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Diebold Chases Links To Leaked Memos
bllfrnch writes "Mary Hodder, over at The Berkeley School of Journalism's bIPlog, reports that electronic voting bigwig Diebold has begun sending cease-and-desist letters to universities whose students are linking to hijacked internal company memos that elucidate the company's level of respect for citizens' right to vote. Particularly shocking is the line: "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.""
The DMCA is quite clear in its provisions for allowing questionable material to stay up. BlackBoxVoting had no need to roll over in the first place. The simply needed to submit a DMCA counter notice.
Simply send a counter notice stating that the documents do not breach copyright, and put the website back up. This moves the obligation to Diebold to bring suit!
Be careful to not overanalyze that "illegal-votine" quote. It appears where a sig normally does (sans the '--'). It could just be cynacism... after all, if I took the quotes at the bottom of the /. main page this seriously I would probably stop reading the page! Good journalism is in part good history and anthropology.
Sam
Yes, the power of apt-get could be used to form a type of ad-hoc distributed network for the distribution of the Diebold memo, without fear of a single server being shutdown making the document disappear. What we did for the Fed was to create a set of apt.sources files which contained the addresses of a bunch of mirror servers which contained the documents of interest. When a user needed to find a document, they would simply issue an apt-get instyall Document command at their workstation, and apt-get would do the rest.
It gets better. When a new revision of the document was released, it was a simple task for the user to perform an apt-get upgrade Document, and the latest version was dragged across from what ever server happened to be available from their apt.sources file. We even spent a couple of weeks hacking dselect to launch OpenOffice when necessary to create a kind of crude distributed document management system. The users loved it! It's the UNIX way!
But anyway, back to the problem at hand. What is needed are a bunch of Debian servers to host the offending Diebold memo which has been leaked, and for people to start adding these to their apt.sources files. That way, Diebold won't be able to shut down any servers, and if they leak new information, it can easily be upgraded with apt-get upgrade Diebold! apt-get just continues to amaze me.
apt-get free speech!!!
Particularly shocking is the line: "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal."
It's so annoying how people blow these things out of proportion - dude works for a voting machine company and has a sarcastic signature about voting - it's a joke - lighten up - it's like people are looking for things to whine about and then jumping on anything remotely sensational - [grumbles and moves back under bridge]
-P
Why have ONE conviction when you can have TWO?
By DMCAing people who host or link to these documents, they're implicity confirming their validity. I almost wonder if a "deny everything" policy might've worked better for them:
"Nope, never seen those before. Guess somebody thinks it's funny to try to discredit a reliable, trustworthy company like us."
Insead, they've chosen "arrgggh, give those back! You can't show people those - they're secret!". Hmm...
James Bruce
Vice President for Information Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 10-219
Cambridge, MA 02139
XXXXXXXX@mit.edu
Re: Copyright Infringement
Dear Mr. Bruce:
We represent Diebold, Incorporated and its wholly owned subsidiaries Diebold Election Systems, Inc., and Diebold Election Systems ULC (collectively "Diebold").
Diebold is the owner of copyrights in certain correspondence and other material relating to its electronic voting machines, which were stolen from a Diebold computer ("Diebold Property").
It has recently come to our clients' attention that you appear to be hosting a web site that contains Diebold Property. The web site you are hosting infringes Diebold's copyrights because the Diebold Property was reproduced, placed on public display, and is being distributed from this web site without Diebold's consent.
The web site and Diebold Property are identified in a chart attached to this letter.
The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to seek your agreement to the following: (1) to remove and destroy the Diebold Property contained at the web site identified in the attached chart and (2) to destroy any backup copies of the Diebold Property in your possession or under your control.
Please confirm, in writing, that you have complied with the above requests.
To the best of my knowledge and belief the information contained in this notification is accurate as of the time of compilation and, under penalty of perjury, I certify that I am authorized to act on behalf of Diebold.
Our clients reserve their position insofar as costs and damages caused by infringing activity with respect to the Diebold Property. Our clients also reserve their right to seek injunctive relief to prevent further unauthorized use of Diebold Property, including reproduction, distribution, public display, or the creation of derivative works, pending your response to this letter. We suggest you contact your legal advisors to obtain legal advice as to your position.
We await your response within 24 hours.
Very truly yours,
Ralph E. Jocke
INFRINGING MATERIALS POSTED ON:
XXXXXXXXX.net
It's what we use here in the UK.
