Let me ask you this... wouldn't you like to be prompted if you somehow picked up a piece of malware that wanted to randomly change your desktop background, delete the files in your home directory, empty the recycle bin, etc.?
You're expecting Vista to "know" that it's "you" performing these actions and not some piece of malware that's doing it programmatically. "Ah," you say, "but Vista should just assume that if the mouse and keyboard are being used to perform these actions that it's really the user doing it!" OK, fine. You're just ignoring the fact that the malware could be running software to simulate mouse and keyboard input.
You're looking at this from the perspective of Linux and MacOS, which really don't have much of anything in the way of malware. Windows, unfortunately, does. And part of the problem is that malware can still wreak havoc on your system even if you aren't running as an administrator (i.e., I would be just as devastated to lose all the files in my home directory as I would the entire system). So what does Microsoft decide to do? Plug up the holes with prompts. Yes, it does seem excessive, but they're doing the responsible thing. If one day you were using Windows and out of the blue you were prompted to allow or deny "del *.* in home", you'd probably be thankful it was there.
Last time I checked, regular users couldn't fool around with ifconfig either. I would say changing your IP address is something that should require admin privileges. I think you picked a bad example there.
So it sounds to me like the issue boils down to Vista having much more fine-grained prompting than Linux or MacOS does. There are many entry points from which Windows can be compromised -- we know this. It sounds like Microsoft is at least doing the responsible thing and trying to plug them up with prompts. You guys expect them to work magic and "know" the difference between legitimate and illegitimate requests.
One of the big complaints in this article is about UAC. It's too bothersome.
I just don't understand the reasoning here. First, the Windows bashers complained that Windows requires you to work as an admin user to perform a lot of common tasks. That's true.
"In Linux I get prompted by a GUI sudo program whenever root privileges are required. MacOS does this too. Windoze is so stupid because you HAVE to run as an administrator! There's no sudo!"
OK, fair enough. Vista adds UAC, which does just what those GUI sudo programs do. The Windows bashers bitch and moan that they're getting prompted too often and decide to disable the feature.
What do you guys expect? Jesus Christ. If Windows requires user confirmation to escalate privileges, you're going to get prompted for your password, plain and simple. If you're foolish enough to be running as an admin, you won't be prompted for your password but you will be prompted to "allow" or "deny". And that's too annoying for you guys? Sheesh. Last time I checked, you don't get prompted AT ALL for ANYTHING when you run GNOME or KDE as root. At least Windows tries to keep things safe in that regard.
So my question to you guys is: what do you want? Windows now has "sudo" functionality, which everyone was complaining about, but the claim now is that it's too intrusive. Can Microsoft ever win with you guys?
Re:The Amiga Could Run THREE OS's at Once!
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Can your machine do anything even remotely like that today?
Windows 95 and Windows XP were both designed several years apart and thus the "baseline" PC configurations were much different during the 95 and XP's development. I don't know where you work, but where I work, we take into consideration the general computing power available at the time and base our design decisions on that. I.e., we might do things in our code today that would've been thought too costly several years earlier. So it doesn't surprise me that XP runs worse than 95 on the same hardware -- duh! I'm sure the XP developers were doing the same thing just about every other software company does: if there's more computing power available, take advantage of it.
I don't understand this geek obsession with "XXX Mhz and YYY MB of RAM are all you should ever need, if you need more, your code is bloated." Honestly now, time marches on and computers become more powerful. Software evolves to take advantage of it. What once took too many cycles is a drop in the bucket today. Why not take advantage of it? Hardware is cheap. The rest of the world seems to understand that, but stubborn geeks think that 300Mhz PC they bought should be top of the line forever.
BTW, you might try comparing KDE 1.X to the latest release on your 300Mhz PII with 64MB of RAM. Tell me which one performs better.
I suppose NBA players never wasted their time playing basketball outside of regularly scheduled games and practice sessions either, right?
The fact remains that the best way to get better at something is to practice it regularly, on your own terms. You're still allowed to have a life -- no one says you have to spend every waking moment coding.
And you may be working for one of the big corporations, but that doesn't imply that you're a spectacular programmer with a real passion for your job. If I had to take a guess I'd say you're one of the "passable" programmers who's just coding to knock out the rent.
