Slashdot Mirror
Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site
Harrington writes "In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. " Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.
Hmm, I seem to recall this story from somewhere...it sounds somehow strangely familiar...almost as if this exact thing had occurred before...
Oh, that's right, this story was covered -- right here on slashdot, no less -- a year ago, complete with a link to the very same now-year-old blog post, which was significantly updated at the time, and caused Diebold to remove the photo in question! (A very generic key form was used.) Might want to update this post...
Archives - January 2007 should be a clue. Or at least one would hope.
While you guys are at it, can you fix your patently incorrect story about Iran being "offline", when it clearly and provably isn't, thereby negating the main premise of the story? You know, since no one seems to care about anything sent to the on-duty editor email.
Slashdot is really on fire today!
http://digg.com/politics/Diebold_Posts_Image_of_Master_Key_to_Website_Hackers_Make_Real_Master_Key http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1113 It's about one year old. And I'm sure that I've seen it on slashdot quite a while ago.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
The picture was of a piece of luggage with the combination of "12345."
Pretty damn stupid to use that as a master key.
...step closer... to...
...what you know, is true for you too...
THE INEVITABLE LOOMING ROLLOUT of THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY
http://roboeco.com/dlobeid
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
Relying on the Diggbats will just result on more ancient non-stories like this popping up over and over again. The digg kids love anything that might explain why Ron Paul isn't winning the primaries. Come to think of it, the RP crowd here should adore this article.
Laborare Est Orare
Soon on Slashdot: USA bans images on the internet as a safety method, "Evil hackers posting these so called images danger our protections, and we have to ban them all".
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:FcvferlnsJAJ:www.bradblog.com/%3Fp%3D4066+site:.bradblog.com+diebold&hl=en&strip=1
With the way it's gone so far today, apparently, slashdot is hosted in Iran.
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Diebold sucks. Let's dupe this article several times a month.
This ought to be tagged 'StopMisleadingTitles', /. is definately off game today.
Any country making both democracy and security its highest priorities for years, even at cost of a perpetual state of emergency, suspended liberty, thousands dead and many tens of thousands wounded (multiplied in the non-American casualties), unsupportable debts, alienating allies and activating enemies, would immediately remove these untrustworthy machines and never allow their vendors or technologies into the critical path of its government again.
Such a country would never have allowed such a risk at all, either before or after such vulnerabilities were publicly exposed.
But instead, this story will become a footnote. Precisely because there's an election going on. An election that is threatened by these untrustworthy machines.
Since those priorities were set and executed by a government installed on the reports of these kinds of untrustworthy machines, I guess we've got everything we deserve.
--
make install -not war
Dupes aside, WTF is with the insane and stupid tags? I thought a system was implemented that would wipe out crap like "haha". It's driven me nuts for a long time and I was glad when the system was "fixed". Looks like it re-broke.
But then, this from the software that STILL doesn't have an edit button!
i am a soviet space shuttle
Does it open the website also?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
you know, i love technology and computers, and i've had many years of experience with programming. but i have always said there are places that computers just don't belong -- and this is one of them. an exclusively electronic voting method just isn't a wise decision.
but i truly believe an electronic/paper hybrid could be developed which would make voting much more secure than electronic voting, while at the same time producing the quick results that everyone seems to want.
just as an example -- i think a machine where you cast your ballot electronically, which would in turn instantly produce a human readable punch card of sorts would be a good way to go. this punch card could be fed into a second separate system to immediately read and tally the results moments after each ballot is cast -- though both machines could be used to keep track of the numbers for comparison purposes. that would give us a paper trail AND a quick tally of votes.
Hello from just down the street! Except google maps is off by about 50 feet or so. I'm in the KHK house on the other side of the street.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
What's the problem? We've all been demanding "open" elections.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While this story may be old, it was not a major election year when it ran, and all the e-voting problems still have not been fixed. So it is at least worth mentioning again, I think. Also, this story serves as a reminder that the most fearsome element of malicious "hacking" is not some geek with uber skills in a dark room, it's the information we willingly give out without realizing the danger.
Ok, I done trying to be constructive. I always was mostly a crowd follower, so here goes: Slashdot sucks and I hate them for posting this story.
In the past year or two Slashdot has been IMHO on a downward spiral. Enough so, that if I had stock - I'd be selling it off.
I personally attribute this downward trend to the site's decision to become more political and less geeky. More and more I feel as if I am reading a political blog rather than a geek science & tech blog.
Good article submissions are passed up. Interesting news never posted. And numerous politically charged items find themselves reposted repeatedly - sometimes simply as a link to a different article on the same issue and other times the same article (just a year later).
More and more of my friends express that they no longer read Slashdot. Reason given...the interesting news appears later than many other online sources. And I must concur! Years back, most of the info I read on Slashdot was the first I heard of the matter. Now, over half the entries I read on Slashdot, I've already heard - many days and weeks before. In fact, I am finding that I am hearing things on CNN.com before they reach Slashdot. That's just a shame...
Can we stop with the "politicizing" of Slashdot. And return to geekiness of nerdworthy news - thank you!
- The Saj
Now that is news... It should appear as a new article any moment, thanks dave, for the heads up!!!
