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Researcher Who Reported E-voting Vulnerability Targeted By Police Raid in Argentina
TrixX writes: Police have raided the home of an Argentinian security professional who discovered and reported several vulnerabilities in the electronic ballot system (Google translation of Spanish original) to be used next week for elections in the city of Buenos Aires. The vulnerabilities (exposed SSL keys and ways to forge ballots with multiple votes) had been reported to the manufacturer of the voting machines, the media, and the public about a week ago. There has been no arrest, but his computers and electronics devices have been impounded (Spanish original). Meanwhile, the information security community in Argentina is trying to get the media to report this notorious attempt to "kill the messenger." Another source (Spanish original).
Kirchner's pals rule.
If the researcher is not being arrested its not "kill the messenger". Impounding his equipment, the "evidence", is just a very rude way of getting his data on vulnerabilities and attacks. They could have asked. Then again perhaps they feared the "evidence" being tampered with, confidential sources and all that sort of thing. Again, rude, but a plausible path if such concerns were warranted.
Come on, Slashdot editors! Get with it! Fix the fucking summary! It's fucking awful!
Jesus Christ, most of the links are to non-English articles, and the automatic translations are shitty. Like most people here, I don't read Spanish, so I have no idea if the automatic translations are actually accurate and match with what the Spanish articles are saying!
Additionally, I have no idea who is behind these articles. Being unfamiliar with them, I do not know how reliable they are, or what their biases are.
I know I'm not alone. This is a site targeting English-speaking individuals. As we already speak the most relevant language in the world, we have no need for other languages.
Is anyone in the English media covering this? Can we get some confirmation from reputable American, British or Australian news sources, so we can actually understand what the fuck is going on in this case?
You expose a backdoor that the current in-power government was going to use to win the election.
Security researcher in that country might want to get his own security team to cover his ass.
The researcher's work have been aborted abruptly and devices have disappeared for the information they contained.
TFS is wrong. We hold elections on Sundays in Argentina, not on weekdays. In less than 11 hours we will be voting with this horribly unsafe system that hasn't really been tested.
Estonia also uses e-voting as an option, using an ID card. Basically software is opes source and anybody can check for backdoor, plus there is independent checking committee.
Bottom line of this is that it is much more difficult to fraud in e-voting than in ordinary voting with paper.
Interestingly the biggest critic of e-voting is our opposition party who relies heavily on russian and old people vote, basically less educated is the target group, they have raised hell after hell, and yet no one has yet to produce any attack vector that is not fundamentally in it already - al la guy holds a gun into your head and forces you to vote x or malware that steals your pins and votes x.
Basically the bottom line is that if you trust banking and your money, because if anybody cracks it, it is the first thing to go after. you should trust e-voting as long as there is independent oversight and source is open.
Sorry for the summary. I sent this yesterday and sunday looked more like "next week"
Sunday is the first day of Next Week
That depends on who you ask. Some would say that Sunday is the last day of this week.
A quick check suggests that Argentine probably sees Sunday as the seventh day of the week.
There is one single very dangerous problem with electronic voting: Trust. People have to trust it, because they are unable to test it.
With paper and pen, it's easy. You can nominate anyone to work as an election monitor. The necessary qualification is "being able to find out where the X marks the spot" and "count". That's a skill set available to nearly everyone.
Working as an election monitor to rule out foul play with election machines requires someone to know quite a bit about computers. It's anything BUT simple to rule out foul play.
The danger here isn't even so much that manipulation can take place. And I don't even want to engage in the discussion whether or not these machines can easily be manipulated. The danger is that some populist aiming for the uneducated masses goes and cries foul play when he loses the election. And that's a danger not to some party but to the faith of the population in the whole democratic process. And that inherently is dangerous to democracy altogether.
It's not easy to debunk such claims. With paper, it's easy to go "oh please, count them yourself if you don't believe us. Here's the paper slips, and you can count, can't you?". Now try the same with election machines. Saying "you can do an audit yourself" isn't going to cut it. Why should we trust the computer experts? It's not something just anyone can do.
These machines are a danger to democracy. Nothing less.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"week end". At least in English-speaking world, Sunday is the last day.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Not everywhere, in some parts of the world Monday is the first day of the week.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If they (one man even!) can trivially create votes anyway they want, the election needs to be voided, and delayed a month while they get their paper election together,
The security researcher was right to expose the flaw, and seizing his equipment to shut him up does not make the flaw go away.
In Russia, when Putin lost the last election, the last few districts to report were insanely PRO-Putin with HUGE- turnouts, in other words he didn't rig the election enough to win it and had to do some major rigging at the end to even stay in power. Even to the extent that districts that had already reported, then re-reported a different result the next morning. It was blatant, he did not win the election, but he held enough to rig the election.
After that, he became another dictator, he cannot yield power or this shit will all fly back at him.
With this voting system, he could have done that change in a much more realistic way, with no evidence trail to hide. So this election needs to be voided, because if a leader rigs this election, he will become a dictator rather than permit an unrigged election in future.
It's obvious that these reports are exaggerations by a press trying to embarrass the leftist government of Argentina.
The government is just doing what it must to protect the people and to ensure elections are carried out according to the people's will.
Citizens that threaten the people's rights must be dealt with firmly.
Sorry, for this article, it needs to be "Todos de Uds. son vacas. Vacas dicen mú. MÚÚÚÚÚ! MÚÚÚÚÚ! Mú dicen las vacas. UDS. SON VACAS!!"
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If you work in my org, the first day of the week is Thursday.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The vote system is like an kiosk were you made your personal cards but instead of printing 100 copy of your card you print your ballot. And then place it in the old classic ballot box. The machine doesn't store any important information, only statistics. Then when the vote is over, they open the ballot box, count the votes by hand, and communicates to a central points they result. The traditional way was by mail and by other way (phone, email, etc) to speed up the information. But only the mailed is the legal. They are now trying to replace the mail with electronic transfer and here is were the problem that the article talks about happens.
Zontar, you crack me up.
Who do you think is behind this 'electronic voting' bullshit? Why, the eternal JEW, the nation-wreckers, the money lenders...
Sunday is the first day, just look at your calendar.
Not in New Zealand, and last I checked, we spoke English.
Don't piss off powerful men.
No fucking inverted interrogation or exclamation points.
Further proof that Slashdot is indeed mired in 1997 or thereabouts.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.