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HBO's Hacking Democracy Available Online
prostoalex writes "HBO's controversial special 'Hacking Democracy' on issues with Diebold voting machines is now available in full on Google Video." Covered earlier on Slashdot, the documentary seems to have gathered quite a bit of heat from Diebold in addition to the one that didn't air.
If you have the "VideoDownloader" extension for Firefox, it gives you three choices of downloading the video from google: flv, avi, mp4. I'm sure you can find at least one of those options suitable.
I noted that one of the computers running GEMS (don't know if it was an actual tally machine) seemed to have Bear-Share installed so I assume it was connected to that "series of tubes". Nice; a Windows box running something as monumentally critical as voting connected to the web and probably used for general computing as well - there's a system I would have faith in. I'm also amazed at how stupid this piece of software was. You modify the MS access database (or maybe it was a plain JET database) which has seems to have no protection whatsoever and the stupid software doesn't even notice - "its ok, it has a password". Diebold made much about encryption but it seemd bogus if you can modidy databases and memory cards and not have the software notice. The worst part is the election officials presented all seemed to blindly accept that all was OK. I'm we use paper in my country.
By the way, if you're voting in California, you might consider that one of the candidates for Secretary of State, Debra Bowen is a proponent of Open Voting.
Bruce McPherson, the incumbent, appears to be obstructing progress towards open voting.
I don't know the other candidates' stances. Anyone?
GVI format and conversion
.avi files, are modified Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files that have an extra list containing the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. The video is encoded in DivX4 alongside an MP3 audio stream. DivX video players can render .gvi Google Video Files without format conversion (after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi, although this method of just renaming the file extension does not work with videos purchased with DRM to protect it from piracy). Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows the user to convert them into different formats of choice. There are also privately developed software solutions, such as GVideo Fix, that can convert them to .avi format without recompression. MEncoder with "-oac copy -ovc copy" as parameters also suffices.
Google Video Files (.gvi), and latterly its
Very simple conversion with no program
It is Simple to convert a GVI or GVP file. 1st download file, then open file with notepad. There will be a URL address. You copythe URL into your browser then you get a download window from google server for files real format AVI mpep wmv ect.
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If you don't have the time to watch the entire thing ... start watching at 1:05:15 until at least 1:16:00 ... which includes Diebold stating that the memory cards cannot be hacked without the system knowing, and then watching the process of the memory cards being hacked and altering the outcome of an election (and the system not registering the fraud). All it takes is to preset the cards with a number of negative votes for one candidate and the same number of positive votes for another candidate (thus not altering the total number of votes cast).