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Chimp Can Hack Diebold Electronic Voting System
rbuysse writes "A million monkeys can write Shakespeare, but it only takes one to mess up an election. Scoop here." Blackboxvoting is behind this demonstration; there's also a lengthy thread on the Bugtraq mailing list.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Is that chimp one of the Diebold engineers?
This is interesting, but why would George W. want to do such a thing?
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
A new denial of service attack is spreading through the wild. It involves hurling feces...
Hey now, is that any way to talk about our beloved president? Besides, we won't know until election day whether that's true.
Electric Monkey Pants
Incase of the enevitable slashdotting, here's the movie of the chimp hacking the vote.
A million monkeys can write Shakespeare, but it only takes one to mess up an election.
I'm a proud Bush voter, You insensitive clod!
Sigs are for the weak.
Final_Results.Mdb
Look for this attatchment on the Electoral College's Outlook Express inbox.
If you think
Troll, perhaps, funny, I think so, flamebait? This mod's smoking something...
a hacker monkey's uncle Sam. In comparison with some of our current politicians, my money's on the monkey.
bau bau chicka chicka mau mau
http://www.blackboxvoting.org.nyud.net:8090/baxter /baxterVPR.mov
Although it's pretty weak... just a bunch of cuts of a monkey and a computer.
That's why the liberal media, like Fox, is reporting on it.
Am I the only one who thinks that the only adequate punishment that is gonna put a stop to the Diebold-esue shenanigans is to prosecute the company into the ground and then go after every VP/Salesman who lies about the severity of the problems and the coverup?
This Has Got To Stop!
(Yes... been sitting on the sidelines, but I am about fed up)
Go Getem Ahnold!
I
just so you won't make anthropologists cringe the rest of your life, you might be interested to know that a chimpanzee is an ape... not a monkey.
I'm not sure why any of this should be surprising...
is overrated anyway
Almost as cluttered as their TV screen, which consists mostly of swooshing flags, alarming "alert" tickers, and melodramatic banners like "AMERICA UNDER PERSUASION"
Fox sucks, program it out of your clicker
Try the US Civil Rights Commission. (Their report on the Florida electoral fraud is available here: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm )
#define DRM chmod 000
PS...that's not just an ordinary Chimp.
Here is an action photo of the actual hack.
If you think
So the elections can be rigged easily...
"Dacek said Wednesday that she fears that critics of the new voting system may try to physically sabotage the machines."
Wow. That's so..... scaremongering.....
Gentoo Sucks
Fortunately, we have much better chimps on our side than the Russians or the Chinese do.
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."
- Wally O'Dell, CEO Diebold
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
You mean like this? I've seen the Diebold speech quoted on numerous left-leaning sites.
They're not suing (yet?) to suppress the information.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Was the monkey name Spank, like Spank, the monkey? Or "l33t |-|4xx0R 5P4|\|"?!
When pressing the touchpad I guess his trainer must have said something like:
NO! Bad monkey, BAD monkey, BAD MONKEY!!!! NO!!!!!....... ARGH! Dam Hackers!
I'm european, you know... in this side of the Atlantic we mark a piece of paper with an X on who we vote. And yes, a monkey can also do it, but at least we don't spend billions in tech just to keep all the monkeys voting...
I've never seen the president use a computer before. You know, since he clearly doesn't write his own speeches.
Links would speak for themselves.
E pluribus unum
Because even in the political section, this is an IT centric board, dumb fuck.
The crock is you thinking all of the rejected stories had anything to do with "TECH".
The Diebold story is interesting because of the computerized voting angle. Not sure where the "news for nerds" aspect is in the "Iraq Diary" story, or the "Quick exit" story.
If I want to read 100 stories about Iraq daily, there's tons of other sites spewing them out by the ton. I come to Slashdot for tech-related stories.
rather than going 'all electronic' there are not more efforts to have a hybrid paper-computer model, off the top of my head:
- the voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper token with a barcode that contains the polling ID station ID and a sequential number (note that the ID is not humanly readable, important for privacy)
- the voter goes in the box, which has a touch screen and an 'easy' UI, voter inserts the paper token in the box which scans it
- voter votes on the touch screen (make it really easy, BIG buttons, BIG text, whatever)
- machine prints out a ballot with the voter's vote in humanly readable form (say, prints out a 'real' ballot with blackened out rectangles on the relevant candidate(s)) and a 2D barcode at the bottom with the vote in machine readable form including the ID on the 'paper token'
- voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
========= election over ===========
the paper token are shipped to the central office, scanned (should be very fast via the 2d barcodes) and votes tabulated accordingly; for an additional level of security you can always count the votes via the 'human readable' part of the ballot before shipping them.
If a recount or anything is necessary there are several safeguards with this system:
- you can't have ballot box stuffing, because 1 'token' = 1 vote and if those ID are generated 'well' you could even double check that all IDs make sense, sort of like a 'there are only so many valid serial numbers' there. Multiple votes with the same 'ID' will be discarded.
- you can't have doubts on the voter intent, they'll vote on the screen *AND* look at the paper copy before putting it in the ballot box later on
- if there is really no trust in the computers no problem, you can just look at the 'human readable' portion of the ballot as many times as you want: no nonsense about hanging chads or anything.
this (or something like it) would cover all the bases in terms of fast results (via scanning ballots, ship them all to a central location and do it), paper trail and so on. I really can't understand who in their right mind would consider putting the fate of the election in the hands of MS Access, for crying out loud!
-- the cake is a lie
Well, my only witty joke here is that Diebold has gone completely bananas.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And I thought Michael Moore was a liberal. You forgot the one about Bush eating the brains of dead Iraqi babies because he thought of it as a cure for paralysis.
"saves vote totals in Microsoft Access"
Hey, at least its accurate advertising
Quote from that website:
The variables for Democratic and African American supervisors are negative; the coefficient for Republican supervisor is positive. The only justifiable conclusion from these results is once again that there is no statistically significant relationship between whether election supervisors are Democratic, Republican or African American and either overall ballot rejection rates or racial disparities in ballot rejection rates.