My school offered a two-semester software engineering sequence where a problem was assigned (usually from an outside company that needed at real-world solution).
Most schools do this for senior design. Mine did this, but the problem was that 90% of the projects were "make a web interface for something we manually enter into a database". It's just not challenging stuff. The companies were looking for a "nice to have" project to give to the school, so what you end up with are fairly trivial projects that one or two of the company's programmers could knock out in a month or less if they didn't have other obligations. Obviously they wouldn't entrust critical work to a bunch of unpaid students...
Personally, I got far more out of my long-running internship than I ever did out of school. I got so much exposure to large-scale software development it's not even funny. One of the little anecdotes I like telling people is that when I was looking over some of the past senior design projects (this is when I myself was taking senior design and interning), one of the projects was something I wrote during my internship in about two weeks. Only difference was, my implementation was more robust and it only involved one person and two weeks versus four people and an entire semester. It kind of puts the scale of these senior design projects in perspective.
I know this sounds harsh, but bear with me here folks...
From the sounds of it, programming might not be for you. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but there's more to programming than getting a four year CS degree. As you've found out, there's a lot that school doesn't teach you. In my opinion, the one skill you need to master is learning how to take an abstract concept (e.g., writing a console emulator) and utilizing your concrete understanding of CS concepts, algorithms, data structures, and the problem domain in order to synthesize a solution to the problem. I really don't think colleges teach this at all. But then again, how can you? Problem solving skills are something that you just have to "get" on your own (in my opinion) via challenging yourself with increasingly hard problems. I think that some people are just born with a better understanding of how to "get" programming. You see this a lot with mathematics: most people just don't understand the deeper meaning and connection behind all those symbols and equations, and some people can "get it".
What's more distressing is that you're asking people how to improve skills, while realizing that programming in your own free time is one such way to go about that. From the way the question was worded, I get the feeling that you didn't actually spend much of college doing that. That's troubling, in my opinion. I really think that if programming was your passion, you'd be juggling numerous "spare time" side projects all throughout school and, most likely, while you work. It shouldn't even be a question, you should've been doing that all along. But that's just my opinion. Sorry to sound harsh, but that's the way it looks to me.
No, I do want your computer. You don't really need the microwave either, seeing as how billions of people in the world without access to one are still alive. So I'll take that too.
As for you trinkets, I'll gladly take them as well.
Can we arrange for you to ship these items for me or will you provide me your address and leave your residence unlocked? I'm sure you'd be overjoyed to wake up to all these items missing.
I is not wrong to take something from somebody, when that person has no need for it.
Say what? And I suppose the person stealing gets to make the judgement about whether or not the person who possesses the item has a need for it, right?
Please feel free to send me your TV, computer, electronics, trinkets, etc. that you don't truly "need".
The only thing I worry about is when, some time down the road, multiple forks of Java (which aren't called "Java" per se because Sun won't allow that) are unleashed upon the world, there are going to be apps which are written to take advantage (meaning, are only compatible with) of some particular JVM.
That's going to be ugly. Imagine having to keep multiple JREs on your system in order to run all your Java apps.
So please folks, resist the urge to make forks of the JVM which introduce new, incompatible features. You didn't like it when Microsoft did it...
I still think you're misinterpreting the remark, as has everyone else.
'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.'
OK. So he works for Diebold. Diebold has rolled out a bunch of machines in Ohio. Hence, if the president wins in Ohio, he gets the electoral votes. Diebold machines were used to record the votes that eventually gave the electoral votes to the president. So Diebold had a part in delivering the electoral votes to the president. Naturally everyone assumes evil undertones in the message.
I think it was just a case of sensationalist Democrats completely twisting the message since it could possibly be interpreted in a bad way. But that's just par for the course for them...
No, not "no evidence;" there are a dozen opportunities for you to get caught there (not least of which is what do you do if you're caught driving around with a bunch of ballots in your car?
Oh get over it. We're talking about two or three hundred ballots, max. Takes up less space than two reams of computer paper. It's not like lugging around a dead body. Throw them in the trunk with the spare tire. And what in the hell would you be doing on your way to the country that the cops would pull you over and search your car?
The resources and experience of law-enforcement with regards to computer crime are far less than physical-world crime, not to mention the signs of an ongoing computer crime wouldn't be recognizable to most people.
