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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.
Alright people, there should be no talking for 1 hr 21 min 57 secs after the post, or else you didn't WTFM!
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.
Fact is an affirmative defense to libel.
To determine facts there is a legal process known as "discovery." I don't imagine that Diebold is going to be in much of a hurry to go there; hissy fits are their stock in trade.
Just as it is for all abusive control freaks.
KFG
What's the legal status of that video being there?
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
Great documentary.
Despite the fact that I have very little faith in the electoral process in the USA, and no confidence at all in the election results - what I still retain faith in is the way that US citizens will not stand idly by, while democracy is stolen from them, whether it be by design, or by mistake (it's immaterial really, either way).
The important thing is that the US system of checks and balances permits citizens to kick up an almighty stick about the systems which count (or fail to count, or alter, even worse!) their votes.
The only question in my mind is this: can the citizens of the USA kick up a big enough stink, and fast enough, to produce a fair election in 2008. Somehow, I doubt it, sadly.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
So if I keep telling myself that my software I write needs to make me money, it'll automatically make itself bug-free?
Dammit! I have really been wasting a lot of time debugging software if all I needed was a little positive thinking!
Of course, ATMs are capable of providing a paper receipt and the accuracy of ATM actions are routinely audited by average citizens with a vested interest in the accuracy of an ATM's tabulations.
You just go to your electronic voting machine and do a write-in vote for a candidate named:
:-)
'; UPDATE votes SET type='W', name='Electronic voting is not ready yet';
Voting machines are much harder. See with ATMs there's trust on all parts except the final operator. The ATM trusts the bank fully and does whatever it says. The bank could lie to the ATM and say you had no money, or tell it you had money you didn't. However they have no reason to do that since the amount they could steal that way is peanuts and they'd be shut down over it. So what it comes down to is you can trust the owner of it, you just need to make sure the person using it can't break in and steal money.
Not the case with a voting machine. Here you can't really trust, well, anyone. The person who controls the machine might very well want to change the results so you have to have a system to keep them from doing that. It's a much harder problem.
It would be somewhat analogue to why encryption works for SSH but not for copy protection. With SSH you are trying to keep everyone out except for trusted parties. You trust the server, it trusts you (if you authenticate). All the people who should have keys. However for copy protection you want to keep everyone out, even the person who you are giving the software to in the end. You want them to have use but not access. Well it doesn't work like that, the key has to be there somewhere and thus the encryption is mostly just for show.
So that's actually part of the problem here. Diebold just kinda decided to apply their ATM design to voting machines, but that doesn't work because voting machines are a much harder problem.
I live in a suburb of Toronto and we have our municipal elections tomorrow. I voted early on Saturday and I noticed my vote got counted on a Diebold machine. All previous elections we wrote an "X" in a circle and they were hand-counted - this time it was electronically counted.
1 324237&from=rss) really pissed me off.
I asked the elections official how did they know my vote was counted. Her response was, (as she pointed to a small LCD display), "this counter here says how many votes this machine processed." I asked her how does she know it was counted *CORRECTLY* she made the mistake of saying "we're pretty sure it's correct."
At this point I demanded to know how "pretty sure" she was. Her defense was "there's a paper trail incase of an error" - a fairly valid defense. I proceeded to point to two electronic Diebold machines, the 6" thick ones with an LCD screen, and asked her "what about those?" She told me in a very matter of fact way that there's a paper trail for those too.
I asked her where the printer was, and if she ever actually say a printer. It was at this point that she no longer wanted to talk to me and kinda laughed me off as some sort of conspiracy wackjob.
The fact that we used these machines after their utter failure in larger US elections pissed me off, but the fact that they FAILED in CANADA, just one province over (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/
I wanted to argue with her further but had no hard references memorized, essentially making my argument invalid. I did a bit of research from the usual sources (http://www.blackboxvoting.org), but I was really hoping to see this documentary before the elections tomorrow.
I encourage all Canadians voting in municipal elections tomorrow to make your feelings about e-voting (especially on Diebold machines) known to the organizers, and write your MPs and MPPs to tell them that e-voting is not acceptable.
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
Well, if you ask me, the deal is that the Bush machine is getting ready to pull some fast ones tomorrow, and they expect they're going to have some peculiar "upsets" that need to be explained away, so they're sending folks like yourself around to soften up the crowd in advance. But hey, some people think I'm paranoid.
Aw, poor baby. You might lose some karma.
Is having a national release tomorrow! One day only!
This is a great sworn testimony by a programmer named Clinton Curtis that talks about the hackability of the machines. Eak.
So the demonstration at the end showed how this could work - they voted in a fake election. They had six votes for "Yes" and two votes for "No". They put in the hacked memory card and it produces the initial printout which shows zero votes for no and zero votes for yes. After entering in the votes through the machine it comes out as seven for "Yes" and one for "No" (so I guess they had -5 "No" and +5 for "Yes" on the hacked card).
Just to set the record straight;
The vote was can the machine be hacked?
6 no votes were cast and 2 yes votes were cast.
The pre count showed no votes cast for either option and no votes cast.
After the count (optical scan) the official verified result was 7 yes and one no.
My question is - why did the initial printout show zero votes?
The initial votes on the card were zero..
The important question is.. How did the final count get altered?
Answer.. The card that does not contain a program actualy does contain a program. That program altered the result. Re-watch the film. The card contains much more than just the poll totals which is denied by the manufacture.
