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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.
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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".
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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.
Pennsylvania will probably find itself electing Ruth From Card Services, or some guy in India who promises to repair your PC.
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.