Slashdot Mirror
Legal Troubles Continue To Mount For Diebold
dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."
Congresscritters when they kneejerked after the 2000 elections and gave us HAVA in an effort to look like they were doing something. 357 Representatives and 92 Senators seemed to think it was a great idea, not to mention all the states that signed up going "ooh, free money!"
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
All wonderful jokes, but Xmas (in my mind at least) is the consumerism day, while Christmas represents the true, original spirit of the holiday, before corporations got their grubby little paws on everything.
The X stands for chi, the Greek letter and first letter in the Greek word Christ. Xmas is simply an abbreviation for Christmas.
On the other hand, xmas might sound more consumerist precisely because the filthy corporations tried to distance themselves from Christ, both to persuade Christians to think more about shopping and to include, er, heathens in the consumerist orgy.
Of course, Christ never had anything to do with Christmas anyway. He was probably born in August-ish if he existed at all, and Christmas was just the Catholics' attempt to usurp yet another pagan holiday that had been around ever since people knew what a solstice was. So perhaps "Xmas" is a (slightly) better thing anyway.
Happy Newtonmas, everyone!
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
You mean the pagan holiday with the lights and the tree and the gift giving that the Christians stole? Because Easter(Ishtar) and Christmas(Winter Solstice) are both as pagan as you can get. The Christians in the Catholic church didn't even bother changing the traditions, they just stuck some made up Christian reasons for doing them. BTW, just FYI, Jesus was born in June, during the Roman tax census IIRC.
Now to TFA, I don't know who made the voting machines we used this year in AR(not Diebold because these actually work) but IMHO they really need to roll these out nationwide. It was truly a pleasure to vote this year. In fact the entire process was so friendly and orderly and voter efficient it is a shame they don't just copy it nationwide, as it makes it truly nice to vote. Who would have thought AR would be ahead of the curve in something?
Anyway I walk in and everything is nice and neat with 5 machines and an orderly line. Before I even get a chance to vote I'm already impressed by the way they handled voters who went to the wrong polling place. Instead of sending them all over town trying to find the right place an election official asked them to set aside for a moment and he would get on his cell after finding out which district they voted last in and have them transferred. Those that showed up in the wrong place only had an extra 5 minute wait before being allowed to vote with everyone else. Very nice. Then I get up to the machine and you could tell some serious thought went into this one. A large screen with a big round blue circle that you would touch to choose your candidate or position, and when you made your choice a large pop up would read "We believe you wish to vote for...Is this correct? If not please push the green cancel button to the left of this message" and when you confirmed a large, easy to read printout would scroll up under a glass plate to the left of the screen, so you could easily look down and make sure the machine was putting down your choice. Very nice. Then when you were finished the machine would blink and a volunteer would collect the electronic vote with this cartridge and the paper ballot. Then the ballot was placed into a box and the electronic vote was placed on the table with the election officials for use with the next voter.
The entire process took less than 10 minutes and made voting truly a pleasure. Volunteers were offering coffee and donuts to those waiting in line and were just as friendly and helpful as could be. I only wish all government dealings could be as friendly and efficient as voting was this year. And this year there weren't any "surprises" and the election results went pretty much exactly what the polls taken the week before had said they were going to be. So all in all I was quite happy with the machines this year and only wish that everyone could have as nice an experience voting as I did. On and Merry Xmas!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The programming itself is quite straight-forward but the system design is subtle due to the need for verifiability at every step, not just for experts, but so that interested laymen can at least grasp the verifiability in overview.
The Diebold systems fail on all counts INCLUDING the straight-forward programming.
They also managed to fail at version control, source audit and binary certification by loading unapproved patches onto unknown binary versions the night before an election while refusing to reveal the source even to government auditors.
The fact that they have anti-virus software on them (which has caused at least one problem) shows that they REALLY didn't design it right. A device like a voting machine should only accept new executable code through a JTAG or similar port locked safely inside the case. That means that Windows was a poor choice for an underlying OS. Windows just does far too many things without explicit commands and apparently can't be configured not to. It's source is also a problem to audit by anyone.
More proper options would have been programming on the bare metal or a seriously stripped down Linux or *BSD. Not so much for size but to simplify auditing and testing.