In theory, yes, I agree with this. But then again, we're talking about burning some paper and burying it out in the middle of nowhere. Ashes, not a dead body. Somehow I don't picture many police officials patrolling an entire state looking for a tiny pile of suspicious ashes, which, if burned thoroughly, couldn't even be identified if found. What's the forensic scientist going to say? "Yep, those are paper ashes alright."
This is really a dumb tangent to be going off on. It's easy to burn paper, we all know this.
As for some of your other comments, I don't understand the relationship between allegations of Republican physical vote-tampering and electronic voting. That people have recognized signs of physical-world vote manipulation just serves to further my feelings that there are fewer unguarded (or at least unrecognized) avenues of attack in the physical world than there are in the electronic.
The point I was making is that the Republican party is constantly accused of vote tampering, voter intimidation, etc. All of which require a large number of people to be "in on it", and, if the conspiracy theories are true, involves a lot of people high up. So once again we come back to your original claim about physical vote tampering being effectively impossible because of the logistics and number of people involved. Yet, if these accusations are being made, then clearly it is possible and it does happen. So which is it? It's either improbable or happens every time there's an election, as is claimed. And furthermore, no one's ever been brought up on any charges despite the "overwhelming evidence" you claim would exist in such a scenario. So are we to conclude that previous allegations of vote tampering, voter intimidation, etc. are bogus or actually happened and no evidence (that could tie anyone to the crimes) exists?
Your comment about not networking the machines is similarly incorrect; the machines don't need to be networked to propagate a virus from one to the other. Someone with enough knowledge of the systems could probably write a virus that propagated via the same smartcards that are used to collect the "votes" and take them to the tabulation system, and from there infect the tabulation system and modify other votes. You don't know, when you plug a smart card (or USB stick, or floppy disk) into the machine, what's being written to it; it could just as easily be a virus as legitimate data. Computer viruses existed back before computer networks; they spread at whatever the speed that data is being moved around is.
Granted, but think about what that would involve. Lots of people infecting voting machines at various precincts, completely unnoticed. It certainly couldn't be done by just one person if there's no network connectivity. So here we are again, running up against the problem of sheer numbers of people and logistics.
How come fraud accusations have occurred/still occur in places where electronic voting is not used? Face it, "voting fraud" is always going to be cried when unfavorable/unexpected election results occur, no matter what technology is used. It just becomes even easier to point the finger with electronic machines since "everyone knows" Bush and Diebold are secretly rigging the machines to favor Republicans and "it's so easy" to rig the vote using them. The truth of the matter is, those anecdotes are just that -- anecdotes.
And the "deliver Ohio" promise was completely misinterpreted. The Diebold executive didn't say "Diebold is going to make you win Ohio Mr. Bush!", he said that Diebold would deliver the Ohio results, as in, "we've rolled out a lot of Diebold machines in Ohio, and hence many of the votes are going to be delivered by Diebold machines." But please, carry on with your paranoid conspiracy theories.
Or we could go all paper, which has the advantage that it's worked for a zillion years, and is hugely difficult to fraud on a large scale.
Then why is it that every election (or at least, every election with a favorable Republican outcome) the Republicans are accused to rigging the vote, either by tampering with ballots or by intimidating voters? Seems like that fraud sure is easy to detect but yet no one has been sent to jail over it. And this isn't just a party thing, this happens all the time in countries where an unfavorable/unexpected outcome arises. Everyone is "absolutely sure" voting fraud happened, but damned if anyone can prove it.
Electronic voting just makes it easier to point the "fraud" finger at the party who won.
First, because that requires a conspiracy of a large number of people.
That doesn't stop people from believing that the electronic voting machines are a conspiracy that go all the way up to the president and his administration. And, in areas where blacks vote, that there's plenty of hired Republican goons to intimidate the voters. And that there's still ballot tampering going on in other areas. Your point? Even an electronic voting scam would require a large number of people and eventually make its way up to the party in power.
Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes, requiring teams of people, and keeping it all a secret? It's virtually zero.
Doesn't stop people from believing that the Republicans do it every election...
he smell of burning paper coming from the polling places might tip someone off; and if it doesn't, the barrels of paper ash probably would. Or the truckloads of ash that you're hauling away to dump in the river/ocean/whatever. It becomes a big logistical problem.
