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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."
Man, it must really be xmas! LOL!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
He didn't say Christmas. He said Xmas. Totally different holiday.
Yes, that's the point exactly. People expect the opportunity to select their corrupt politician of choice. Anything that interferes and might allow the wrong corrupt politician to get into power is unacceptable.
"Oh no... he found the
They'll probably get a bailout for their efforts too.
Anyone else find it kind of weird that this is happening right around the time that Bush and Cheney and Co. are heading out of office?
And this is what pisses me off so much! People like Avi Rubin WARNED of the pitfalls in Dielbold (and other) systems years ago and the pols didn't listen. I remember writing to my Maryland State Rep YEARS ago about inherent problems in Diebold systems and referred him to Professor Rubin's work and got the pat-on-the-head response telling me not to worry. Screw all of them. I can't believe how angry this makes me.
You mean XF86-mas, or X.org-mas?
We could celebrate with a new newsgroup, alt.die.bold.die
Hopefully, when it comes time to nail them to the wall, they'll use Wilson's Nails.
Seriously, the crap that kept the Bush administration in office has paid off.
Does anyone believe that the 2000 election was a legitimate Bush win? Does anyone believe that Diebold DIDN'T tamper with the machines? Now that bush is leaving office, we find that the machines are insecure and aren't going to be used?
Now, *all* of the wealthy Bush supporters made HUGE amounts of money under Bush. The bailout was basically a theft of $700B (and more to come) from the U.S. treasury for the very people that have been getting rich 8 years. Never in the history of man-kind has so much relative wealth been given to so few. How did this happen?
I can't think of a single policy of this administration that was designed NOT to remove money from the middle class and transfer it into the hands of the more wealthy. Immigration, trade, health care, intellectual property, and even the department of the interior and the CPB have all been centered around either allowing corporations to make money at the expense of the people, or out-right giving money to large corporations directly.
Now, we, the regular people, call us middle class, working poor, unemployed engineers, have to somehow rebuild the economy after its departure.
I'm 45 years old. I am ill at what I've seen happen to my country. It is a rush to the bottom. If we are not a third world nation already, we will be. Its disgusting.
The truth is that while paperless may sound sexy it is not really practical.
The truth is that Diebold's problems have nothing to do with the paper or paperless issue, and everything to do with incompetent design and execution. Which is all the more galling considering the relative straight-forwardness of the programming task. A corrupt or inaccurate paper audit trail would be just as useful as no audit trail at all, and arguably more harmful.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's the illusion of democracy that keeps me going at night.
I believe it was said best here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF5Kdm4Eu6w
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
"Diebold" always struck me as such a typical bond-villain type of name; "Premier Election Systems" sounds like it's trying to cover up that the company is run by the mafia... maybe they should buy voting machines from ACME? Sure they'd blow up every now and then, and the roadrunner would get away, but in many ways such obvious failure would be better than subtle and undetected vote-rigging :-)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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.
Well not exactly. Diebold managed to screw up several parts of the system.
The software
The lousy hardware locks
The poor update process
Just to name three off the top of my head before my second cup of coffee. Makes one wonder about Hanlon's razor. I guess you gotta be good at something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Grubby little paws? Corporations I know have huge powerful sucking tentacles, and they're in everything.
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."
I feel sorry for Stephen Heller, the whistleblower who was charged with three felonies for revealing Diebold's legal problems, in Feb 2004.
Won't work. Once the vote is public information, people can be bought/pressured to change their vote.
then don't rant - act
Think I haven't? Short of taking up arms against my country, I've done all the legal things I can. The tide is turning, I think, but it takes a long time to wake up the U.S.A.
I honestly believe that the vast majority of Americans are motivated less by money and more by "doing the right thing." The problems is that "the right thing to do" has been purposefully obfuscated by the bastards in power. By using christiantity and the talking heads of talk radio, propaganda minister of the Bush administration, Karl Rove, has successfully turned America in against itself. Dividing families and groups against each other over simplistic moral debates, while completely drowning the substantive discussions about what is truly best for the country.
All this so that they can rob the country of its wealth and make themselves rich at the same time.
I'll say here and now, Bush and Cheney and everyone in their administration have been traitors to the U.S.A.
Signed, patriotic American!!
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.