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Pennsylvania's Voting Machines Are Running Windows XP (cbsnews.com)
Slashdot reader rmurph04 writes: As reported by CBS News, the battleground state of Pennsylvania might as well have a target on its back as Election Day nears, the cybersecurity company Carbon Black warned in a new report released Thursday. Across the state, most Pennsylvania counties use particularly high-risk electronic voting machines that leave behind zero paper trails, which could be useful to audit the integrity of votes cast. In addition, many of these machines -- called "direct-recording electronic" machines -- are running on severely outdated operating systems like Windows XP, which has not been patched by Microsoft since 2014.
According to the survey more than one in five registered U.S. voters may stay home on Election Day because of fears about cybersecurity and vote tampering. Respondents believe a U.S. insider threat poses the most risk (28%), followed by Russian hackers (17%) and then the candidates themselves (15%).
According to the survey more than one in five registered U.S. voters may stay home on Election Day because of fears about cybersecurity and vote tampering. Respondents believe a U.S. insider threat poses the most risk (28%), followed by Russian hackers (17%) and then the candidates themselves (15%).
Are they running the POS or embeded that are still getting updates? Just saying XP isn't exactly helpful.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
What a dumb thought process. Someone may try rig the election so I'm not going to bother going to vote? Who's brain works like this?
Granted, XP sucked SO bad when it launched. It was nearly unusable for the first year, then it just became tolerable to switch from Windows 2000 with SP1. But why the complaint? These are not network connected, so the concerns of the OS are really pointless. If there's a security threat, like open physical ports, then address those. XP isn't some boogey man. Be specific.
Microsoft is supporting it to 2019. People have reported, and Microsoft has confimed ta registry hack that lets regular XP and XP Professional also get support by pretending to be Windows Embedded Stardard 2009.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I would have figured Win98 or maybe WinME.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Unpatched XP? So what? What's the threat model? Are these things online? I'd be worried about the latest OS running today's patch set online. Are they worried about tampering by election officials? Physical access is access. Again, the latest patches won't help. What threat do they think will be thwarted by current software?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I vote early. If you can't vote early in your state it's because somebody doesn't want you to. Let that thought sink in for a moment.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Historical turnout data
This "survey" is useless, since the number that normally don't turn out is more than the most hyperbolic security threat number they offer. If they said 50% were going to stay home, then i'd start to take notice.
Sounds like an excuse for laziness.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Voting machines should be open-source coded in assembly language to run directly on the hardware, and the hardware should be open source - something like a clean-room recreation of a 6502 or Z80. Every gate, every mask, should be verified by hand against the schematics, and every machine code in ROM disassembled by hand and compared against the source listings.
Nothing in the voting mechanisms should be capable of being hidden, nor should it be so complex that one person can't understand and verify the whole thing in a reasonable time, say 1 year.
That means no OS, no proprietary hardware or software, nothing but obvious routines running on "metal".
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Georgia, which in 2002 set out to be an early national model for the transition to computerized voting, shows the unintended consequences. It spent $54 million in HAVA funding to buy 20,000 touchscreen voting machines from Diebold, standardizing its technology across the state. Today, the machines are past their expected life span of 10 years. (With no federal funding in sight, Georgia doesn’t expect to be able to replace those machines until 2020.) The vote tabulators are certified to run only on Windows 2000, which Microsoft stopped supporting six years ago. To support the older operating system, the state had to hire a contractor to custom-build 100 servers—which, of course, are more vulnerable to hacking because they can no longer get current security updates.
My favorite Nathan for you running joke is Windows 95. "You're still running Windows 95? My parents got rid of their Windows 95 computer because minesweeper stopped working."
It's possible I'll get to vote anyway, but they rejected my ballot application the first time with several BS reasons (selected from a long list on the rejection form). Over the last few elections, it has been getting harder and harder to vote, and this latest voter-ID bogosity makes it much more difficult. And stupid.