Why would you burn the ballots at the polling stations? And remember, if all you're doing is changing 2-3% of the vote, that doesn't turn into a massive amount of paper ballots. Ten thousand votes at a polling station turns into two or three hundred ballots that need to be changed. Not hard to conceal at all. Throw them in your trunk, take them out to the boondocks, burn them, at bury the ash (making sure the ballots are thoroughly burned and the ash is mixed in the dirt). Voila! No evidence!
Third, an electronic attack could self-propagate. If you infected a machine, or firmware loader, it might be possible to make that machine infect other machines, without any intervention on your behalf.
So make sure the machines aren't network connected...
Fourth, the ways of manipulating elections via the paper-ballot systems are long established and for the most part, well recognized.
That sure doesn't stop the Democrats from charging Republicans with tampering with ballots. But none of the charges ever stick, so I can only assume those dastardly Republicans are quite good at covering their tracks.
Yes, it is definitely easier, seeing as how digitally manipulating anything is easier than doing it by hand. Although I would argue that, properly secured, the reverse would eventually be true: that paper ballots would be easier to tamper with than electronic ones.
I just think it's ridiculous for this knee-jerk hostility towards electronic voting and irrational acceptance of the "foolproof" nature of paper balloting to be going on at Slashdot. See for example, everyone saying that a paper receipt for electronic voting would somehow fix things.
Contrast this with Diebold and their crap voting system based on fucking MICROSOFT ACCESS. Jesus Christ! That screams Mickey Mouse half-assed bullshit solution to me. ACCESS? That's like having fricking Mattel or Hasbro stamped on the side in kid-friendly primary colors. You know just by hearing that little factoid that fraud is completely possible. Securing an access database is a fantasy.
I suppose it would be more secure if Linux and MySQL were used? Sheesh, it's a perfectly capable database, get over yourself.
Voter fraud is always going to be possible, but I'd rather a system that requires people to print fake ballots and lug the real ballots to a river or something, rather than a system that can untracably introduce a 2 or 3% error to favor one side over another.
Well, seeing as how everyone thinks these rigged machines are a conspiracy going all the way up to the president himself, I fail to see how printing a bunch of new ballots is any trouble. And throwing them in a river? Huh? Wouldn't it be smarter to burn then? That's pretty untraceable, you know.
And remember, all you need to do is introduce paper ballot error to a bunch of districts. There's no need to replace all the ballots in every single district.
I would argue that paper ballot fraud is easier to pull off than you may imagine.
Sure it's easier, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Hypothetical situation: let's say it came to light that the 2000 presidential election (I don't think there were any electronic machines used in that one, but if there were, let's pretend that wasn't the case) was indeed rigged. Enough paper ballots were replaced to give Bush a slim lead (oh, 50K or whatever makes sense). Now what did that involve?
Just changing a few hundred to a thousand ballots in several precincts across the country.
Let's say this really did happen. How would you feel about paper ballots then?
Face it, it's not foolproof. "Security through difficulty" is just as bad as "security through obscurity".
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Let me ask you this... wouldn't you like to be prompted if you somehow picked up a piece of malware that wanted to randomly change your desktop background, delete the files in your home directory, empty the recycle bin, etc.?
You're expecting Vista to "know" that it's "you" performing these actions and not some piece of malware that's doing it programmatically. "Ah," you say, "but Vista should just assume that if the mouse and keyboard are being used to perform these actions that it's really the user doing it!" OK, fine. You're just ignoring the fact that the malware could be running software to simulate mouse and keyboard input.
You're looking at this from the perspective of Linux and MacOS, which really don't have much of anything in the way of malware. Windows, unfortunately, does. And part of the problem is that malware can still wreak havoc on your system even if you aren't running as an administrator (i.e., I would be just as devastated to lose all the files in my home directory as I would the entire system). So what does Microsoft decide to do? Plug up the holes with prompts. Yes, it does seem excessive, but they're doing the responsible thing. If one day you were using Windows and out of the blue you were prompted to allow or deny "del *.* in home", you'd probably be thankful it was there.
Last time I checked, regular users couldn't fool around with ifconfig either. I would say changing your IP address is something that should require admin privileges. I think you picked a bad example there.
