Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned
An anonymous reader writes, "In a just-published report (PDF, in English, cached here), the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation (Dutch and English) details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party. The paper describes in great detail how 'anyone, when given brief access to the devices at any time before the election, can gain complete and virtually undetectable control over the election results.' As a funny bonus, responding to an earlier challenge by the manufacturer, the researchers reflashed a voting machine to play chess. The news was on national television (Dutch) last night and is growing into a major scandal. 90% of the votes in the Netherlands are cast on these machines and national elections will be held in a month." Please create mirrors for the 8.1-MB PDF and post their URLs. You might also try John Graham-Cumming's l8r.org service to tell you when the slashdot effect subsides from any of the mirrors.
Since we probably won't be seeing elections thrown by a brothah-from-another-gov'nah this time around, we can look forward to crackerz paid well by the republican contingient to ensure the victory in '08.
:/
Most popular party in Holland is Jon Lech Johansen's "DVD Party"
839*929
I would first like to say that I admire your diligence in this matter and gratefully appreciate the work and effort you have put forth to protect the votes of many people the world over including my own.
Secondly, I would like to point out that, although you are a group of experts/scientists, I have witnessed concerns based on science go unheeded by politics--at least in the United States. I hope it is different in other countries, but I have seen a large organization of scientists from all walks of life oppose some of the current administration's actions here with little or no effect on the populace.
Whether this is because people still view scientists as nerds or outcasts of society, I cannot comment on. I only want to make it known--at least on Slashdot--that I support what you're doing and am amazed at the work contained in this PDF. I am more so amazed that someone was kind enough to take the time to translate it to English.
I hope your efforts are met with international recognition as being a champion of voting security--although I fear the reality is you may be criticized and possibly even sued.
My favorite criticism listed in the PDF: After reading a bit of the PDF, I must say that the only thing I don't like is that there is no clear solution offered aside from allusions to opening up the process and technology on how all of this works so that it can be scrutinized. It is pointed out that Security by Obscurity is not the best route
My work here is dung.
Can someone do this in the US please? The only way the US public pays attention to things like this is if there is a scandal.
These things clearly need to be critically looked at.
Star Pirates
What the fuck is "Pwned"? I thought this was a news site, not an AOL chatroom.
here's a mirror, good luck fair server
http://www.preinheimer.com/dump/Es3b-en.pdf
paul reinheimer
And the mirrordot server here.
My work here is dung.
Yeeeeaarrrrgggghhhhh!!! Avast Mateys!! We'll be needin' to get some of these here votin' machines fer the next elec-shun!! We'll teach those scurvy dawgs a thing or two... Arrrrrr!!!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
here (primed).
direct link to the file
Here's a mirror ( added by email :)
/ 2212.html
http://www.testcompany.com/archive/October2006-40
Obviously I need sleep. So here's another mirror.
Hrm, funny, every time we complain that slashdot should go through the process of automating a simple mirror process to avoid hammering an unsuspecting server into rubble, all the "editors" go pointing at the FAQ as some sort of ironclad reasoning against doing so. But here we have an "editor" instructing the readership to do slashdot's work for them. This all just points to the fact that OSTG will pay the bandwidth bills if it means ad revenue, but doesn't want to actually foot the bill to use their server complex for disseminating information.
[
http://www.solatis.com/iliketobeslashdotted.pdf
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
very interesting... here's a mirror:
http://www.nicotinelounge.com/stuff/Es3b-en.pdf
I've been keeping tabs on the Diebold stories coming from U.S. news sources, and it's not like the Diebold problems have been kept secret. Nevertheless, many Americans have reacted to the information with a collective yawn.
So here we have a similar set of circumstances--only the nation at risk has really changed--and the Dutch appear to be fighting mad over this. What gives?
The TV-show link in the main article goes to a preview. The full show is at http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=3355684&md5=e83e151 c120fb91b83739b61fda939e6
African-American?
It's a Dutch blackbox, so it's obviously an African-European box!
However I have a problem on how to call black people in Africa. African-Africans?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Electronic secret ballot just allows fraud to move at a much faster speed, and move invisibly.
Non-secret ballots like caucuses are less prone to fraud as long as voter registration is strictly checked. Those are not immune to social pressure though.
A silly impracticle idea would be to have an arena filled with remote controlled cars. people would be piloting their cars to the area for their candidate. This way the anonymity is pretty much preserved. (this could be done with moving dots and screen shots, too..something..)
Did we seriously just use "Pwned" in a headline for a serious news story?
Don't Tread on Me
That's what I'd expect to see in a heading on digg, but /. - never!
But anyway.. shouldn't it be "got pwned"?
I wonder if any "patriotic" Americans crackers will hack the digital machines collecting/counting votes in the upcoming election to favor Democrats in response to all the reports the past 6+ years that Republicans are getting more than their share of the benefit.