Your source has failed to indicate a Republican conspiracy. Here is a direct link to the chapter where I found the above quote. If you can find a better quote suggeting a conspiracy, please include it along with an exerpt in the reply.
I agree.
Those topics are a crock of shit.
Good things the moderators got them.
Read This
COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
It seems to me that someone who makes voting software shouldn't be promising to deliver votes, but maybe it's just me.
-Dan
Sure we trust the election officials, but do we trust every contractor or tech who might work on those systems? Especially as Diebold seems so lax in checking backgrounds that people with convictions for fraud, blackmail, and embezzlement have access to their code. I'd bet that their contractors are even less subject to appropriate background checks.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Their "evidence" of a chimp hacking diebold is a series of poorly cut images of a chimp and a computer????? Come the fuck on now... First, half of the minute video is useless filler text and a picture of smiling chimp, which immedietly jumps to a sequence that could have only been cut by an editor with suffering from ADD syndrome. Seriously, where's that foot icon, because there's no way you could possibly take this story seriously.
But for the inveitable slashdotting it'll receive, I'll summerize: Makers say Diebold works, opponents say it doesn't, que poorly edited movie of monkey sitting by computer hitting stuff, analogous to the new "Baby hitting mouse" AOL 9.0 commercial. The End.
Thank me, beecause I just saved you 5-10 minutes of your life. Use it to get a free ipod or something.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
However, most of the rejected stories you listed have nothing to do with technology; they merely describe political news or events. I think the bias Slashdot has toward "news for nerds" is appropriate; we can get our pure political news from other sources.
When I'm reading slashdot, I'm looking for info about tech trends and social impacts therefrom, nothing more.
Although very questionable, and highly inflamitory, the above quote would provide better evidence of a corporate conspiracy (much more likely) than a conspiracy by the Republican party.
"State elections officials also said Wednesday that they are confident they can protect the system from a decidedly lower-tech threat.
:P
Elections administrator Linda Lamone said" that monkeys will be prevented from accessing the machines during the elections.....
The good thing is that even though a monkey can hack the system this still puts the hack out of the reach of the average Republican ;)
Well, you see, with most *cough* liberals as you call them. They seem to be able to go through life not liking something and it doesn't cause them to go psychotic. Well, at least the non-zealots. (...or is that Zelots?) I think it has something to do with tolerance. Either that, or being able to accept a worldview that isn't always cut-and-dry black and white, good-vs-evil.
Fabulous.
itadakimasu
Anyway, "Hate corporate run news media" would have been a much more accurate term.
Anyone else notice Air America getting syndicated all over the country via Clear Channel? Perhaps Clear Channel figures they can make Left wing media STFU about media monopolies through syndication. Their opponents end up working for them (for some reason media monopoly is not a popular topic among AA hosts) and they dispel claims of bias in one shot.
Pretty damn smart if you ask me. Guess they didn't wind up owning radio accidentally.
Anyhow, you won't be hearing much about "corporate run news media" from the Left anymore.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The people at black box voting admit that to hack the Diebold System you have to have access to the machine. Well whether it uses Microsoft Access or any other "secure" database, if someone has access to the computer they are going to be able to delete/modifiy results. i mean... they could just set the box on fire if they have access to it, so i really don't think this is a big issue at all.
-bradly
Examples? Sure: Orrin Hatch's staffer illegally accessed Democratic memos on a server. See: "FileGate - Cyberterrorist Republicans Crack Dem's Networks" -- http://wjm.homelinux.com/archives/000055.html/
Judging by the fact that most people with the time to volunteer for poll work are our 'seasoned citizens' who, let's be honest, aren't, as a group, too computer savvy, I'd be more worried about the scrupulous people with no computer skills whatsoever messing things up.
I know this makes me an ageist asshat, but how in the heck are all these people going to get up to speed on computers enough to ensure a little 'whoops' doesn't toss a whole county or something?
You know what?
Turdface, tv screen is correct usage, just like tv remote
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That video doesn't prove anything! It's just a picture of a chimp typing at a computer keyboard! How the hell does that prove that he can hack a voting system?
I agree that these Diabold machines are not a good idea but, please, putting up shit like this just makes all of us who are anti-voting-machines look like idiots.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
I say "Quite honestly, it's somewhat insulting to the voters," to the idea that the voting public should naively disregard the human factor and that temptation/corruption/bribery "just don't happen."
Never underestimate the power of money, especially in large, unmarked bundles.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Heh, gotta like the name.
As a comparative analysis... an uninformed reader only needs to read two disparate statements and decide which is more true.
"We probably have the most secure system in the nation," said Lamone
and
according to Associate Director Andy Stephenson, "The entire voting record can be deleted by choosing "reset the election" on a drop-down menu."
Only a fool would pick an otherwise obvious statement...
I, for one, welcome our new karma-risking overlords.
It isn't like this is even the only ace up their sleeves. Kerry is starting to look like a fallguy to me. If these incredibly brilliant people that have come up with incredibly brilliant ways to attract the press (and have been hugely ignored considering how serious this is), and a live demonstration of a fucking monkey hacking a voting systems doesn't get some of them to ignore their bosses and partisan politics long enough to wake the fuck up and start doing their god damn jobs, Bush will delay the elections long enough to build up more public support in some catastrophically successful way. Think about it.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
But I guess Chimp hacks Access Database isn't really news.
I clicked on the monkey story, I wouldn't have clicked on any of the others except for the one that says "Turkey", then I would realize it isn't about the yummy bird and close it.
If I wanted to be up-to-date on the war on terrorism, Irak or whatever I would watch CNN, but I want to know about Monkeys so I read Slashdot.
My humble suggestion, stop submitting political stories and start looking for monkey stories. A turkey story would be nice too.
Obligatory monkey story:
I like Monkeys
The pet store was selling them for five cents a piece.
I thought this was odd since they were normally a couple thousand. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth so I bought 200 of them. I like monkeys.
I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one of them drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in the genitals. I laughed. They punched me in the genitals. I stopped laughing.
I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech and hurl themselves off the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into it's third hour. Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive; they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sort of dropped dead. Kinda like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. God damn cheap monkeys.