So it sounds to me like the issue boils down to Vista having much more fine-grained prompting than Linux or MacOS does. There are many entry points from which Windows can be compromised -- we know this. It sounds like Microsoft is at least doing the responsible thing and trying to plug them up with prompts. You guys expect them to work magic and "know" the difference between legitimate and illegitimate requests.
One of the big complaints in this article is about UAC. It's too bothersome.
I just don't understand the reasoning here. First, the Windows bashers complained that Windows requires you to work as an admin user to perform a lot of common tasks. That's true.
"In Linux I get prompted by a GUI sudo program whenever root privileges are required. MacOS does this too. Windoze is so stupid because you HAVE to run as an administrator! There's no sudo!"
OK, fair enough. Vista adds UAC, which does just what those GUI sudo programs do. The Windows bashers bitch and moan that they're getting prompted too often and decide to disable the feature.
What do you guys expect? Jesus Christ. If Windows requires user confirmation to escalate privileges, you're going to get prompted for your password, plain and simple. If you're foolish enough to be running as an admin, you won't be prompted for your password but you will be prompted to "allow" or "deny". And that's too annoying for you guys? Sheesh. Last time I checked, you don't get prompted AT ALL for ANYTHING when you run GNOME or KDE as root. At least Windows tries to keep things safe in that regard.
So my question to you guys is: what do you want? Windows now has "sudo" functionality, which everyone was complaining about, but the claim now is that it's too intrusive. Can Microsoft ever win with you guys?
Can your machine do anything even remotely like that today?
Yes, easily. It's called VMWare.
Windows 95 and Windows XP were both designed several years apart and thus the "baseline" PC configurations were much different during the 95 and XP's development. I don't know where you work, but where I work, we take into consideration the general computing power available at the time and base our design decisions on that. I.e., we might do things in our code today that would've been thought too costly several years earlier. So it doesn't surprise me that XP runs worse than 95 on the same hardware -- duh! I'm sure the XP developers were doing the same thing just about every other software company does: if there's more computing power available, take advantage of it.
I don't understand this geek obsession with "XXX Mhz and YYY MB of RAM are all you should ever need, if you need more, your code is bloated." Honestly now, time marches on and computers become more powerful. Software evolves to take advantage of it. What once took too many cycles is a drop in the bucket today. Why not take advantage of it? Hardware is cheap. The rest of the world seems to understand that, but stubborn geeks think that 300Mhz PC they bought should be top of the line forever.
BTW, you might try comparing KDE 1.X to the latest release on your 300Mhz PII with 64MB of RAM. Tell me which one performs better.
Nice post, AC.
I suppose NBA players never wasted their time playing basketball outside of regularly scheduled games and practice sessions either, right?
The fact remains that the best way to get better at something is to practice it regularly, on your own terms. You're still allowed to have a life -- no one says you have to spend every waking moment coding.
And you may be working for one of the big corporations, but that doesn't imply that you're a spectacular programmer with a real passion for your job. If I had to take a guess I'd say you're one of the "passable" programmers who's just coding to knock out the rent.
My school offered a two-semester software engineering sequence where a problem was assigned (usually from an outside company that needed at real-world solution).
Most schools do this for senior design. Mine did this, but the problem was that 90% of the projects were "make a web interface for something we manually enter into a database". It's just not challenging stuff. The companies were looking for a "nice to have" project to give to the school, so what you end up with are fairly trivial projects that one or two of the company's programmers could knock out in a month or less if they didn't have other obligations. Obviously they wouldn't entrust critical work to a bunch of unpaid students...
Personally, I got far more out of my long-running internship than I ever did out of school. I got so much exposure to large-scale software development it's not even funny. One of the little anecdotes I like telling people is that when I was looking over some of the past senior design projects (this is when I myself was taking senior design and interning), one of the projects was something I wrote during my internship in about two weeks. Only difference was, my implementation was more robust and it only involved one person and two weeks versus four people and an entire semester. It kind of puts the scale of these senior design projects in perspective.
I know this sounds harsh, but bear with me here folks...