--
make install -not war
what we need is simplicity when it comes to voting, not complexity. i believe we should never go to electronic voting, and even get rid of mechanical voting booths, which has a sordid history of tampering
of course you can do fraud scams with simple paper ballots too: lose them for entire districts, stuff the boxes with fake votes, etc. but any more complexity in the voting system doesn't remove these scams, it just adds a new layer of possible scams
fraud happens in all forms of voting mechanisms, and voting is just too much of an important and vulnerable part of our social cohesion and the source of so much faith in and integrity of our government. being so vital and vulnerable, the point in my mind would be to oversimplify the voting process on purpose. the more complex the system, the more points of failure and the more possibilities of fraud. so make the process very simple: paper ballots
i mean seriously, why the technophilia? voting is a problem that is not solved better with more technology, just made more complex. paper ballots, period, end of story, for all time. the slashdots crowd of any crowd of people should know all about the various and sordid ways malfeasance can be achieved in electronic communication and electronic storage. voting is not a complex math problem. it's very simple. no computer need apply
electronic voting can be a downright scary prospect. don't mess with it, simplify it, which means avoiding computers in the voting process like the plague. i'm not a luddite, i am simply saying that specifically in reference to the voting process, it must be simplified technologically to ensure faith and integrity in our government
because people already doubt enough about how much their vote counts. why give them yet another paranoid schizophrenic reason for them to think their vote doesn't count/ doesn't matter ("it doesn't matter man, it's all in the computer, and they just change the votes to whatever they want them to be man")
bottom line: faith and integrity in our government is far more of an important issue than any speed of transmission/ tabulation. no electronic voting. no mechanical voting. paper ballots only. of course malfeasance can still occur with paper ballots. but with more complex systems, you only add more points for manipulation. this is not a luddite's point of view. i am as much a technophile as the next slashdotter. i just have an appreciation for the limits of technology's ability to solve problems, and that for some limited subset of problems, due to malfeasance and the potential for it, more technology need not apply. voting is such a problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
African-Dutch box, you silly boy.
Yes but does it run Minix
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
I guess it's quite obvious which will be the winning party... (Hint: http://www.piratenpartij.nl/)
I wonder if they'll have a vote whether to keep the boxes or not.
Have you read my journal today?
Hello? Did someone not get the memo about secure passwords? Or better yet, no default passwords at all? Granted, physical access makes the point rather moot, but if this is the kind of security the designer had in mind, it looks like they can give Diebold a run for their money . . .
Yea, but then you'd get complaints from ACLU or NAACP that stupid people were being denied the right to vote.
Okay, we in the US all know that there's not enough time before November elections to fix this. So I have a very simple solution. First we ban the sale of all flash memory for 7 days prior to the elections. Second, we put gigantic super-electromagnetic field generators in the doorways of all the polling places. This way we can ensure that any potential election fraudsters that try to smuggle in memory cards will find them wiped out when they open the Diebold machines with their hotel bar keys.
Of course, anyone else walking through the door stands to have their ATM and credit cards wiped out, but hey, it's a small price to pay for Democracy, don't you think.
For the severely humor-impaired, the above is intended as a joke and in no way reflects the author's actual thoughts on this matter.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Scandal? Sure, but how can we program a voting machine to abuse little boys?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I wish people would concentrate on why it is - at least here in California - close to 70% of the people eligible to vote simply don't.
Oh, I'm sure with these new voting machines, the number of non-voters will decrease. After all, it's easier to add votes than to switch them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I was going to check out what they had to say about it. They also released a press statement about the dust being kicked up:
Kan de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden?
Alles is te manipuleren.
Can the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
Everything can be manipulated
Is de Nedap stemmachine beveiligd tegen moedwillige manipulatie?
Ja. Tegen iedere nieuwe bedreiging worden maatregelen genomen.
Is the Nedap voting machine secured against manipulation
Yes. Against every new threat measures are taken
Kan de uitslag van de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden?
Veel moeilijker dan bij "papieren" verkiezingen
Can the results of the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
Much more difficult than with "paper" elections
Well, at least they're honest unlike Diebold over here that says they're system is the best and totally secure. Elections can and will always be manipulated as long as there are humans involved. If you make 1000's of people vote for a person by putting a gun against their head, you have succesfully manipulated the election.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
stuff is getting old. Come on /. have a little integrity by not letting stories with 'pwned' in the title through all the time.
Regardless of where the box is, it's an African-American box.
Since you didn't know that, you are obviously racist, too.
Couldn't each voting slip or electronic vote just give out a sequential number, people could later check the correct vote has been cast using that number, thus verifying the process whilst retaining anonimity?
http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/101819/Es3b-en.pdf
The basic test for any voting system is: how does it compare to paper ballots marked with a pen and dropped into a box by the voter? If it's not clearly more secure than that, don't use it. So far it doesn't seem any of the alternatives measure up.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That's what you sound like.
Slashdot is not journalism, it is a place where we geeks come together to discuss geek-oriented news that other people have reported. And what language is understood by pretty much every geek? That's right! It's l33t.
I was attempting to explain this to someone the other day. You don't need to alter the votes after the fact, though that may be easier. All you need is a good statistical guess (say, a poll by the local newspaper). Given that, you calculate the skew necessary for a candidate to win. Then, you simply tell the machine to randomly record a vote for person X as a vote for person Y every a certain percentage of the time. You only need to do this in specific areas where the races are close, concede a loss in areas where the skew would be too large, and presume victory in areas where the bias is for your candidate.