I would hope the machines would format any card at the start of an election and then write the encrypted count totals to the card and nothing else except a checksum and the machine ID number.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
Yeah, and the Republicans are really good at that one. You got to hand it to them, whenever they're under-fire they go on a really strong counter-attack (kind of like this one).
Bullshit. You don't have documentation of that.
Now this at least actually happened. Against the long litany of sins in Ohio in 2004, against the use of hired thugs to interfere with the vote count in Florida in 2000, you can point to this one mindless prank.Hardly. But they cheat so well! Or at least, the new breed of Republicans do... give 'em one or two more elections and maybe we can forget about the rest of them.
To quote an interview with Steven Freeman:
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?
- The "safeguards" in place border on the non-existant at this point. No one who understands those DRE machines thought they were a good idea.
- I would not believe the 2004 election was stolen were it not for
- the patterns in the exit-poll data discrepancies
- the huge number of conventional election corruption techniques deployed in Ohio.
In other words, you can spin, spin, spin all you want, but there's a reality-based world out there, and some day the truth (if you will excuse the expression) will out."I stand behind the nation, not the bozo who happens to hang out at 1600 Pennsylvania."
You called the President of the United States a bozo. For any other president, that would be disrespect. For George W. Bush, that is an improvement over what he is usually called, so I guess he can count you as one of his warmest friends.
Check what comedians say about him: Funniest George W. Bush Comedy Videos. (I'm assuming that we can all agree that bozo is friendlier than "cretinous simpleton".)
The thing is you can't possibly deny that, say, Diebold Accuvote machines aren't pieces of swiss-cheese as far as vote security is concerned, and you can't possibly deny that the management of the big electronic voting companies (Diebold and ES&S) have a known Republican bias -- both of those points are tremendously well documented. The one and only thing you can possibly deny is that maybe those two points weren't put together to steal the 2004 election -- except that there is that nasty little problem of explaining away the peculiarly large exit-poll discrepancies that correlated with the use of those voting machines.
Hence, I vehemently deny your accusation that this is all Democratic spin, and I reiterate that this is just an attempt at Republican counter-spin.
El wrongo... if you really believe that (and I find it unlikely that you really do) you're not paying attention.
Well, at the moment it's a little hard to believe that, because all polls seem to agree that most people are sick of the Iraq war, and annoyed at the Bush regime's handling of it. The American people can be a little slow on occasion, but they do catch on eventually (you know, "some of the people some of the time" and so on, as was once said by a man who doesn't deserve to be associated with the current crop of people calling themselves Republicans).
What is so hard to believe about Karl Rove engaging in an internet astro-turf campaign? Wouldn't it seem weird if he didn't try something like that?
In any case, I'm not suggesting that every conservative voice on slashdot is necessarily a hired Republican-sock puppet. What I am saying is that there's a surprising number of folks doing mindless reiteration of the same pretty lame talking points, like "Oh the democrats do it too!", or "oh polls are so inaccurate", or "oh you're just a tinfoil hat conspiracy nut like those 9/11 truthies!" Those folks, I find, shall we say, suspicious.
It must be biased. We just don't realize that The Democrats Do It Too (so it must be okay).
In any case: if anyone is so whacked as to still be reading this: don't get so wrapped up in the "the elections are rigged!" business that you don't bother voting. Yeah, they're rigged, but none of us know how badly they're rigged, and if it's just a finger on the scale (and not a two-ton weight) we need all the legit voters out there we can get.
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.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
In 2000, the Democrats said that the Republicans stole the election because of the confusing butterfly ballots and that we needed a new and modern way of voting. Now that we have it,
Yup, just that like that guest I served in the restaurant yesterday. He complain there was no sauce on the steak, so I took it back and gave him a new one with sauce but this time no fries. But guess what: he still complained. Sheesh, there's no pleasing some people.
Look, everyone agrees the old system was hopeless. Does that mean we have to accept whatever crap we are offered as a replacement? The main complaint with the voting machines is really very simple: the results are unverifiable. Even if no other actual problems were found (although they have), this really should disqualified the Diebold machines. It is a very simple point, very easy to understand, and very easy to understand the importance of. If you don't get this, you are not smart enough to vote.
The fix is well known: keep a paper trail. Now here's the hard part: That does not mean a return to badly designed paper based mechanical voting. Got that? Yes, I know the word "paper" is involved in both but don't be fooled by that. Really: they are still not the same thing, and they do not share the same problems. Trust me on this, or better still, just think it over for two seconds.
So the only question left is why would anyone oppose the fix, except if they stand to gain from errors and/or manipulation that the fix would prevent?
sudo ergo sum
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).
Since this line of debate was started by your claim that there was no burden of proof with affirmative defenses, because proof was moot with them, your correction, while accurate, demonstrates that your original position was wrong.
It has nothing to do with the burden of proof on the elemetns of the plaintiff's case, but it has everything to do with the burden of proof the defense has with regard to proving the elements of the affirmative defense.
I think you are confused as to the context of this discussion. There is no judge.
Well, we agree on that.
Or, looked at a different way, I gave you an opportunity to either productively move the discussion forward, or make a fool out of yourself, and you chose the latter option.
Ah. So your delusion about the mere existence of a judge is rather deeper than it initially appeared. Might I suggest you seek professional help with that?