You go into a little booth with a ballot paper, where you will find a pencil. Mark an X in the box next to the candidate you want, fold up the paper and post it in the ballot box.
It's more auditable and even if the paper, pencils and boxes are manufactured by a company who make no secret of their support for one particular political party, it's difficult to see how it could make any difference.
I'm not trolling - if someone could explain, please do.
First off, I'd like to thank Wired News for linking me a couple of days back regarding this, and Why War? for providing a way for me to get at these files.
Now, then, from a January 2002 memo titled, Nearterm AVTS 4.x roadmap, discussing the classification of a major update as a bugfix:
These are just the sort of people I want in charge of the machines that people vote on in my election. No, really. [/sarcasm]
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
I tend to agree, but what if you had a doctor who's signature block said "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" or a politician who's signature block said "Ask yourself what you can do for ME"...the fact is that sarcasm in certain forms, and certain places is innapropriate and it doesn't take a great deal of thought to tell when it is no longer apropriate.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
The 'last war' with Iraq had been going on since 1991. If you understand basic international diplomacy and what a cease fire really means, you will understand that the war was never declared over, just an end to overt hostilities was declared between the US (and coalition forces) and Iraq.
It was similiar to what continues on today between North and South Korea, those two countries are at war and have been at war for over 50 years. Yes, 50 years. There was never a declaration of peace between North and South Korea, just a cease fire armistice.
I can't blame you for not knowing. I have the impression that most people aren't really taught such truths in school anymore. These days, for one to actually learn the truth, they have to hunt for it themselves.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I've lived in several communities in the US and have been voting since 1979 and I've never even seen a voting machine. I've always voted on paper forms that were designed to be read by an optical scanner. Other people have never seen anything but punch ballots, or "voting machines" with pull levers that mark ballots for people.
There is no country wide standard of how voting is conducted.
People outside the US may not be aware of this, but local governments (cities, counties and states) are extremely important in our system. US states are pretty much exclusively in charge of setting standards on how voting is conducted. For example, while every state has secret ballots, this is only a widely accepted custom; well into the nineteenth century people voted in some places by testifying publicly at the local courthouse. States typically don't have very stringent standardization. Local municipalities or counties (depending on the part of the country) actually conduct the polling and have a great deal of leeway in how they do it.
Combine this local autonomy with the typically frugal funding of municipal functions compared to what a European would expect, our entrepreurial spirit and our love of technological quick fixes, it's pretty much inevitable that there should be an array of half baked systems out there. The Diebold system in question is only the latest.
I wonder whether this chaos has a kind of protective effect, at least on the national and statewide level. Think about this: barring a knife edge result like the last presidential election, the only way to rig a statewide or presidential election would require undermining a variety of systems in a variety of places, using a variety of methods. The chancs of avoiding detection decrease hyperbolically in the number of exploits attempted.
The real danger with electronic voting is that in our post-Florida mania for a technical quick fix, a de facto electronic voting standard will emerge. This has happened in the past, for example in states adopting the secret ballot. However, electronic voting provides a single point of vulnerability, in which a rogue staffer with sufficient skills could conceivably change the composition of the US government. Americans tend to dismiss the possibility of voting manipulation by corporate interests as class warfare paranoia, but think of the opportunity this presents to certain foreign intelligence agencies.
What we ought to do is something that has never been done in the US: set real standards for polling methods, especially (but not limited to) electronic ones. I think most people here understand what this should include: things like auditabiliy, indepedent security analysis as part of system acceptance, etc. These standards could be implemented by multiple vendors, and for security reasons we would probably want to have at least four or five major players, and set maximums for the percentage of an electorate in a state voting on a particular vendor's machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hello, I'm the Boston University mirror.
I expect that BU will receive a DMCA notice in the next day or two, and ask me to remove the memos. Although I would very much like to find this, I simply don't have the resources to get into a legal battle (and it's doubtful BU would stick its neck out for me).
But that's not even necessary. If I could just find two people willing to put up mirrors once my mirror goes down (I've already found one), than their takedown notice will have the net effect of putting another copy of the memos online. This seems to be the best overall strategy for those who can't fight this legally.
If a willing mirror could email me, and let me know what the url of your mirror is, I'd really appreciate it.
chrisn1 [at] bu [dot] edu