In the US, you could steal an election with a small software update on a small percentage of the machines. The tallies would all add up and most of the votes counted would reflect the votes cast -- but just enough wouldn't to skew the ultimate result. The only hint you would have something was wrong would be a minor but crucial deviation between exit poll results and the official count.
It makes for a good simulation for students to put together to see just how simple it is to do.
Well the article only mentions that the manufacturer challenged the dutch hackers. Groenendaal, head of Nedap stated "hackers have absolutely no chance", since the machines were no normal computers but dedicated special purpose machines built "only for the purspose of voting and nothing else". Based on that he made a statement he must have thought was funny. I sadly can't translate it without loosing the fun of it. Translated to german he said: "dass man mit unserer Wahlmaschine auch Schach spielen kann würde ich gerne vorgeführt bekommen" Meaning he (thinks) it's not at all possible that this machine could ever play chess. And he would like it to be demonstrated. How silly. Very funny they made it possible. Haha.
Here's another mirror on my websiteo uwenstemcomputersniet.nl-temp/images/9/91/Es3b-en. pdf
http://goestoeleven.org/misc/mirrors/www.wijvertr
Um, flash memory is not magnetic media. It would be unaffected by magnetic fields, unless they were of sufficient strength to cause large enough circulating currents in any piece of circuitry so that it would destroy itself. Presumably such a field would also destroy the voting machines, pacemakers, cell phones, lighting ballasts in the voting room, etc. Try again.
That is a pretty good test. I wonder if it would be hard to get a law passed stating that any new voting method must be at least clearly as secure than a previous method.
Here's a mirror:
http://maarten.tepaske.net/Es3b-en.pdf
Not really, the weaknesses presented can only be exploited on a per-machine basis and there are some 8000 of them.
Of course on longer term these machines need to be replaced by a inherently secure system.
What I find more worrying is the closed source software running the machines and tallying the results, this has to be replaced by an open source system that can be checked by any one.
Dutch elections are simple, just a single vote per citizen and the required software would be equally simple.
The only complicating factor could be that there are typically as many as 20 or even 30 parties, each with a whole list of candidates that all need to show up on the large touch screen.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
From their site:
Q: Can the results of the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
A: Much more difficult than with "paper" elections
The system we had in place for paper elections wasn't perfect. But it was at least nontrivial to change more than one vote at a time. These machines were introduced because they're convenient and because they eliminate counting errors, not because they were more secure than paper ballots.
Sheesh, Mr. AC! It wassn't meant to be serious. I guess no one even bothers to read disclaimers anymore.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
How the hell did Bush manage to pull this off? Everyone knows only dirty American Republicans (is that redundant?) would use such evil machines!
No, it is called a Semantic Pleonasm.
Yur güelcom =oP
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
As requested
Why would anyone vote, if they had to wonder about the results?
Apathy is a real issue, but why allow "why vote, my vote will not
be tallied as I want it tallied anyway" to the many reasons people
come up with for not voting?
emt 377 emt 4
For those of you keeping score, a good portion of Americans have essentially given up on their government, which allows it to get away with murder. I honestly can't think of a single thing that Congress would stop this administration from doing. The politicians in power don't listen to us, and our only choices on election day are between two candidates who are ready to sell their soul and lie to the public all over again.
And now we continually get reports that the politicians no longer need the public to get elected because of these new fangled e-voting machines. I write letters, I vote, I tell others about all of it, and yet the bastards keep doing what they do and don't go anywhere.
True democracy only works when the populace is educated enough to make smart decisions. You could counter by saying vacuous crap like, "well why aren't you running?" But in the end the public is apathetic because it's takes too much work to care about this crap. Americans are rediculously lazy, you know. (After all we invented the internet so we could browse pr0n without walking into a shady bookstore.)
[/apathy]
So you want to use an electronic voting machine. Why not have it also print out a paper record for each vote? Have the paper printout slide into a non-accessible, yet viewable window for the voter to approve/disapprove. If it's approved, it gets dropped into the mix. If not, it is shuttled into a junk pile and they re-cast.
You've now got your e-voting tallying votes quickly, and the paper trail should there be doubt cast upon the results.
As well as being used in Holland and France, thousands of these NEDAP machines were bought by the Irish government with a view to replacing our paper election system with electronic voting. They had been used in a few pilot constituencies, and were due to be rolled out nationwide for the 2004 local and European elections. Luckily, determined lobbying by computer professionals (Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting) and others forced the Government to set up an independent Commission on Electronic Voting, who decided that they couldn't stand over the use of the machines without further testing.
Interestingly enough, these Dutch hackers used the First Report of the Commission on Electronic Voting to glean a lot of the technical details about the machines.
The most recent report of the Commission (July 2006) concluded that the machines needed some modification but were basically okay, but that the software used to manage an election was basically a joke and should be scrapped. The Government tried to use this as vindication of their actions in procuring the system, even though they had been perfectly willing to let a nationwide election go ahead with dodgy software.
Even that fig-leaf of respectibility has now been removed, and I expect that the Government will soon be moving the machines out of their costly storage facilities, and into the nearest recycling centre. As the Dutch hackers showed that they could be used to play chess, perhaps an amusement arcade will take them off their hands.
Lots of info at the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting site linked above, including a discussion list archive which has covered every imaginable angle on E-Voting.
I hate it when people misspell pwnz0r3d.
I tdon't think that'd work, the proponents of electronic voting claim it is completely secure.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Depends on who is in power at the time, I guess. If making it more secure would also make it more difficult for [incumbant party] to retain their power, then it will likely never go through. American government is all about the acquisition and retention of power. I havn't seen one bill passed in recent memory that wasn't almost entirely poilitical posturing on both sides: "Look what I voted for/against that was so great/bad for the American economy/war on terror/homeland security/social security system! Remember that when you go to vote this year!"
they can't open it with a minibar key..
"Geez - if I'd known how easy it is, I coulda saved myself a BUNDLE on campaign expenses!"
Translation:
Yea, but then you'd get complaints from ACLU or NAACP that stupid people were being denied the right to vote.
Flamebait!?! I thought it was quite funny. (and I'm left leaning)
ZKTime flies like an arrow Fruit flies like a banana
Oops. Forgot the URL.
-> http://www.nedap.nl/nieuws.php?id=30
Well, here's my mirror... http://dlz.m00h.ath.cx/download/dutch_blackbox_vot ing
good luck.
If you can code it to change votes, you can code it to print anything you want out of the printer while internally counting a vote otherwise. Then you'd have to count the paper votes to verify anyway, so why even have the machine?
Get rid of the machines.
Maybe The Netherlands should become the next state of the USA - it already has the necessary e-voting infrastructure :-)
NO. Because then vote-selling would be possible. It would allow a voter to prove to a vote-buyer that they voted as-desired and should be paid. In an honest election, the voter must have no way of proving their vote outside of the polling place.
Here's my mirror of the PDF:
p df
http://www.koschfamily.com/tekrat/mirror/Es3b-en.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Good point, the idea of vote selling has never crossed my mind, guess I'll never make a politiion...
Africans. When your skin is white over here, you get referred to as an European. (No matter is you were born here or not.) Go figure.
Maybe we can just call them people?
he said what i said better than i did and with real world experience
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here are two mirrors:
p df
http://www.computersciencegeek.com/files/Es3b-en.
http://www.gilscode.com/files/Es3b-en.pdf
Good luck!
Hard to get a popular movement going when the issue only affects a third of your population and half of that third doesn't care because the issue in question works to their advantage.
As for "helping America vote", the only group having a problem with marking paper ballots would be visually impaired voters, and the law allows them to bring a person of their choice into the voting booth with them, to assist them. Disenfranchisement through poorly maintained voter records is, I suspect, a far greater problem (but that would be caused by the bureaucratic apparatus not doing its job, and so there's no incentive to get *that* fixed) Voters who are too frail or lack the ability to correctly indicate their choices on a paper ballot probably won't improve their abilities when a touchscreen machine is placed before them.
3 21509
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199213&cid=16
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
mirrored on Es3b-en.pdf
where do you live in indonesia? i've always wanted to go, never been. sulawasi, flores, borneo. not interested in bali/ lombok, too touristy. java, not so much, except for borobudur/ yogyakarta. is it safe for westerners in the boondocks? i know medan/ ambon is nuts, but i think south sulawasi is ok. i'd love to see those wacky houses the torajans build
;-)
salemat, cheers!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Um...
I think you're trying to be funny, but let me point out a couple of things...
1) Electronics don't have the concept of "Race" or ancestry therefore you cannot be racist against them.
2) The Dutch are not Americans, else they would likely be called Americans. Therefore you should call it an African-Dutch-box by your logic.
Judging from your statement (...not an AOL chatroom.) it appears that you understand the nature of the word.
I also believe there is sufficient context clues in the summary to derive a definition.
As mentioned elsewhere, it is a typo for owned. It is a significant piece of the Internet dialect of English known as leet-speak. It is pronounced like owned, but with a p in front of it; "powned" or "pohned".
I don't get why people are so upset by the evolution of a language over a textual medium.
Then again, I also don't understand why people feel the need to maintain the status quo. Men can't have long hair! Don't be gay! Digital downloads of music and movies are bad!
:(){
"If it's approved, it gets dropped into the mix. If not, it is shuttled into a junk pile and they re-cast."
If it's approved, but for the undesired candidate, shuttle it into the junk pile after the voter had approved it.
Even better; show the wrong vote. Voter rejects, drop it into the approved mix. Let voter recast and approve, shuttle into the junk pile. Voter thinks they've outsmarted machine, machine throws election. Simple.
In Belgium, the source code for voting machines has been made available and independent experts have pointed numerous flaws. No one seems to care, but that's off topic.
My point is this : these experts explained that the only way to make the vote truly verifiable is to have a paper trail for each vote. I believe RMS said something similar about this problem.
"guess I'll never make a politiion..."
You can be proud of that.
It's good to know that Bush can be the president of the Dutch too.
Bishop to D5
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I'm just as jaded as the rest of y'all, but I am *glad* that the Constitution is George-Resistant.
