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Virginia Ditches 'America's Worst Voting Machines'
Geoffrey.landis writes: Computerized voting machines are bad news in general, but the WINVote machines used in Virginia might just have earned their reputation as the most insecure voting machine in America. They feature Wi-Fi that can't be turned off (protected, however, with a WEP password of "abcde"), an unencrypted database, and administrative access with a hardcoded password of "admin." According to security researcher Jeremy Epstein, if the machines weren't hacked in past elections, "it was because nobody tried." But with no paper trail, we'll never know.
Well, after ignoring the well-documented problems for over a decade, Virginia finally decided to decommission the machines... after the governor had problems with the machines last election and demanded an investigation. Quoting: "In total, the vulnerabilities investigators found were so severe and so trivial to exploit, Epstein noted that 'anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded' in hacking them. An attacker wouldn't have needed to be inside a polling place either to subvert an election... someone 'within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can could also have attacked them.'"
Well, after ignoring the well-documented problems for over a decade, Virginia finally decided to decommission the machines... after the governor had problems with the machines last election and demanded an investigation. Quoting: "In total, the vulnerabilities investigators found were so severe and so trivial to exploit, Epstein noted that 'anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded' in hacking them. An attacker wouldn't have needed to be inside a polling place either to subvert an election... someone 'within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can could also have attacked them.'"
Except third world countries, with way more voters, seem to have solve the Voter ID problem. There is a reason why certain people love to claim "Racism" because it shuts down rational thought, and you don't have to actually fix the real problem.
While I am sure there is "racism" out there, it isn't the real problem. The real problem are the people enabling failure to keep a class of people voting lock-step with the (D) party. And the (R) party just can't figure out the language to call the (D) party on their racist policies.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The Republican party policies pretend that all social problems like poverty and crime are caused by individual moral failings and that there is no systemic cause, no cause outside the individual for a lack of success, which is objectively false. Every statistical measure we have suggests the US is not a meritocracy but a society where favors are granted to friends and networks of the wealthy and where your parents have more to do with your success than any other factor. Our economy has a structural number of jobs due to it's consolidation, no matter how hard the poor work, they can have no effect on that number and are just beating out one another for resources, the number of unemployed can not be changed by those at the bottom, it is not an issue of dependence, it is an issue of currency manipulation pushing jobs overseas, and of market consolidation eliminating millions of jobs at a wide, structural level, not at an individual level. No amount of moral fortitude, hard work, or skill guarantees or even suggests that anybody will be successful. The Republican policies further deregulate and support Cronyist policies. I've read most of the bills passed by congress in the past 8 years and every bill proposed and voted for by the Republican party was toxic waste deregulation, corporate tax cuts, wall street deregulation, NOTHING else. Welfare is economically necessary to prevent demand spiral/demand crisis, which is what turns market crashes into great depressions, it also corrects the market structural issue of having insufficient jobs, since people's only 3 options are 1. get a job, 2. get the dole, 3. starve/die, as they don't have access to capital or goods to create new jobs and the big companies are too successful at suppressing that outside of fringe, freak accidents/events less likely than winning the lottery. Investing in infrastructure, in education, in healthcare, in renewable, stable energy sources means more jobs, more opportunity, more market creation to overcome the jobs glutch created by the systemic consolidation of industry, more educated voters, and the democratic position of regulating those industries that create those structural issues is incredibly valuable to the economy. According to complex systems theory, the more "efficient" or consolidated a system is, the less robust, stable it is. The more we let banks, wall street, and big business consolidate, the more of a threat we face as a society. The Republican position allows racism, it allows homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, ignorant economic policies that could cause near infinite harm and could even destroy America in a very real and permanent sense, as though the burning of the constitution's 4th amendment, 1st amendment with domestic spying and the gradual merger of government with religion with putting religion on money, in schools, in national oaths and in symbols and buildings of government. I can't imagine any group as anti-humanist, anti-equality, anti-freedom as the conformity fetishists and order fetishists under the Republican party. As a leftist libertarian, the right wing authoritarian ideals of that party, which go against everything this nation has ever stood for and in blatant contrast to what is right and scientific, disgusts me.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn