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The Diebold Voting-Machine Hack
Warm John writes to mention a short article on Doctor Dobbs Journal about the Hack that couldn't be done. "Hacking a Diebold voting machine was the focus of Cigital's Gary McGraw's keynote at SD Best Practices. He discussed 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,' a paper released by Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. 'The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.'"
I'm in your voting machine stealing your election.
Fundamentalism stops a thinking mind.
Man Diebold looks slimier and slimier every passing week, but I'm more disturbed by Joe Demma's, Salt Lake's chief elections officer, response to Bruce Funk's actions. Granted, Funk acted by going around Demma by calling in Black Box Voting to check the Diebold machines, when presumably Demma is supposed to be responsible for that (just my guess as he's the chief elections officer).
However, Demma seems more incensed at Funk because he may cost the state $40,000 for Diebold's astronomical recertification fee. He doesn't seem to be worried that people might not trust these machines. He doesn't seem to care that a state officer was worried enough to call in a non-profit third party to verify the integrity of these machines. I mean, these things could possibly affect the outcome of a vote, the foundation for a democratic republic! But instead of worrying about these machines he's clearly more upset about the $40,000 and Funk not talking to him about his concerns regarding the voting machines.
And of COURSE Diebold is going to tell you the machines are fine and fair. Sheesh, they want to make money don't they?
Isn't it great that chief elections officers have their priorities straight?
Give me a ballot sheet and a pencil any day over these closed, proprietary black box machines.
In Illinois we get a paper printout that you check for accuracy and put in a ballot box; we can actually have a real recount.
That's incredibly weird, considering this IS Illinois, where they say "vote early, vote often," where dead people still have a right to vote, and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
And no, SpybotSD can't help you.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I've seen plenty of pro-Microsoft and pro-Diebold posts get modded up. All you have to do is have a clear point, and show it. You didn't manage that. You said the fraud happens, and it doesn't make a difference if we can trace it or not.
It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.
With the current generation of electronic voting machines, we can't do that. I don't care who makes a good machine, but Diebold hasn't made one. And they've defended that design as if they think it is a good machine. Geeks don't like people who pretend a bad design is a good design. We'll tear into them. If they routinely defend bad design by saying it is good design and overlooking what we think are obvious flaws we'll notice, and start to expect that. Until they change, a group that decides who they like on the technical ability of a company won't like them. They are lying about their technical quality; at least in our eyes.
Maybe this is an example of free market forces at work.
One customer wants a secure, hardened, auditable, time proven machine with a user verifiable paper trail.
The other doesn't need any of those features.
Therefore two entirely disparate product lines.
One is designed to protect $.
The other is designed to protect democracy.
Who will guard the guards?
it's called 'peer review' and in the science world it's not only expected but mandatory.
my question is this: has diebold's product undergone any sort of peer review? if it's important enough for someone studying the genetic inheretance of grey hair, it's important enough for someone entrusted with running an election for the most powerful person in the world, dontcha think?
2 1337 4 u!
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
I'll get mod-bombed right back down to Good Karma for this- but I have to say that I'm not at all sure it didn't happen in Ohio and Florida in 2004. The exit poll numbers, which had previously been extremely accurate in just about every election I'd ever heard of, were way off in those two states on the Presidential race- but the numbers were close enough that everybody focused on recounts instead (where possible).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
How come no one seems to be asking the slot machine manufacturers to make voting machines? They deal with millions - or billions - of dollars a day and seem to be able to account for every single penny accurately. As an added bonus, all they'd really have to do is change the 7's to donkeys and jackpots to republicans... Pull the lever for your new rep! Seriously though - they're the people who should be making the machines...
It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.
Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.
You don't want to do any flashing around these machines. The little old ladies behind the voting table will be watching you like a hawk and they're swoop down on you so fast with their canes before you could even think about flashing anyone. If you want a safe voting experience, you must see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil when the voting machine flashes you!
Thank you for stealing an earlier post of mine absolutely verbatim.
-the real jdm
Welcome to democratic government, brought to you by Diebold(R)!
Please choose a candidate:
(1) The incumbent guy who's against the terrorists.
(2) The weasly other guy who likes terrorists and wants your child to
be gay.
[press 2]
You have chosen option (2), for gay marriage. Are you sure?
[press no]
Please choose a candidate.
[press 2]
Let's not be too hasty. We don't want the terrorists to feel good.
Do you want the terrorists to feel good?
[press no]
You have chosen option (1), for the incumbent. Are you sure?
[press cancel]
This may forfeit your vote! Are you sure you wish to cancel not
voting for option (1)?
[press yes]
Thank you for your participation in the democratic process! Printing
receipt
Sorry! Out of paper.
The Possible Future, Nov 4th, 2008
"While exit polls conducted by our station and others showed Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain neck-in-neck at nearly 50% in this highly contested state of Ohio, initial results from available precincts shows the winner of the state, and thus the country, as Osama bin Laden, with 107% of the vote. A tape allegedly featuring Mr. bin Laden was broadcast by the al Jazeera network just minutes ago, in which the terrorist mastermind said he was pleased by the clear mandate the capitalist pig masses had given him, and that he hoped his transition from a cave somewhere in Pakistan to the Oval Office would go smoothly. Back to you, Tom."
I don't know, think that would wake people up?
The enemies of Democracy are
Ed Felten is also the guy who hacked the MS DLL that "integrated" IE into Windows to remove IE without destroying the OS, proving in court that Microsoft's defense of their illegal bundling, "it was technologically necessary", was a lie. Though Felten was not even a Windows specialist, and certainly didn't have the source code to delete IE cleanly, he was the the key to the court finding that MS had violated their antibundling consent agreement, the key to finding they'd violated their monopoly status.
Now he's the guy proving Diebold voting systems are insecure.
Isn't anyone else in our giant, brilliant "computer science" industry doing anything? Or are they all working for the bad guys?
--
make install -not war