He's tried to slam through a couple of very dubious amendments recently, particularly on gay civil rights.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
'Pwned' may have started as a typo, but it's now a full-fledged word with a different meaning than 'owned'. Compare:
I owned that car. (That car used to be mine, before I sold it)
I pwned that car. (We were racing, and I left it way behind)
First there was the slang word "ownage", which means dominance, and is only loosely related to the verb "own". Once ownage was widely used, people started using it in other forms: own, owned, owning. These are spelled and pronounced the same as the non-slang verb to own, but are not the same word in people's minds. This sort of thing happens all the time in languages, and what tends to happen is that people look for a way to separate the two words. Then a few people started using "pwned" satirically (to say, "I'm using this word in the sense a person who can't type would use it"). Well, pwn (pronounced "pone") just so happens to be a syllable with no widespread meaning, which makes it prime real estate for a new word to form. So when a few people started using "pwned", it caught on quickly and replaced the slang meaning of "owned". Voila, a new word is born. In a few years its spelling will probably be normalized to "powned", and then it'll be here to stay.
So you want to use an electronic voting machine. Why not have it also print out a paper record for each vote? Have the paper printout slide into a non-accessible, yet viewable window for the voter to approve/disapprove. If it's approved, it gets dropped into the mix. If not, it is shuttled into a junk pile and they re-cast.
Don't forget to come up with an appropriate Dr. Seuss name for this confounded contraption.
You've now got your e-voting tallying votes quickly, and the paper trail should there be doubt cast upon the results.
But we have this already without the smoke and mirrors. Voter marks choices in pen on paper ballot. Electronic voting machine scans ballot, tallies votes, and securely stores paper ballot. Problem solved.
We don't use voting machine in France. Not for national or local election at least, maybe for some specific organisations.
We just count by hand, by volunteer citizens. I have done it several times. I don't see any better system to ensure there is no manipulation, as any voting citizen can participate and check the counting procedure is done correctly.
If the people are still young enough and/or worldly enough and/or smart enough then they CAN learn.
But there are people who will put Vasoline on their toast.
And even more who could be talked into trying it.
I don't hold out much hope...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
just got pwnd!
The two are very different. The href link is right, but the text isn't. I typed in the text (because I was reading from a news feed) and got a VERY different site :-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
give us a break, i'm busy and have years of conditioning that says "don't read, just click the submit button"
Be gentle
http://dkdk.homelinux.com/Es3b-en.pdf
Yertman
The only way to keep electronic voting machines without a paper trail out of democratic elections is to conduct a mass revolt during the election. Not a violent one, but a huge, impossible-to-ignore demonstration of how flawed the machines are.
There needs to be a foundation which will distribute flash cards, keys, whatever is used to compromise (but not damage in any way) these boxes; and the software on it should allow the voter to enter an off-ballot vote for someone not in the election officially (say, "Spiderman", "Bill Gates", or the local independent candidate who couldn't afford to get on the ballot).
Ideally, there would be no crime committed, as the voter using this "freedom kit" would be using it only to cast their own vote the way they see fit, not modifying anyone elses' votes.
Of course, an even more dramatic demonstration would be 1,000 people trojaning every single riding to case ALL votes for "Spiderman". But those 1,000 people would be at risk of prosecution if they could be tied to the modifications. If the cards reflashed the board, and told it to reboot in random(2) hours to the new skewed software, there would be enough plausible deniability I suspect.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
NEDAP voting machines have been used (in small numbers) in Germany as well, including the last big goverment election of 2004.
But it seems like the german goverment really wants these machines. The offical specification for any voting machine in germany looks like it has been copied from the NEDAP specs. And the certification of these|any voting computer will not be done at the obvious choice of federal agency for computer security (BSI), but insted at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), an agency that's mostly known for keeping the official german time (and does some consulting in physics and engineering). Computer Security is definatly not on their agenda and the closest thing to certifying a voting computer the PTB has done is certifying "non-automatic weighing instruments". (Source and suggested reading for german readers: c't magazine, 20/06)
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
No living Americans have had to face this, so they can be pretty laissez faire about things. After all, they have have their tec-9s and hunting rifles, so shouldn't it be easy to oust the government that has stolen an election? They forget, of course, that like all fascists, they're subtle about stealing the election, they rely on the unthinking masses to keep dissidents from acting, and -- in a pinch -- any weapon that you are allowed to own is so immensely that feeble that the army and police are already laughing at you for thinking that rebellion might even be an unlikely possibility.
For information on the upcoming election, see:
o n%2C_2006
;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_electi
I guess nobody has written about this controversy yet, I guess I'll write that into the article tonight. If anyone feels like helping out
Logic is a white male construct.
Your post proves you are racist. And a virgin as well.
Not cracking on you for the spelling mistake. Giving you a thumbs-up for NOT being a politician!
Almost everybody knows that it can happens but believes that it will not. What is needed is for 1 machine to be set to be 100% communist or green party in America, or conservatives in Europe. Once they realize that it can work against them and it does happen, then citizens will start to care. As it is, in atlanta, there are ex diebold employees who will tell you that they were forced to load a set of programs on the night of voting by the company, being told that they would lose their jobs if they talked. And, interestingly, the vote on machines reflected different than the exit polls (much more republican). And yet, this is not enough to care, since it can not be proved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
actually, from the first paragraph of the article you linked to:
"Pleonasm is the use of more words (or even word-parts) than necessary to express an idea clearly. The word comes originally from Greek ó ("excess"). A closely related, narrower concept (some would say a subset of pleonasm) is rhetorical tautology, in which essentially the same thing is said more than once in different words. Regardless, both are a form of redundancy."