The hilarious part is that my vote had already been rendered meaningless by the partisan gerrymandering and double-gerrymandering. My so-called Representative is such a worthless tool that they had to rejigger his district to keep it "safe". They are running out of room in the sacrificial districts where they pack in and waste the Democratic votes. They can't draw the district boundaries house by house! Or can they?
I sure hope it's worse than that from the dictators' perspective. The so-called Republicans (really former Dixiecrats "betrayed" by LBJ) have been driving Texas to the bottom so hard and making the state so cheap that a lot of damn Yankees have moved south. Maybe they are about to flip the state back to the Dems, even though the polls have trouble tracking and accounting for first-time-in-district voters. No evidence, but "some people are saying", as the Donald says.
(Also hurts them that Trump is killing the Hispanic vote. This latest insane TwitterWar is NOT the temperament of a potentially great president. If she would have just given him the damn blowjob as payback for maker her a winner, then none of this would have happened!)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The voting machines are NOT connected to the internet. They are also running EMBEDDED XP not desktop XP. No they can not be infected easily unless someone has physical access... and at that point every OS on the planet is easily cracked wide open if the attacker has their hands on the device.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What's wrong with optical scan? We use it in my country and its great. Just fill in the line. What's nice is you can 50 people in a room filling out the forms and one or two scanning machines that read then in a second and depot the paper in a locked box. Instant check to make sure you votes and o dublicates and easy to rescan later or manually count.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Either it's running an old OS and it's vulnerable to unpatched exploits or it's always running the latest and greatest and it's vulnerable to code breaking because of changes to the OS. Can't have latest and greatest AND high reliability.
AS INTENDED.
"...are running on severely outdated operating systems like Windows XP, ..."
So? News flash: Software doesn't wear out.
The fact that any voting machine leaves no paper record is criminal.
Those are vulnerabilities to read information from them, which does not affect the outcome of an election. Maybe you should realize that before posting.
Pennsylvania will probably find itself electing Ruth From Card Services, or some guy in India who promises to repair your PC.
XP embedded doesn't get security updates. Because it is pick-and-mix, windows update doesn't work. Trying to make a Sasser fix was VERY hard work.
Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about. Being able to read data off a closed system that contains public owned information is not a vulnerability. I am very familiar with OPSEC, and there is no data to be read from these machines that would affect anything. What are they going to read, the public owned vote data? They're closed systems, so anything read cannot be used as a vulnerability. Perhaps you should study about INFOSEC.
Don't be fooled with claims of paper backup trails and the like, it is not possible to verify a vote on any electronic black box voting machine.
The only way to verify a vote is using hand counted paper ballots.
prsdntl
old SQL? time for write in candidate drop tables!
Security fixes are great, but the lack of mitigations present in newer versions of Windows make it more vulnerable in comparison.
He's not funny, and he's not insightful.
In my experience only truly stupid people find him to be either.
Also, in my experience truly stupid people think that not voting is somehow political action.
There has been no discussion. You simply are repeating a buzzword that doesn't seem to apply to an intrusion with manipulation as the result.
Who's brain works like this?
Clinton's big problem is voter indifference. People don't like Trump, but they don't like Clinton enough to vote for her.
Articles like this are intended to nudge tepid Clinton supporters to get out and vote.
"most Pennsylvania counties use particularly high-risk electronic voting machines that leave behind zero paper trails, which could be useful to audit the integrity of votes cast."
Why not use the same machines as state lotteries. They're reliable and secure and produce a fully audited paper trail.
It's whose hacks will be the most effective?
And I'm not referring just to people playing with code. The people playing with money have been hacking pretty effectively as well.
opinion from outside the USA: both options are scary. But while Hilary is likely to "only" make wars in predictable places like Middle East so SE Asia, Trump seems like the guy who would for example make alliance Russia to nuke China, sacrificing Europe for Russian support.
I mean, many past presidents were horrible scum and liars; but DT makes no slightest trace of consistency, he denies obvious facts, invents stats etc.
They're still releasing patches for XP Standard Embedded. You can obtain and apply these patches to ANY XP with a registry hack.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.