NY Legislature Rejects "Microsoft Amendment"

An anonymous reader writes "Finally, some good news on electronic voting. The New York state legislature rejected an amendment proposed by Microsoft's lobbyists which would have gutted New York's requirements for voting machine vendors to turn over their source code to the state Board of Elections. Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton commented: 'The voting machine vendors have known for two years what our laws said. Now they're saying that those parts of their systems using Microsoft software have to be proprietary? It's just wrong.'"

Comments

Re:Nothing to see here. Move along.

[lena_10326]

I click on them all the time. It's a deliciously satisfying way of transferring cold hard cash from Microsoft's wallet to Slashdot and Google.

And you're also diluting the CPA, which is the real measure of ad performance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_Per_Action

Of course, you by yourself won't have much impact but there would be if 1% of Slashdot's reader base did.

Re:no its not

[Original Replica]

In this particular case the risk of a trapdoor in the platform code is a lower concern than the risk of the running code being substituted on the final machine.

IANAProgrammer, But for this application neither is acceptable.
Given what the code is required to do (allow for the selection of a vote in each catagory, record said votes, provide totals for each catagory) shouldn't the code be blindingly simple? Give me ANSI graphics and no mouse driver. Give me three imputs: cursor up, cursor down, enter/select. Hell, it can print out on a dot matrix. It should be a requirement that the code be small enough to be reviewed completely, without excessive effort.