It's called the CIA. They specialize in overthrowing and subverting governments. See Haiti, Honduras, Guatamala, S. Vietnam, Iran, Latin and S. America in general as examples.
I doubt they did this one, but considering the resistance much of Europe has to American assimilation, I wouldn't put it past them...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I've seen the documentary and the message boils down to: you can crack it if you have access to it. But isn't that the case with all computers? System administrators always have the opportunity for fraud because they know all the passwords and can access all data on the computer. So I really don't get what the big deal is here. In the documentary they showed how to change the software in our voting computers by changeing a chip inside the machine. I've seen voting computers on the Internet that were easier to crack. I say FUD!
-- Cheers!
If it's a Dutch blackbox, does that imply that in order to vote, you have to stick your penis into it?
[soapbox]
I agree with that assessment. However, I think the sensationalizing of these reports - in order to stroke the egos of a few uber h4xx0rz - is a bad idea and prone to turn off more voters than necessary. Simply stating that there may be flaws wiht any given voting system is poor judgement. Stating that there are flaws and that steps have been taken to rectify them - as in Los Angeles County - is better.
[/soapbox]The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Spare us the moral equivalency. Having sex with children, regardless of their gender, is not even remotely the same thing as having sex with other consenting adults. I know the Republican spin on this is to somehow blame Democrats for this scandal rather than admit fault, and I can't say I'm surprised by that. But sorry, Republican--believe the new polls: You people just disgust us. No matter how far back into history you try to go, you can't change the fact that one of your own is a disgusting pervert, and that his Republican cronies in the House chose to remain mum about it rather than risk losing the seat. That fact in itself is despicable for other reasons.
From TFA:
"Without exaggeration, even a brain-numbingly insecure system(19) would would meet Dutch legal requirements..."
And the text of footnote 19?
"For the sake of the argument let us assume an unpatched Windows 95 machine with an always-on unencrypted wireless Internet connection, no virus scanner and an early Internet Explorer web browser to cast votes on an ASP script running on an internal unpatched IIS 1.0 webserver."
I would have specified that file and print sharing be enabled on the win95 box, and that the IIS server not be restricted to connections from localhost, but I think their example is good enough.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
This is a good week for America. Nasdaq is up, Barbra Streisand is back, and we've just discovered the Dutch are about as dumb as we are.
You can avoid that by just telling each voter his or her "vote ID" number, rather than providing an official printed slip or something. In an electronic system, just display it on the screen; the voter can choose to write it down or not.
After the election you publish the list of vote ID numbers and corresponding votes somewhere -- on the web, with printed copies available in the county courthouse or something -- so a voter who knows his own vote ID can confirm his vote. But the voter cannot prove to a third party that a particular vote ID is really his own, so vote-selling doesn't work.
Ideally the ID numbers should be chosen randomly, rather than sequentially, so that they don't reveal anything about when (and possibly where) they were cast.
Yup - that's what people decided here in Ireland - that the proposed e-voting while having the appearance of being progressive, was a regressive step (our paper voting works well apart from the potential for final results not being set for a week with recounts and our use of transferable votes). We are currently spending millions of Euro every year *storing* machines of this type that were bought here and fortunately not used in the end.
:) Of course, the fun thing about this story is that we now know that the hardware is totally insecure too.
The guys in the Netherlands apparently made reference to the document produced by our Commission for Electronic Voting - which suggested the hardware was OK but the software a joke (the govt. had set up the committee to stifle dissent by having an independant body give a stamp of approval - it didn't quite work out like that
Not a hope of us using these machines in Ireland now - we should try flog them off to some fledgling democracy or something.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
That's no good, as the vote-buyer could just insist that the voter tell them the voter id number. This can be done before the list is printed. The voter may be able to pick a random number, but they are in trouble if that random number either does not appear or does not indicate a vote for the "correct" candidate.
After the election you publish the list of vote ID numbers and corresponding votes somewhere -- on the web, with printed copies available in the county courthouse or something -- so a voter who knows his own vote ID can confirm his vote. But the voter cannot prove to a third party that a particular vote ID is really his own, so vote-selling doesn't work.
If the whole point of giving someone a number is so that they can check to see if their vote was correctly reported, wouldn't they need some kind of proof in order to report to the authorities (or the media, or whatever) if their vote was changed? If you can't prove that that vote was yours with a receipt or some such, you can't prove to your buyer that you've voted as promised, but you also can't prove that the vote was yours and that you voted in a certain manner if the votes are tampered with.
That's a hard standard to beat. However, there's an interesting proposal from Ron Rivest (the 'R' in RSA) called Three Vote [PDF] you might be interested in. It proposes a system whereby each voter gets to keep a copy (receipt) of the vote he cast, but can't use the receipt to prove how he voted and every ballot cast is essentially 'put on a bulletin board' for public verification. An interesting system, which can be implemented using existing voting technology.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
I think the paper has to come out of the machine and the voter then takes it and puts it into a ballot box, or can be returned to the disposal box (with the voter seeing it get torn up) to get the right to try to vote again.