I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room; on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs. I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and one hundred ninety-nine dead, dry monkeys.
I tried to pretend that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad. I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in my toilet and I didn't want to call a plumber. I was embarrassed. I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortuantely there was only enough room for two at a time, so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't go bad.
I tried to burn them, but little did I know that my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire. Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and one hundred ninety-seven dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed.
The odor wasn't improving. I became agitated at my inability to dispose of the dead monkeys and I really had to use the bathroom. So I went and severely beat one of the monkeys. I felt better.
I tried throwing them away but the garbage man said the city was not allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him I had a wet one. He couldn't take it either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.
I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't quite know what to say. They pretended to like them, but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.
I like monkeys.
(DISCLAIMER: I am not the author of this story.)
--- I w00t, therefore I'm l33t.
dispite the cost
dispite the loss of contitutional protections of the states
dispite the possibility of it being a hoax
the federal government should take over the election process and out law "MONKIES"!!
stendec@gmail.com
Because Access functions are already built in to the Windows operating system, the totals could be altered even if a computer did not have Access installed on it...
But Maryland election officials agreed with Bear that no hacking can happen unless the hacker is physically at the computer.
How long until somebody writes a virus/worm/trojan that does nothing on most Windows boxes (other than propagate) and on systems where GEMS is detected then around 8:00pm on election day just go wreak havoc with the election results? No physical access to the GEMS systems is needed. If those machines are hooked up to the internet at any time prior to the election (like to get Windoze updates) they could potentially become infected with just such a worm.
Yeah, I know it's a stretch. Just playing devils advocate...
beowulf cluster of chimps could do.
Isn't it basically unconscionable that the actual process of elections be a for-profit venture? While the military may buy hardware from outside vendors, it does so because certain problems require such specific, high-level technical knowledge and manufacturing know-how which they don't posess in-house. A voting system is, at it's core, a system of adding numbers together that any first-year comp sci student could create. Why is something so basic to the legitimacy of our government being given to for-profit ventures with closed systems?
At the government's disposal are hundreds of public universities with some of the brightest minds in the country, many of whom would gladly work on implementing the great american open-source voting system. Even if these graduate students and professors were paid market rates for their work, it would still be much cheaper than what Diebold systems are costing the US. There is also no competitive advantate go keeping the system closed-source... so what if Austrailia decides they want to run their elections on our software? We've proud of other countries copying our constitution and systems of government, why not our systems of elections too? Especially if they improve it, and give those improvements back to us? What, are we suddenly going to be exporting less consumables to them because they have more legitimate elected officials?
The ______ Agenda
This makes me wonder if 'W' was the inspiration behind Curious George.
But then who is the man in the yellow hat?
Bush senior?
Cheney?
or perhaps some evil mastermind hiding in the shadows, secretly pulling the strings?
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
A million monkeys can write Shakespeare...
Perhaps you'd like to visit The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, which randomly attempts to duplicate Shakespeare's work (don't worry about legal aspects, you can generally assume it's out of copyright).
The current record is 20 letters from "Coriolanus" after 462,060,000,000 billion billion monkey-years. Sent in by Jens Ulrik Jacobsen from Denmark on 31 Aug 2004.
"1. Citizen. Before w ZgJ 8GPxwFnwvG&iX4tKfo("2ny!3Pp..."
matched
"1. Citizen. Before w e proceed any further, heare me speake All. Speake, speake 1.Cit. You are all resolu'd rather to dy then to famish? All. Resolu'd, resolu'd..."
I take it videos of donkeys and elephants are coming. Also bulls and bears hacking electronic trading systems.
"Who? Where? Please provide examples of a credible (ie. non-
m )
"conspiracy theorist) source suggesting that Republicans might abuse
"a security hole.
Try the US Civil Rights Commission. (Their report on the Florida electoral fraud is available here: http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.ht
Maybe you should actually read the report.
It doesn't say a thing about Republicans abusing anything.
Try again.
While you're at it, you should also look at this.
We find out, for example, that
"the incontrovertible evidence shows that by statute the responsibility for the conduct of elections is in the hands of county supervisors, not the governor or secretary of state. County supervisors are independent officers answerable to county commissioners, not the governor or secretary of state. And in 24 of the 25 counties that had the highest ballot-spoilage rates, the county supervisor was a Democrat. (In the remaining county the supervisor was not a Republican, but an independent.)"
and
"The Justice Department did find violations of the Voting Rights Act in three counties. The infractions were that some poll workers had been hostile to Hispanic voters, bilingual assistance hadn't been provided to two Haitian voters, and some Hispanic voters had been denied bilingual assistance. None of the offending counties was controlled by Republicans."
also
"Whites were actually twice as likely as blacks to be erroneously placed on the list. In fact, an exhaustive study by the Miami Herald concluded that "the biggest problem with the felon list was not that it prevented eligible voters from casting ballots, but that it ended up allowing ineligible voters to cast a ballot."* According to the Palm Beach Post, more than 6,500 ineligible felons voted."
and
"Despite claims of rampant police intimidation and harassment, the only evidence of law-enforcement "misconduct" consisted of just two witnesses who described their perceptions of the actions of the Florida highway patrol. One of these witnesses testified that he thought it was "unusual" to see an empty patrol car parked outside a polling place."
OMG! An empty Florida highway patrol car! It's a Republican conspiracy!
Did you submit any of these articles?
Are you new to /.
Are you on crack?
(Ok, I will admit it. This post is a bit of a troll too but I just cannot let an implied accusation of /. being right-wing go by without SOME comment.)
Dacek said Wednesday that she fears that critics of the new voting system may try to physically sabotage the machines. She pointed to a recent incident in which a poll judge had to be ordered to return a voting machine that was used for demonstrations at an suburban folk festival.
Does anyone else find it rather strange they are worried about the "critics" and not the ones who seem to be in a big hurry to get these insecure systems in place? In my mind, the critics are the ones trying to stop a possible hi-jacking of democracy.
This reads like a AM radio talk show host comparing protestors at a convention to terrorists.
