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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.

13 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. Video Mirror by chrispyman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Incase of the enevitable slashdotting, here's the movie of the chimp hacking the vote.

  2. Coral Cache of video by Meostro · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. What's the big deal? by outrage98 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not sure why any of this should be surprising...

  4. Re:This story could make a liberal's head explode by cgranade · · Score: 5, Informative
    Who? Where? Please provide examples of a credible (ie. non-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.htm )

    --

    #define DRM chmod 000

  5. Re:This story could make a liberal's head explode by tajmorton · · Score: 5, Informative
    Who? Where? Please provide examples of a credible (ie. non-conspiracy theorist) source suggesting that Republicans might abuse a security hole.

    "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.
  6. Re:This story could make a liberal's head explode by adiposity · · Score: 4, Informative


    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

  7. Chimps can write News Articles, too... by Mulletproof · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  8. Re:What I don't understand is why... by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Informative
    1-2: Handled by millions of point-of-sale terminals already. This is no large feat of engineering that needs to be reinvented.
    I dunno about you, but I've often seen sales clerks spending a lot of time refilling the paper rolls, dealing with ink outages, paper jams, "Sorry, but do you mind if I don't give you a receipt, it's not working," "Sorry, but the ink is really faint."

    : Scantrons are ancient, and work well, with a very low error rate, at least, lower than hanging chads when you've got machines to properly mark the cards in the first place.
    Not true. Scantrons have an extremely high error rate, as I've found on the few occasions when I've used them as a teacher. If you don't do any erasing, the error rate is fairly low, but if you erase, the chances that it'll read it correctly are only about 50% in my experience. (The people who sell the Scantron machines claim that they're extremely accurate when they're tuned up perfectly, but if so, then the ones at my school don't ever seem to get a tune up. Remember, this voting technology has to be extremely robust, and it has to be run by volunteers with no technical knowledge and no time for tinkering.)

  9. Re:Fight back with your code... by TheSpoom · · Score: 2, Informative
    --
    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
  10. Re:for-profit voting systems by laird · · Score: 4, Informative

    "I think the system the grandparent was promoting was using public funds to create a public solution, which still requires buying/paying for tools from the private sector"

    Exactly. Please visit http://www.openvotingconsortion.org/. We're a consortium dedicated to creating an open source voting system. The idea, exactly as you propose, is that many commercial vendors can take the open source platform and package it with hardware, training, and so on. Or a particularly motivated (or cheap) organization could run their own election system using internal technical resources. :-) The project has been under active development for several years, and has produced a system that's been publicly demonstrated.

  11. Re:Nuff Said by DavidTC · · Score: 3, Informative
    And have you read the latest articles, why, look at that, on blackboxvoting, about how uncertified people were allowed access to a tabulator during an election? Which is a felony, but it's apparently okay because, hey, those computer guys don't need to be accountable to anyone.

    You're the one who needs to start using your brain.

    --
    If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
  12. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  13. Re:Fair and balanced?? by switcha · · Score: 2, Informative
    However, most of the rejected stories you listed have nothing to do with technology

    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? ... A little club soda *did* get that out!