The enclosed paper leads to the possibility that the paper seen is not the one put into the box. Granted that seems unlikely, but having the voter move the paper removes this possibility, and also eliminates the need for a complex mechanism to redirect the paper to two different bins.
...awwww snap.
Blar.
every single issue you bring up above is valid and good. but every single one of those issues is less important than the integrity of the process. integrity that is served best by making the process as simple as possible, with the least opportunities for malfeasance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
-integrity of the process is most important
-integrity is best served with the simplest process
nothing you said above changes or surpasses those two points
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I came up with this idea after the "hanging chads" fiasco. People started suggesting that the best alternative was to go electronic. Being a Software Quality Assurance Engineer, I know that this is not a better way to handle the situation.
I think we should use less technology. So I propose that we use colored rocks! You select a color that is pre-determined to represent a Presidential candidate (okay, red for Republicans, blue for Democrats, green for Greens, yellow for Libertarians, etc). Then walk up to a large bag and put your rock in. Once the voting is over, the rocks are counted. Pretty darn fool-proof compared to hanging chads and hackable machines. At least that would work if the popular vote actually determined the President.
"... Red. No, blue! AAAAHHHHH!"
Not so long as corrupt and evil individuals wish to corrupt the democratic electoral process.
It all boils down to what level of trust you want to have in the system. General purpose computers for voting? They can be programmed to run anything and say anything - that's the entire purpose of a general purpose computer. Open source voting software and open verification? Read about the Thompson Hack. Assembling a limited-purpose expert system? Can't trust that its designers aren't compromised in some way. Creating the system using discrete transistors a la PDP-10? We can fit an entire PDP-10 onto a single one of those discrete transistors these days; It would only take a few such hacked transistors on the data readout pins to say anything their malicious creator wanted. Plan to verify that the transistors are in fact simple transistors? You'll have to use electronic tools to test their responses. Your tools can be replaced with ones programmed to say what the person replacing them wants. Each step more and more difficult, but still possible none the less.
The basic problem is that it's fundamentally impossible for a person to be absolutely 100% certain how an electronic computer will operate if evil and corrupt people have a strong incentive to change it's workings because it's impossible to interact with electronic circuits without technological go-betweens that could also be changed.
The most complex device I would support being used in an election is an electromechanical computer with mechanical memory where every component is encased inside a transparent material. Anyone can examine it's system of mechanical switches, register pins, levers, and rods, and the operation of the motors that turn the crank and the electrical relays connecting it's "vote for this person" buttons on the front to the counter mechanisms, and the wouldn't need anything other than their eyes to inspect that all vote counters start in the 0000-0000-0000-0000 position.
I freely admit, suspecting that someone would try to corrupt an election by replacing hardware components of computers is out there. How do you KNOW that it's not being done though? Given what we know of Diebold, it's almost universally suspected that they replaced softare components to fix the 2004 election. And is anything less than 100% certainty of the basic components acceptable in something as critical as an election?
Any voting box can be hacked.
It's getting the axe through security that presents the real problems.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
I agree that the media can be very derelict in their duties these days, but blaming media for everything is a cop-out.
Blaming the media is just another excuse John Q. Public can use to cover his own unwillingess/inability to carry out his civic duties.
People are more than willing to stand in the streets holding signs, but how many spend a similar amount of time researching candidates, becoming involved in their political party, writing to elected officials, VOTING, going to city council meetings, etc?
All those things take time, though, and come with little glory. It's easier to sit around bitching about how bad things are and blaming The Media for your own lethargy, ignorance and failure to actively participate in your own governance.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Nevertheless, many Americans have reacted to the information with a collective yawn.
My Ohio now allows mail-in voting simply for the asking (no conditions needed.) According to the local papers, the quantity of mail in ballots being requested has increased dramatically (I personally don't doubt that Ohio will become an all mail in state in a few years, like Oregon.)
According to informal research, the top reason for requesting the mail in ballot is to avoid the lines. The second reason--distrust of the voting machines. I've met with the Director of my county's Board of Elections, and in spite of their work (Franklin County was the only county to require 3rd party examination of source code of voting machines) people are highly distrustful.
Because: a) you'd need to count the paper votes anyway (at least in some fraction of the districts) and b) what should happen if paper count and computer count disagree? As far as I know the b)-thing happened lately somewhere (I forgot the location, was it in Spain?) and then it was decided that the paper count was too unreliable and the computer count was used.
That's only a partial proof, but I see your point.
It might help if the polling place were to have a screen that displays randomly-selected votes (ID and candidate) in real time as they're cast. That way the number reported by the voter could just as easily be that of someone else's vote for the "required" candidate that just happened to show up on the screen.
That's adding more complexity, though, and more potential weak links for someone to exploit. (For example, an attacker could cause bogus votes to show up on that screen, to catch the voter if he reports one of the bogus vote numbers.)
