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Vote Tabulator Security Hole Exposed
Doc Ruby writes "Black Box Voting has exposed a security hole in Diebold machines that tabulate votes collected from electronic voting machines. A code entered into the tabulator's user interface duplicates the "secure" counts into an insecure count which can be changed, and counted instead. The "double books" vulnerability and exploit were reported to the manufacturer over a year ago, and confirmed, while major customers (California and Washington states) were notified shortly thereafter. In spite of some revisions, the latest version of the software remains insecure. Diebold voting machines running GEMS version 1.18.x are vulnerable, running in about three dozen states. Although the software is widely deployed, and scheduled for use in shortly upcoming elections, risk mitigations are available, mostly protocols restricting physical or network access to the machines. Other auditing/accountability measures for ensuring only trusted access to the system are recommended."
How it's gonna turn out is this time Bush not only wins the electoral college vote he's gonna get the popular vote to.
I got into a conversation today with two other people in the dorm lounge last night and we went over topics ranging from RTS games to Portland, Maine's upcoming gigantic Elvis impersonator convention, ending up discussing Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?, at which point I stepped in.
I told them about what I do for kicks and they thought that trolling was funny, so I decided to show them some of my work. I haven't really been doing much on the same lines as Adequacy, the most controversial site on the Internet or SomethingAwful's Truth Press, so I realized once they came to my room to browse through my stuff that I didn't really have anything to show them (the overly-technical flames by Theo are not really accessable to a broader audience). So one of them leaves the room to pick up his CD case that he left lying around somewhere and I remember that, hey, Trollaxor wrote some funny stuff in his journal, maybe I could show that to them.
So I load up Death on Route 69, and he sort of got a kick out of it. I said, "Hey, you want to see something really fucking disgusting and funny?" "Oh, sure."
Now, let me tell you first of all that this is someone who gets his kicks from going though SomethingAwful's Photoshop Phriday galleries and laughing at pictures depicting baby mutilation, so I figure he's a pretty tolerant guy. He just seemed like he'd get a kick out of the Linux Party. So I loaded it up in IE and let him read through it.
"Uhh...," he said as he read through it. "That's really fucking disturbing. Do you really think homosexual rape is funny?" He looked at me funny.
"Well, OK, maybe that's one of his bad examples, but there are other ones... like this one!"
I loaded up "QA: Dying of AIDS"
"OK, I GET IT. HE'S GAY, OK?"
This seriously creeped him out. I'm glad I didn't show him my gay Emad posts or, God forbid, my recent post posing as a woman.
All in all, my increased interaction in these closing weeks of my taste of college life has served to finally give me perspective into what a warped individual I have become. In seeing other people's reactions to my sense of humor, I have become fearful of what I really am.. I put on a facade when I interact with nearly fucking everyone, a quiet, polite boy who holds the door for girls and helps people study. But something else hides beneath the exterior, to use a rather trite, overblown term, and tonight the facade slipped.
Today, I am deleting all the porn from my computer. Emad will never post again, if you want the account, you can have it. Theo has sunk into such a small, esoteric reality that I don't even know what to do with him anymore. I won't visit sites like goatse.info again. Hey, it's funny guys, but that's what scares me. I can only hope that it's not too late for me to change.
One of the suggestions for "Diebold" is "Diablo" Accident? I think not...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
I'm a conservative, and this shit is even pissing ME off.
For that matter, use this email! Early bird gets the worm http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-8f4191c0b8-dd12e91 420-e99ddd1927
Shameless self promotion
Free iPods
I'll give away a GMail invite to the first 3 people who complete a Netscape or Blockbuster offer (because they're instantaneous credit. You can cancel as soon as the offer credit goes through, usually within 1 day.)
Yeah, you know all those raging liberal mobs who like to run around and beat up young republicans with baseball bats.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
(1) expressing disagreement with someone is not intolerance
(2) my sig is a paraphrase of the dictionary.com definition of liberal ; specifically definitions 1a and 1b.
(3) the intent of my sig is to provoke the question: "Given the definition of the word 'liberal', how has our society reached a point where the word is mostly employed as an insult?".
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.