A chimp can hack the Diebold system, but can a Floridian punch a hole?
From TFA:
The entire voting record can be deleted by choosing "reset the election" on a drop-down menu[..]
You really can't make this shit up...
=O
Chimps are not monkeys they are apes.
We can read a simple ballot, for one.
This reminds me, at the recent ASIMO demonstration that I went to this Thursday at my college, they played a movie. In this movie, they were trying to prove the importance of how the robot looks determines how the public will accept it. And at some point they threw in a picture of a touch screen voting machine and mentioned "Florida" and "elections." I was too caught up in my selective hearing to know why these were mentioned in a video about trusting machines, but my friends and I had a good laugh. After all I have read, I could never trust this failure of a company. They need to fold, tuck their tails and find something else.
The idea that elections can be entrusted to the Diebold corporation is wholly absured when you consider that democracy is an activity of the people, for the people and by the people. Of course the results will be and ***SHOULD*** be questioned; that's the whole point of a democracy. That's why an open source voting system is and should be the only way to do computerized voting; it's open to scrutiny by anyone and everyone, and such it is, eventually and ultimately, beyond scrutiny when the final vote is out.
The open source community should produce as soon as possible an effective, secure, and open source voting system that's ready for reliable usage. It's one thing to criticize Diebold, it's another thing to question an elected official why an open source solution that's proven and secure and anyone can know the ins and outs of is not implemented and another obscure, closed, and highly questionable one is entrusted.
I think we've found the culprit
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Why would someone try to do ANYTHING secure with a database engine based on JET... Even personal projects I write, and small business systems are based in SQL Server.
The mere thought of trying to store such important data in an unencypted manner gives me a headache.
One must wonder what the GEMS architenct was thinking using such a ubiquitous data store as MS Access. Honestly, my company will not even seriously consider an application for use if it is based on Access, or even stores it's data unsecured in an MS Access database.
While there are methods for "securing" an Access database, they are based on JET's user system, which itself is not all that secure in the first place.
Might I suggest they rewrite the database core to SQL Server. There would not need to be that many changes to the source code if there are using standard ADO or ADO.Net code. One can quickly create an encrypted database using a statement something like this: Create Database "secure.sdf" databasepassword '' encryption on
Being that this data has the potential for selecting the countries next Presidient, the data should be:
Encrypted
Secured with Multiple Levels of Authentication
Passed on a network invulnerable to snooping (fiber comes to mind here)
Encrypted between the client and server
Coding my way to the next BSOD!
It's like a monitor, except it's a lot cheaper, the resolution sucks, and you can't read Slashdot. All it does is show crappy Real Video type stuff all day. Worse, it's mostly advertisements, and when there's not an ad, people in the programs often talk about or use products anyway, which is basically another form of advertising. On the plus side, I heard companies like Sony and Nintendo sell boxes that you can hook up to a tv screen and play video games. These boxes will also let you watch Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or other DVDs on your tv screen too. Yes the resolution sucks, but the main advantage of watching a movie on a TV screen is that you can get a huge TV screen (42 inches let's say) for a lot less money than what you'd pay for the same size monitor. It's a tradeoff.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
I mean, really. They practically have a button that says "Press to Hack Election."
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
"Hacked by chimpanzees"
....all the Rs and Ds get in a war with each other and bump themselves off.......
I'm trying.....grunt... groan...sweat..... can't do it!
I just can't figger out anything wrong with that.
%^)
here
Make Diebold and other election machine companies comply with already-existing government standards for computing. Specifically, hold them to DO-178B. I used to work with flight navigation software, and this level of software certification would make the voting machine as reliable as aircraft software.
After all, shouldn't voting be as safe as flying?
DO178B is a lot to explain, and someone else here can probably do it better justice than I can, but let me just say that diebold wouldn't be running an access database on top of windows. In fact, they wouldn't be allowed to run linux or sql either, since every line of code has to be verified/justified and traced back to peer-reviewed requirements documents.
Diebold says...
Even if the system could be hacked, he said, it could only be done by a person with "unfettered access to the system." Bear noted that elections are not just the machines, but also the people who work the elections.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
At every election I have voted in, the officials and volunteers are retirees who have VCRs flashing 12:00! They would never know it if some young whipper-snapper was farting aroung with the newfangled high-tech whizbang voting machines, nor will they be able to help anyone if the machines screw up.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
For all the Americans out there, we live in a democracy where "all decisions are made by representatives who act by [our] consent". However, it is incredibly difficult for an elected representative to follow his/her constituent's wishes if they are not informed of which bills they should vote for by their constituents.
A simple letter (here or here or here or here) is one of the easiest ways to inform your elected representative of your stance in regard to certain bills. If you feel strongly enough about fixing the current state of electronic voting in this country, I highly reccomend writing to your elected representatives to inform them of your concerns and certain bills which they should support.
Remember, for a democracy to work as intended there needs to be participation by all of its citizens though voting as well as keeping their elected representatives informed of the citizens wishes.
Also remember that when contacting your representatives a signed, mailed letter makes a much bigger impact than an e-mail.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
... and an infinite amount of time that could create a Shakespearean work.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
It was the best of times. It was the BLURST of times!!?!
-Mr Burns (referring to a typo made by a chimp while using a typewriter)
but can George W Bush?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"I take it videos of donkeys and elephants are coming."
Glad you didn't forget the 'are'.
It may be insulting, but election officials would be fools to believe that every else is as honest as themselves. What's more, election fraud and or "accidents" do happen. I seem to recall that in the last presidential election one of the less populated states out west (4 electoral votes IIRC) went to Bush but only because a hand written vote count was "accidently" misread and tabulated hundreds of phantom votes. I don't remember if the mistake was caught before the count was certified or if it was only during the brouhaha of the Florida contraversy that it came to light. I do remember the news report saying that it would not have tipped the election to Gore because Florida has many more electoral votes. I also remember seeing something in the news about a candidate who got caught hiring a hitman to kill his opponent just before the election thus insuring himself to win. So anyone who denies that election fraud can or does happen needs to wake up and smell the latte.