Although the issues raised with the Dutch voting machines appears to be very similar to the earlier reported Diebold problems, it has some differences.
For one, the actual voting machine is pretty huge, and to change anything to the machine's functions it has to be screwed open, after which a specific chip is to be replaced. That's a lot different from the Diebold issue in which, with little covert skills, you could actually change the machine's code while voting (because it's so easy).
The main issue raised in the documentary isn't really the machines themselves, but the relatively easy access to it outside the election. The makers of the documentary simply asked a city's government official for a machine and they got it. They could then change the machine's code by replacing a chip and send it back without anyone checking it's integrity. Furthermore, the machines are stored in a weakly secured location (no camera's, just a lock on a door). And barely any software-integrity check is made when the machine is put into function. So the machines can be compromised before any election without anyone knowing it.
So I would say that the design of the machine was pretty secure by itself, but the main problem seemed to lie in the process of checking machine integrity and secure storage. Still something in need of a fix, but as far as I know nowhere near the problems the Diebold machines are having.
QWN! It's even better than PWN!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
"You might also try John Graham-Cumming's l8r.org service to tell you when the slashdot effect subsides from any of the mirrors."
Erm, I tried to but it's been slashdotted....
Of course constitutions should be hard to amend.
I wasn't making an argument against the fact that some of the current attempts to amend it have failed. I was making an argument against the state-ratification requirement, and against the fact that there's too little constitutional debate.
Just because it's not broken doesn't mean there's no reason to debate it. There's a lot of archaic stuff in there, and I'd rather have the thing rewritten than have the Supreme Court make increasingly stretched interpretations to be able to apply it to modern government.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
nice obfuscation
dance around the central issue all you want, but in every word you wrote above, you haven't touched the most important issue in play here: the integrity of the process
address that, and maybe you have something worthwhile to say here. as it is, you've distracted and obfuscated, but you haven't spoken one word towards the most important thing in the voting process:
INTEGRITY
address that concept please
you know you should get a job as a political spin doctor, because you've got the essential ingredients of demagoguery down pat: distraction and half truths
in short you have a future in politics, but on the ballot, not in tinkering with the machines
god knows we must always fear those who excel in tinkering with both
that doesn't seem to concern you
**shudder**
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ah, but it is you who is labelling my statements as logic... So your first assertion is false. Also, my wife can pretty easily disprove your second statement. I, apparently unlike most other slashdotters, can manage a social life too ;)
For those who don't like 8.1 meg PDF files, here is a 2.1 meg HTML mirror including images and all.
Bit late, but maybe better late than never.
The founders would have thought that today's President has way too much power but they would have been delighted that it was negative. They anticipated Congresss running the country, potentially getting out of control, and put in an override the President could use if the legislature ran amuck. Aside from that, the President was a sort of cache, dedicated to doing things that had to be done faster than Congress could manage (negotiating treaties, commanding the army, etc.).
No, the founders shouldn't be regarded as prophets, but if you read the Federalist Papers you'll see that they were damned fine engineers, expert on every successful and failed democratic experiment you've heard of and zillions you didn't know existed. Tinkering with their work is kind of like changing software that Donald Knuth wrote: something to do with great humility. Their work lasted a lifetime before the first civil war, hasn't had another one since, and stands in a very small group of long-lived governmental structures.
Try changing one vote per precinct.
Diebold has been known to install uncertified software. Anyone here incapable of making an off-by-one error look like an accident?
http://www.vote-smart.org/index.htm
http://www.factcheck.org/
Just for a start.
Your fellow Americans are dying by the thousands. You have a *duty* to be informed. You have time to read before you vote. Think as critically and openmindedly as if you were debugging a problem at work. This isn't some bleeding tribal football rivalry thing where you're supposed to cheer for "your side" and dismiss the other. Know what you care about, find out who REALLY supports it, and if nobody does then in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster then go vote against the worst ones! Thought experiment: imagine where Iraq would be today if they'd been able to pick the *lesser* of two evils every four years. Picking the lesser of two evils is worth dying for, let alone driving to the polls.
This election is pivotal. Turnout will decide it. Remember that usually only a third of voters turn out for midterms, so you're voting for three people. Drag along another three customary nonvoters from your LAN party and you're voting for a dozen people.
Start simple, check if you're registered to vote.
One step beyond "owned" -- ie. stolen, and fenced at a pawn-shop.
At least, that's what I always assumed. Am I giving credit where none is due?
Bernard Swiss
That would carry more impact for the intended audience than a chess game.
After all, this would be aimed at the US "Joe and Jane Six-pack".
Plus, it would be much easier to present clearly and dramatically on the 6 O'clock TV News.
Bernard Swiss
Just because it's not broken doesn't mean there's no reason to debate it. There's a lot of archaic stuff in there, and I'd rather have the thing rewritten than have the Supreme Court make increasingly stretched interpretations to be able to apply it to modern government.
The state ratification piece is what really makes it work. It spreads what little good sense we have as a nation outside the doors of our easily-purchased congresswimps.
Rewritten by whom -- the assholes whose wackoness we'd want it rewritten to constrain? We've already let our energy policy be written by Cheneyfuck and his energy industry buddies. Why would we want to do the same with the Constitution?