it a decade ago.  I just want to get my work done, not feed and maintain an OS.

I was reminded of OpenBSD during the Heartbleed scare.  While everyone else was complaining about OpenSSL and claiming that open source had failed, the OpenBSD developers quietly drew their machetes and hacked out hundreds of thousands of lines of bad code, forking off LibreSSL where they can keep it clean and stable.  The OpenBSD community is like that: focus on what's really important, hold your code to a high standard, ignore all the distractions.  They're not trying to live in the past, just trying to make the future a place worth living.

Anyway, I found OpenBSD very refreshing, so I created a bootable thumb drive and within an hour had it up and running on a two-year old laptop.  I've been using it for my daily work for the past two weeks and it's been great.  Simple, boring and productive.  Just the way I like it.  The documentation is fantastic.  I've been using Unix for years and have learned quite a bit just by reading their man pages.  OS releases come like clockwork every 6 months and are supported for 12.  Security and other updates seem relatively rare between releases (roughly one small patch per week during 6.0).  With syspatch in 6.1, installing them should be really easy too.

I also enjoy that most things are turned off in OpenBSD by default.  The base installation is sparse.  It assumes that I'll enable a service or install a tool if I want it.   So I'm not constantly facing updates for software I never use.

My experience with OpenBSD is still young, but I really like what I see so far.