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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.
Is that chimp one of the Diebold engineers?
A new denial of service attack is spreading through the wild. It involves hurling feces...
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
That's why the liberal media, like Fox, is reporting on it.
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
"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.
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
"saves vote totals in Microsoft Access"
Hey, at least its accurate advertising
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.]
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.
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 ;)
But I guess Chimp hacks Access Database isn't really news.
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
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..."
that monkeys will be prevented from accessing the machines
Which is un-constutional: Our president has the right to vote too!
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.
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
So, does this mean that Florida won't be allowed to vote in the coming elections?