.
P.S. May that explains why people thought Iran was down. The people at Slashdot assumed that since we could not ping Iran, that their internet was completely down. Maybe they should have checked the Slashdot router, that was apparently on fire!!! But then agian, no "good" admin would check thier own equipment/lines first..
Well, first off I don't remember this story the first time it came out so it's not a dupe to me. I would imagine a lot of people don't remember this story coming out a year ago either and it's also new to them. Not everyone spends 23 hours a day memorizing every single story posted on Slashdot.
How much Slashdot hate can we jam in here? Quit being a douche and calm down. Go take a monistat and read something else if you are that pissy.
...the machines are pre-programmed to cast, someone could photocopy that and save us all the trouble of actually voting.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
so why hasn't this hit the main stream media?
This is the buzzkill for me.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I wonder if Diebold makes campaign contributions. I wonder if Campaigns make "Diebold" contributions.
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
Second, from the appearance of the key it seems to be a lock that's EXTREMELY easy to pick so the effort to make a copy - even by trial and error - would be small.
So if everybody that knows that Diebold machines are in use during an election makes their own key and just unlocks it and leaves the machine open... That could be for some interesting news. Votes dismissed due to irregularities - 50%. Just make sure that the machines is in the counties populated mostly by your opponent.
And - what stops one from ordering keys from Diebold?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Supposedly, the old-fashioned paper ballot method is supposed to be too expensive and in need of replacement. It's awfully hard to pretend when a hundred thousand slips of paper go missing. A rigged e-vote? Who's going to know, as long as the cheaters are even a little creative?
How would you like to explain to the grandkids how you pissed away your democracy because you were too effing cheap to fork out a few bucks to maintain it. Dump these machines, fork out the bucks and do it right. I'd have thought eight years of Bush would be enough warning for anybody.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
You don't have to make your own key. Diebold will sell you one. "Replacement Access Keys", part number GS-567311-1000, $5.90/set of 2. Order by phone, 1-800-769-3246. Operators are standing by.
Am I the only one not surprised by the responses to this year-old news story? Slashdot these days posts so many questionable topics (the Iran cable for example) for the simple fact of whirling up the conspiracy nuts and getting some cheap hits.
People saw "Diebold" ran to their archives and did a copy/paste. Same goes for "Windows" or "Microsoft".
If you can't expect people to make it past the headline, how can you expect them to investigate the article....let alone actually start to read other comments.
Who the hell ever thought it was a good idea to let a robot count our votes? Can't we just use mechanical turks that cost less to maintain? There are probably enough protein machines willing to do it in an open and secure manner and for free. It just seems like a ludicrous waste of money, certainly not worth the ROI for something used a couple days out of the year. The risk of tampering is also obvious since Diebold must have friends in political places to convince them to grossly overpay for a few 74LS163s Are proponents of electronic voting trying to make their protein counterparts obsolete?
That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
... there appears to have been massive voter disenfranchisement in California. Julia Rosen's Count Every Vote in Los Angeles on Crooks and Liars (also on Courage Campaign's site) and Double Bubble Trouble on Brad Friedman's voter rights blog are both following this.
Can someone please explain to me why an electronic voting machine is a Bad Thing(tm)? Just about everyone electronically manages their financial transactions and trusts ATM's, which are arguably more important and touch more people than the 50% (or less) that vote... If we can develop machines that accurately track billions of financial transactions every second, why can't we develop a machine that can count votes?
It just seems strange to me they're so vilified. Is it the companies that are developing them that you don't like? I mean, voter fraud will always exist as long as there are politicians that do things like driving bus loads of homeless people that vote for dead people and then drive to another polling station to vote again.
If someone could explain this anti-voting machine phenomenon, I'd appreciate it.
ConsultingFair.com
I live in Wisconsin you insensitive clod.
Those things you call "memory leak problems" we like to call "social drinking"
and by "reboot" I asume you mean "rehab"
-- Sig under construction...
I worked the Polls in San Diego yesterday as a Precinct Inspector. The Diebold machine we had (for special-needs voters only) did not use this type of key. It needed a key more like a bicycle lock's key.
It's all Hood
Can someone please explain to me why an electronic voting machine is a Bad Thing(tm)?
If something goes wrong with your ATM you know it happened right there when it happened, you contact your bank and get it fixed right then. And even then, you don't really *trust* the ATM. At least I hope you take your paper receipt, and check your balance, and if they don't match you can STILL call the bank about it.
If something goes wrong with your voting machine you NEVER know about it, because you don't get any feedback (like, you know, the money doesn't come out). So what you need to do is to take your paper ballot from the machine and put it in a box and make sure that the boxes and the papers are safe and *those* are what need to be retained for a recount when someone thinks things don't match and needs to "call the bank about it".
These kinds of locks are trivial to open with a lockpick. Why go through all the trouble making a key?
(I suppose it may look a little more "official".)
The last person to change the Access database before the time runs out wins?
Simple locks like that aren't even a 10 second hurdle to me with my Southord lockpick keychain :) I grabbed it from http://www.kingofswords.com/index.php?ref=30000056&products_id=307 its only 24.88 probably best price around.