The pet store was selling them for 5 cents a piece. I thought that odd since they were normally a couple thousand $$ each. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I bought 200. I like monkeys.
I took my 200 monkeys home. I have a big car. I let one drive. His name was Sigmund. He was retarded. In fact, none of them were really bright. They kept punching themselves in their genitals. I laughed. Then they punched my genitals. I stopped laughing.
I herded them into my room. They didn't adapt very well to their new environment. They would screech, hurl themselves off of the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. Although humorous at first, the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into its third hour.
Two hours later I found out why all the monkeys were so inexpensive: they all died. No apparent reason. They all just sorta' dropped dead. Kinda' like when you buy a goldfish and it dies five hours later. Damn cheap monkeys.
I didn't know what to do. There were 200 dead monkeys lying all over my room, on the bed, in the dresser, hanging from my bookcase. It looked like I had 200 throw rugs.
I tried to flush one down the toilet. It didn't work. It got stuck. Then I had one dead, wet monkey and 199 dead, dry monkeys.
I tried pretending that they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell real bad.
I had to pee but there was a dead monkey in the toilet and I didn't want to call the plumber. I was embarrassed.
I tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room for two monkeys at a time so I had to change them every 30 seconds. I also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn't all go bad.
I tried burning them. Little did I know my bed was flammable. I had to extinguish the fire.
Then I had one dead, wet monkey in my toilet, two dead, frozen monkeys in my freezer, and 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile on my bed. The odor wasn't improving.
I became agitated at my inability to dispose of my monkeys and to use the bathroom. I severely beat one of my monkeys. I felt better.
I tried throwing them way but the garbage man said that the city wasn't allowed to dispose of charred primates. I told him that I had a wet one. He couldn't take that one either. I didn't bother asking about the frozen ones.
I finally arrived at a solution. I gave them out as Christmas gifts. My friends didn't know quite what to say. They pretended that they like them but I could tell they were lying. Ingrates. So I punched them in the genitals.
Nope. Not this time. We're trying to vote them out.
I for one, welcome our new simian overlords (!)
A TV screen is a lot like the picture books my little girl reads...
Lots of pretty pictures, small words used, and best of all, you don't have to think to use it!
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
That reminds me...I used a program called GEMs a long time ago. I was working on a computer that controlled the systems for a hydroponic greenhouse. I can't remember exactly what GEMs was. It might have been the OS. Has anyone ever used that? Google is no help here.
What if the number of ballots in the one box, is different than the number of paper stubs in the other?
Ballot stuffing via pre-printed ballots is still possible, and a recount would be impossible.
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-517235 8b19-6f45f145ca c 0563-18969179a8 1 50e2-0bef3ba2a4 2 cd83-e0644e7ef5 6 9d32-22621daaff 7 c84e-b9e70ce4cd
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-13556
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-bc9b1
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-d6f30
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-62e3c
https://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b0ab39f1a8-6c3f0
"1. Citizen. Before w ZgJ 8GPxwFnwvG&iX4tKfo("2ny!3Pp..."
I bet the rest of that is just Danish l33t speak or something...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If it wasn't really obvious that this was a Fox News story, the incessant repetition that terrorists will attack the voting booths in the text should have really driven things home.
May we never see th
If you truly had an infinity of monkeys and of typewriters, then it should only take O(1) time for them to produce a work of Shakespeare. Or, for that matter, all of the works of Shakespeare, including the ones he didn't write.
That's all right then; it should be fairly easy to spot a suspicious-looking chimp near a polling station.
Also, it wasn't just that the chimp could be taught to *hack* the voting system. That, apparently, is beneath even a monkey. No, what's impressive is that he then covered up his tracks, removing all trace of his presence.
May we never see th
I was going to say that they might be more interested in using a real database like Oracle or PostgeSQL, but I see that the moderators have already got to your comment and marked it accordingly :^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Only Fox News can find a way to talk about terrorism when it comes to hacking an election system. If the title of the story were "Bad Things That Could Happen This November", I could understand the garbage about terrorism in the article. Give me a break, though--talking about terrorism in an article titled "Touchscreen Hack Effort Called 'Monkey Business'"?! *ONLY* Fox News would try this ...
...that there was no danger, as animals are not allowed in polling places.
Chris Mattern
I was once told that if you put a monkey in front of a keyboard at a Unix/Linux terminal, the first 10 things it would type would be valid Unix commands.
Is this a related story?
The report was fairly critical, but balanced.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
When asked about the chimp hacking their voting machine a Diebold spokesman shrieked loudly, barred his teeth and threw feces at the offending reporters.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Of course the results will be and ***SHOULD*** be questioned; that's the whole point of a democracy.
Well, no, not really. That's not the point at all. That's the path to postmodern madness.
The point is to have a civilized society, where we actually have enough trust in the system and each other to just engage in democracy, not endless lawsuits and absurd notions like "hanging chads". Democracy doesn't work in that environment, because as you say we would be always questioning the results.
You can read it here or here. You can also check these pictures. As you can see their ATMS are a complete joke, easily as bad as their voting machines.
All of these applications are pretty trvial to code from scratch to only do a very narrow range of tasks, thus making them easy to audit, and easy to secure. Diebold is a complete amateur at this stuff, and I hope to see them eventually sued into a greasy smear on the corporate highway.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm european, you know... in this side of the Atlantic we mark a piece of paper with an X on who we vote. And yes, a monkey can also do it, but at least we don't spend billions in tech just to keep all the monkeys voting...
Not that you're serious, but here, I'll explain it. I'll get modded flamebait like I always do, but so what.
The losers of the 2000 election didn't like the results, which were perfectly valid according to the previously established rules and regulations (and common sense tells you you can't change those after an election, just to get the results you want). So they let fly a thousand (or so) lawsuits, and turned it into the postmodern election, where you don't just count a vote, you deconstruct it.
It almost worked. But anyway, having done that, there's a problem. Unless you just want to chuck out democracy, since you claimed there were all these problems, you kind of have to propose to fix them. That's what all this was about - to pretend that the (completely fabricated) "mess" of 2000 was real, and we need to "do something" about it.
