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Diebold Rebrands What No One Wants
Irvu writes "Diebold has apparently failed in their bid to sell their tainted elections systems unit. Unable to find a buyer the CEO of Diebold promised that the system will be run more 'openly and independently.' To prove that they are serious, they renamed it. Diebold Election Systems is now Premiere Election Solutions. They still sell GEMS, AccuVote OS and the ever-unpopular AccuVote-TSX which performed so disastrously in California's Top-to-Bottom Review under the same names. Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
When your ATM gets scammed: All you lose is money.
When your voting system gets scammed: You lose your rights.
doesn't change it into chocolate cake!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
With a bank, if you get the numbers wrong, you lose that bank as a client FOREVER.
With an election, if you get the number wrong, you have a politician who will be your friend for life.
Think about it. They can handle billions of dollars, but they can't keep a million votes straight? At some point you realize that it isn't incompetence. It's their goal.
Microsoft has a stronger marketing department.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Because the money is in making it NOT work right.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Voting machines as they are are pretty much as good as they can get. There is no way a Compuiter could ever be trusted to do exactly what it is expected to do, and no way to be 100% sure it has not been tempered with. Those machines will always be unfit for public voting. As a voter I have several rights that a machine can never provide. I'm guaranteed by law that my vote is secret. But it has been shown that the electromagnetic radiation of voting machines can be measured accurately enough to draw some conclusions about what has been voted. Also I have the right to know how the voting works. Everybody can understand how counting votes with pen and paper works. Understanding a voting machine is pretty much impossible without a CS degree. Even if the sourcecode for both the hardware and Software was available pretty much nobody can tell if the machine actually does what it claims to do. Also there is hardly any chance to get an actual Rom dump to compare the sources you are looking at with the code that is running on the computer.
This was not a strategy to get the voting machines back into play in the places which rejected them. Diebold is a very old company going back into the 19th century, and was until relatively recently a very well established and trusted name in security equipment. The Diebold Elections Systems division has not only failed to produce reliable products, but has garnered enormous bad press which has reflected extremely negatively upon that name. Regardless of what their true motives are with Diebold Election Systems, I think everyone can see why any rational executive at Diebold would see the need to protect the Diebold name. A good name is one of the greatest assets a company in any industry can have, and especially so in security, where trust comes grudgingly. If Diebold seems incompetent, possibly malicious, with its election systems, why would you, the bank manager, trust them to build your ATM machines?
Calling them Premier Election Systems does not undo the damage that's been done, but it does help deflect future damages. Any attempt to recertify the machines under the new name is probably something they still would have done under the old name.
That doesn't make the machines any less awful. It doesn't absolve Diebold of the responsibility for what it has done, nor does it mean that their ATM machines are any more trustworthy now. If I were the bank manager, I probably still would not buy their machines. But, if we are going to criticize the company for its incompetence, let us at least criticize them for the incompetencies which they demonstrate -- not ones which we misinterpret into their strategies.
how the fuck does where a man sticks his dick have any kind of relevance on his competence in country running?
if a guy makes good leadership decisions we shouldn't be judging him on sex. shit, we shouldn't even want to know about who he fucks! bob my accountant could be gay for all i know, i still appreciate he's the best man to do my tax.
personally, i'd prefer a well-laid president. probably start less wars in an effort to enhance his apparently lacking masculinity. maybe we should shout bush a hooker - 'y'know, on reflection, maybe we should just not shoot them quite so much and be friendly and perhaps they'll like us.. maybe invasion isn't the best way to say i like and respect your nation.. whew, what was i getting so excited about? here i was thinking there was this axis of evil and all it was was the fact i hadn't gotten laid in five years!'
sheesh..
Spraying Britney Perfume on a turd does not hide its smell.
Rebranding was a crime in early 1800s. It should be a crime today and Diebold criminally convicted on livestock rebranding.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
They will rebrand, reorganize, etc., but in the end, don't forget their loyalty is to one political party. That is where the lobbying money goes, so you know who to blame whenever there's an e-voting fiasco.
No, that's not good enough—even you shouldn't be able to prove you voted a certain way unless the ballot itself is checked. Otherwise the person to whom you sold your vote/who bullied your vote out of you can just ask for your encrypted vote code.
Why can't they have the people who make there ATMs work on the voting systems?
The elections machines have been subjected to numerous public tests, the results of which are available to everyone. The ATMs have not. We are told that the ATMs are dependable and secure, but I don't think we really know and I haven't seen much from the banking industry that implies that they are somehow all that much more sophisticated computer security wise than anyone else.
I believe the main reason that ATMs aren't a security issue is because it'd take too long to stand there to hack the machine and the payoff isn't all that great. You can rob a bank in a minute with a gun and get a few grand.
That's not only misleading, but VERY misleading. Brand names, especially very successful brand names, do not get removed just because a patent expires. NutraSweet Company is still an active, profitable and majority supplier of aspartame. They have every incentive to put the brand on foods that contain it...except that people know to avoid the red and white twirl mark just as readily as they avoid the jolly roger symbol that mark poisons.