Of course we would just use paper and pencil, if we were solving real technical problems. But that's not what's happening.
Yeah, that's right. U.S. media ruled by an Aussie media mogul.
Doesn't that scare you?
It scares me.
What Diebold clearly don't understand (or care about) is that while trust in the election officials has always been very important, never before could one single person change all the votes in seconds leaving no evidence! Its like being able to stick your coat hanger through a stack of 50 million punch-cards and have the chads disappear into thin air. But that's not even half of it - they just assume that it can only be done with physical access to that machine - how can they be sure the data is secure on its way to the machine? What if its already been compromised? With a system as complex as the average computer you have allot of exits to cover. At least with paper it would take an army of people to fake 50 million ballots, with computers it could potentially take a few lines of code and an opportunity. Its not even in Diebolds interests to secure things like verifiable election logs, because, if something does screw up Diebold certainly wont want you to know. This is why we call privatisation "The short-sighted or externally lobbied greed of a government in which an enterprise requiring only better management is aquired by worse management who take all profits and place them in a tax haven or a yacht."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Who let Bush near the voting machine?
Cheney's hand up his ass.
their old atms were easy to hack, you could lift the cash register door a hair using a flatten McDonald's straw turned side-ways and a dust buster, you can fish the money out without it ever registering that the door ever opened....this does not suprise me at a ll
mindrape
I can point you to many stories on slashdot that have no I.T relevence. Even in this so called 'politics' section....
The story is listed in the IT section of a geek website. Of course it is IT related politics. The site is called "Slashdot, news for nerds."
All of the rejected articles you listed in your earlier post were Iraq biased. There are websites for that just like there are websites on tecnical stuff for geeks. Why didn't you note any articles on the series hurricanes hitting Florida and sorrounding region lately? Don't you think that matters to US slashdotters?...Nope. I guess your posts can be called "trolldot, news for asciiwhite."
Am I the only one who started hearing alarms going off in my head when I read this sentence:
"We probably have the most secure system in the nation," said Lamone...
Translation: "We know nothing about security."
And lo and behold, they're using Microsoft Access. I rest my case.
Actually, they wouldn't have had to stuff the box in Texas, back then the South voted Democrat religiously, that's before LBJ passed the Equal Rights legislation.
RIAA and the MPAA, putting the "F U" in "fair use".
From the article ...
..."
" He demonstrated how to change vote totals with a six-line program in Microsoft notepad
Is that the programming language for tablet pc's?
--
Why would you trust election officials?
The US (not to mention many other countries) have a long and rich history of election officials tampering with the results. What says that that has suddenly ended in 2004?
A different way than "election officials are corrupt" of framing the issue is to point out that corrupt people who want to influence results will want to become election officials. Especially if there are no checks on their power.
hello,
:-
This is an offtopic plea for legal advice. Moderators: please be lineant on this post, it's just a student who is being ripped off by a former landlord.
The question
1) Is it correct to charge for removing bugs from the apartment - as a charge on the security deposit?
2) The landlord is falsely claiming that we did not return the keys, and charging us for it. What kind of a legal recourse do we have to counteract this?
any advice would be appreciated. Trolls - please keep off this post.
haw haw! Well, I think this is a good idea, actually. But perhaps you would like to suggest an open source alternative to Access? kthx!
could we maybe reset the last election?
[Google Cache] http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:t9kZJxT7QewJ:ww w.information-institute.org/security/3rdConf/Proce edings/10.pdf+India+EVM+design&hl=en
Anyone who thinks Republicans don't cheat and get false votes in is ignorant when it comes to politics and elections.
Anyone who thinks Democrats don't cheat and get false votes in is ignorant when it comes to politics and elections.
Election abuses are pretty rempant (though not as much as they used to be), however since both sides do it just as much as the other, it normally equals itself out. It's just plain ignorant to think it doesn't happen, or think that only one side does it.
I, for one, welcome our new Diebold overlords.
Assistant: Maybe we should finally tell them the big secret: that all the chimps we sent into space came back super-intelligent.
Chimp: No, I don't think we'll be telling them _that_.
[Roller skates away, making monkey noises]
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
heh heh
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
How can a country place its economic and political future on such a fucked up database/wanna be database application as MS Access? Are you fuckin kiddin me?
Say what you will about the relative scale of the elections in the two countries, one thing is certain - the elections work here. The results are in very quickly, the security protocols surrounding voting and counting are simple enough to be comprehensible and auditable by just about anyone, and the whole thing is done with exemplary transparency.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's a difference?
Take all the time you like at Little Green Footballs, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's site, and Free Republic.
Good luck, you'll need it.The moderators who modded you up must get their news from the same "sources" you do.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm citing the fact that they're using a hacked one minute clip as "evidence", dumbass. It's not evidence, it's piecemeal BS. To even include that sloppy piece of film as a serious exhibit is sad. And I didn't say anything about the other claims you mention, braniac, so shove it.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
No bank would buy an ATM that didn't reliably print out two paper receipts for every transaction - one for the customer, one for the bank. They've been making machines that do precisely what they claim not to be able to do, for years now. Which makes the whole thing extra fishy...
As to your objections 3 and 4 - they are valid, but not insurmountable. Here are some suggestions to counter them:
3 - errors in barcode scanning: the voting machine counts the results and sends them to a counting server, much as Diebold's systems do now, getting result A. The ballots are scanned by a separate set of machinery, getting result B. For a randomly selected (say) 10% of voting places, the ballots are hand counted, getting result C.
Then, as long as total A = total B = (where applicable) total C, we consider the valid results to be the sum of all totals A/B. If there are appreciable discrepancies, then all results are hand counted, so there will be a complete set of results C, and these are the authoritative results.
The contracts with the makers of voting machinery might stipulate that if a full recount of the remaining 90% of polling places is required due to any discrepancies between results A, B, and C, then the makers of the polling equipment will be liable for, say, half the costs of those extra manual counts. This would give them an extremely strong incentive to test the entire process to make sure everything works correctly.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
He has 9, I have 19, and mine are spittin' images.
It's a QuickTime!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What Diebold clearly don't understand (or care about) is that while trust in the election officials has always been very important, never before could one single person change all the votes in seconds leaving no evidence! [Emphasis added]
The classic case of a cashier who trades tickets for money and a ticket taker shows that you can have a trustworthy system even if you don't trust the participants.
Flim-flam. Make it complicated enough and there's plenty of room for skuldudgery. Sure you run checks and balances, but it needs to be simple and obvious enough that it can be trusted without looking any further. In fact if there is a problem it is more likely to be in those checks and balances.
Think Road Runner and Coyote. You do not want a voting system invented by Wyle E. Coyote, Super Genius.
If I recall correctly, the memos were improperly left on a shared drive. How many times have we all opened the document named "Strategy Memo" searching for something we legitimately need? This "hacked" thing is just a smoke screen for the fact that the contents of those memos were extremely embarrassing for the democratic party.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Well, if the chimp was an employee of Primate Programming, Inc., that wouldn't surprise me.
That's the plain and simple of it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that they'll save money during an election, nor that they're anywhere close to being secure. Diebold's machines are black-box proprietary and it's essentially impossible to determine if someone (say, a bought-and-paid-for Diebold exec) has tampered with the results.
I used to work with county and city elections. No machines were used, just a supervisory staff of elections officials and a horde of volunteers. All voting locations would count each box of ballots twice, each time by a different person, and if the tallies weren't exact they'd go through the whole process again for that ballot box. This would continue until two separate individuals got the same count for the box.
Afterwards, all of the paper ballots would be boxed and stored in a secure location in case it became necessary to do a recount. And again, all recounts were done by box, twice, and any discrepancies meant starting over from scratch for that box.
This wasn't a terribly expensive way of doing things. The primary cost was in printing and mailing the ballots (for mail-ins). The elections sites themselves were run by volunteers, and the supervisory staff was already paid for. Fraud was rather difficult to pull off on the part of the volunteers and the entire process was 'open source'. Individual citizen groups could demand to have a representative sit in on the recounts, as could any political party that was running a candidate.
Why, exactly, are we dumping a system like this for Diebold machines? It makes no sense at all unless someone is specifically looking for a way to fuck up the elections in their favor, or in favor of whomever happens to be paying them off.
And don't tell me that this system can't be scaled; that's bullshit. The system I'm speaking of here was used on the city, county, and state level. If it can be done by one state, it can be scaled for any state, and it's the STATES who run the elections, not the federal government.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Fair enough, and I agree with you, but take a look at the politics.slashdot.org page and tell me that most of the accepted stories do deal with tech.
I just checked and 5 out of 10 deal with technology in politics. Half. The rest is arguably 100% political news. Granted, I go elsewhere for that too, but the fact is that those rejected stories are nowhere off the norm for the Politics page.
You know what?
Until the next copyright term extension.
In answer to your question, yes; it just so happens that when I try to use a particularly busy ATM, my odds are about 50/50 that I wont get a reciept. Either:
b) I'll be informed that the ATM can't process any transactions whatsoever (for reasons unknown.)
ATMs run out of paper and ink all of the time. So do older POS (that's point-of-sale, not the other acronym) credit card printers. And no, I'm not astroturfing, and I don't believe that the GP poster was, either.
Any voting machine technology - hypothetical or otherwise - needs to be poked, prodded, peered at, discussed, and debated. The very fact that there isn't more coverage by CNN and other major media outlets on the problems with the various voting machines should be worrisome. No matter who we elect, we're going to be stuck with whatever result the Diebold boxes spit out. No matter which side of the political fence you're on, that ought to be cause for concern. It's government by, of, and for the People , but only if the People are actually allowed their say in the matter.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
It's far more likely to gain promotion for your performance in the private sector world. In the public sector, it's a gotcha game. Results are optional - what is important is that you follow the rules no matter what, and don't step on any toes.
Government employees of any stripe live in perpetual fear of doing something 'against policy' or that violate someone else's area of responsibility lest they suffer for it. In fact, getting in people's way too much by doing too much work often results in a stunted career.
Even more perversely, people who are rotten employees get glowing reviews. The reason why is that it's almost impossible to fire a federal employee. Union, you see. Therefore, if a manager wants to get rid of a lousy performer (relatively speaking), the only way to do so is to transfer them out of their group. Hence, giving glowing reviews is standard. Otherwise, people will not want the badly reviewed employee and upper management tends to think a bad review of an employee means there is something wrong with the manager, rather than the (often) true problem of having wastrels on the government payroll.
Experience it yourself before you write off what I say.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I am not sure if I should be plesed by this, humored, or just hang my head until the upcoming election fiasco.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
l/kzsgjopiQU3.SD FNG;LK UDVO83NBDXc ;LLKSHGODRSN\SBMlikedin c jm hkekj 3898n3 cvjdjskldfm fgk hjb fmfifjhdnfls jnfujsei
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
>"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
Riiight, after all, if we have trust, why bother with such quaint ideas as security, accountability, checks, balances, and the like ?
I say we ditch the whole idea of encryption in communications too, after all, it's quite insulting to internet users.
lonedfx.
I thought the US already showed this 4 years ago ...
:-)
Oh, wait, that was the unplugged election
so can my momma!
So W is now hacking elections, whats new?
Can you please be a bit more specific as to which chimp you are talking about?
The voting machines software must be available for public inspection.
The hardware design for voting machines must be available for public inspection.
The assembley of voting machines must be available for representitive public inspection.
The voting machines security must be based on cryptographicly secure systems.
The voting machine once put into service must not be openable, the case must be sealed and no software route to controll the unit in place.
The voting machine must produce a full tally of all votes for any election it has ever been used in when requested by an authorised key holder.
The voting machine must log all administrative transactions, and produce this with all vote counts.
--
The electoral volentears know how to handle people voting, a secure system would have to be devised for handling of the votes taken from the machines, possibly a small printer device similarly open to public inspection to convert the data into a human readable form from an early point in the chain.
If anyone wants to add any more to this, comment on how it can be done feel free. There's no way I can have total trust without proof that the names on the list tally up to what the clicks on the screen mean.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
It's also somewhat insulting to parents to say there are children who are stealing or do underage drinking, while OF COURSE no good citizen would do such thing.
Privacy is terrorism.
the best and sometimes only way to fight a law like that is called "civil disobedience". made popular in the early part of the last century by people like Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, the method involves a LOT of people who believe that the law is wrong gathering and breaking the law as a protest and (here's the important bit) ACCEPTING THE CONSEQUENCES. and coming out and doing it again Think marijuana laws are wrong?? get with a LOT of people, do it in public, and have the cops arrest you. go to PYA jail and come out and DO IT ALL AGAIN. it may even get the laws repealed of course if you can convince the judge that you were doing it as a form of protest, and protest is covered under "freedom of expression", then you could be free. but that may still leave you with a charge of vandalism. remember ..
"if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
good luck
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
(dammit previewing is GOOD)
..
,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."
the best and sometimes only way to fight a law like that is called "civil disobedience". made popular in the early part of the last century by people like Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, the method involves a LOT of people who believe that the law is wrong gathering and breaking the law as a protest and (here's the important bit) ACCEPTING THE CONSEQUENCES. and coming out and doing it again
Think marijuana laws are wrong?? get with a LOT of people, do it in public, and have the cops arrest you. go to PYA jail and come out and DO IT ALL AGAIN. it may even get the laws repealed
of course if you can convince the judge that you were doing it as a form of protest, and protest is covered under "freedom of expression", then you could be free. but that may still leave you with a charge of vandalism.
remember
"if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are
good luck
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Monkey Bussiness!!!!!!!!!
Smarter than the black democrats in Florida who couldn't figure out how to poke a hole in a piece of fucking paper.
Good fucking god...
"The Diebold central tabulators use a program called 'GEMS' that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program."
This should immediately disqualify the prototype.
It's just amazing that you americans, that claime to have the best democratic system in the world, aren't able to find a good and trustworthy way of counting votes!
All the western countries in Europe have no problem counting the votes. Can't you guys just adopt our system? We get the results within a day, (usually within 8-12 hours), and that should be sufficient.
Just the viewpoint of someone non-american...
Investigate Slovenia.
People are amazingly friendly. Life is cheap and highly pleasant. The landscapes are beautiful. About everyone speaks excellent English, so no worries about that. You're one or two hours of flight from any major European city you may have hoped to visit someday (I love Paris and Copenhagen). The economy is thriving. Broadband is cheap and stable. Cable TV seems prevalent, so you shouldn't miss your usual shows. The girls are pretty and friendly. The food is great.
If I had to leave my current living place, I'd go to Slovenia in a heartbeat. It's the most underrated country I've been to, on any continent I've been to.
I've also worked in Denmark, and it's almost as good. The climate is just significantly colder, the cost of life is higher, and I found the Slovenians easier to befriend, but that's probably a bit subjective.
- An anonymous tipster.
Sorry I forgot to point it out, but- no US troops in Slovenia that I know of. The Slovenian are also a fairly independant people, having fought for and earned their independance as recently as in 1991.
If freedom from US influence is your main criterion, France might also be a good choice. I don't think the US has ever managed to install a base there, despite a number of attempts. I know a few Americans who have already moved there and seem very happy so far. Apparently, you may want to aim for the countryside, however- Brittany seems especially good for English-speaking folks. In big cities, people seem to be a lot closer to the typical French stereotype of smartass rudeness.
You see, pointing out what is wrong is good, and we can use that. But you give few solutions except to leave this great country. I say "good for you", don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! The more people like you we can export to other countries, the better.
Anyone out there in /. land want to send this gentle[person] a brochure for your beautiful country?
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
The good thing is that even though a monkey can hack the system this still puts the hack out of the reach of the average Democrat ;)
Chimp Can Hack Diebold Electronic Voting System
Does this mean Bush has learned how to cheat with the votes? Uh oh...
Chimps wrote the software that runs these machines, of course they can hack it.
At least there will be music to play after 0wning a machine.
Get your Unix fortune now!
this could be damn useful, since it was 1 month 5 days since we moved out. im off to the library to check on the state laws. (MN)/.
thanks a lot, calvin!
I say amen
Two words:
New Zealand.
Fantastic place.
He would of course be an expert on staged production, considering that Diebold landed its first customers based on staged demos. In fact, reading about Diebold was the first time I'd encountered the term "slideware" - software that exists only in the form of presentation slides.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Why? Because there is nothing wrong with pen and paper, that's why? Seriously, please check out the recent results of a much larger election than that for US president, in terms of voters as well as in terms of voting options and please tell me what in your opinion is wrong with pen and paper. This is not a rhetoric question, I would really like to hear an answer. Any answer. Anyone who reads Slashdot knows that I am all for open source and free software but I have yet to find any reason to use any software for counting votes. While giving us your answer please keep in mind that voting is the most fundamental concept in democracy and as such needs to be completely transparent--not only to computer scientists like you and me who can understand and verify the software used for voting, but for general public, profanum vulgus, The People.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What *I* don't understand is why rather than going 'all electronic' or 'hybrid paper-computer model' there are not more efforts to have a simple paper model.
The voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper sheet with candidates names--no privacy issues.
The voter goes in the box, which has--behold--a pen!
The voter puts an 'X' mark on the paper in the circle next to his chosen candidate (make it really easy, BIG circles, BIG text, whatever)
Voter's vote is already in human-readable form
Voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
I can continue ad nauseam...
There is one most important and completely ignored question: what is wrong with pen and paper voting? What is this problem that we have to solve using electronic black-box voting? What are those issues? Are they so serious that introducing all of the problems which are inevitable with e-voting is justified? Seriously, I am looking forward to hear any answers, because this is the only part of e-voting that I don't understand: "why."
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
http://www.cafepress.com/hackthevote
funny stuff...
Salon.com - Voter terrorism: For decades, Republicans have mounted highly organized operations to discourage minorities from voting. Experts say there's no reason to believe this year's presidential campaign will be any different.