From the sounds of it, programming might not be for you. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but there's more to programming than getting a four year CS degree. As you've found out, there's a lot that school doesn't teach you. In my opinion, the one skill you need to master is learning how to take an abstract concept (e.g., writing a console emulator) and utilizing your concrete understanding of CS concepts, algorithms, data structures, and the problem domain in order to synthesize a solution to the problem. I really don't think colleges teach this at all. But then again, how can you? Problem solving skills are something that you just have to "get" on your own (in my opinion) via challenging yourself with increasingly hard problems. I think that some people are just born with a better understanding of how to "get" programming. You see this a lot with mathematics: most people just don't understand the deeper meaning and connection behind all those symbols and equations, and some people can "get it".
What's more distressing is that you're asking people how to improve skills, while realizing that programming in your own free time is one such way to go about that. From the way the question was worded, I get the feeling that you didn't actually spend much of college doing that. That's troubling, in my opinion. I really think that if programming was your passion, you'd be juggling numerous "spare time" side projects all throughout school and, most likely, while you work. It shouldn't even be a question, you should've been doing that all along. But that's just my opinion. Sorry to sound harsh, but that's the way it looks to me.
No, I do want your computer. You don't really need the microwave either, seeing as how billions of people in the world without access to one are still alive. So I'll take that too.
As for you trinkets, I'll gladly take them as well.
Can we arrange for you to ship these items for me or will you provide me your address and leave your residence unlocked? I'm sure you'd be overjoyed to wake up to all these items missing.
You can live very very well on 100k in SF if you don't buy a lot of over priced crap.
Like a house?
I is not wrong to take something from somebody, when that person has no need for it.
Say what? And I suppose the person stealing gets to make the judgement about whether or not the person who possesses the item has a need for it, right?
Please feel free to send me your TV, computer, electronics, trinkets, etc. that you don't truly "need".
The only thing I worry about is when, some time down the road, multiple forks of Java (which aren't called "Java" per se because Sun won't allow that) are unleashed upon the world, there are going to be apps which are written to take advantage (meaning, are only compatible with) of some particular JVM.
That's going to be ugly. Imagine having to keep multiple JREs on your system in order to run all your Java apps.
So please folks, resist the urge to make forks of the JVM which introduce new, incompatible features. You didn't like it when Microsoft did it...
all prices except wholesale prices are quoted with VAT already added so most people don't think about it.
Which is exactly what the government wants you to do.
Well, the Democrats got a favorable outcome, so I guess that means they don't think there was any voting fraud this time.
To clarify, I meant two or three hundred from each of a number of polling stations, obviously.
Again, the Republicans get accused of this every election, so I don't see why it's not much of a problem in your eyes.
I still think you're misinterpreting the remark, as has everyone else.
'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.'
OK. So he works for Diebold. Diebold has rolled out a bunch of machines in Ohio. Hence, if the president wins in Ohio, he gets the electoral votes. Diebold machines were used to record the votes that eventually gave the electoral votes to the president. So Diebold had a part in delivering the electoral votes to the president. Naturally everyone assumes evil undertones in the message.
I think it was just a case of sensationalist Democrats completely twisting the message since it could possibly be interpreted in a bad way. But that's just par for the course for them...
No, not "no evidence;" there are a dozen opportunities for you to get caught there (not least of which is what do you do if you're caught driving around with a bunch of ballots in your car?
Oh get over it. We're talking about two or three hundred ballots, max. Takes up less space than two reams of computer paper. It's not like lugging around a dead body. Throw them in the trunk with the spare tire. And what in the hell would you be doing on your way to the country that the cops would pull you over and search your car?
The resources and experience of law-enforcement with regards to computer crime are far less than physical-world crime, not to mention the signs of an ongoing computer crime wouldn't be recognizable to most people.
In theory, yes, I agree with this. But then again, we're talking about burning some paper and burying it out in the middle of nowhere. Ashes, not a dead body. Somehow I don't picture many police officials patrolling an entire state looking for a tiny pile of suspicious ashes, which, if burned thoroughly, couldn't even be identified if found. What's the forensic scientist going to say? "Yep, those are paper ashes alright."
This is really a dumb tangent to be going off on. It's easy to burn paper, we all know this.
As for some of your other comments, I don't understand the relationship between allegations of Republican physical vote-tampering and electronic voting. That people have recognized signs of physical-world vote manipulation just serves to further my feelings that there are fewer unguarded (or at least unrecognized) avenues of attack in the physical world than there are in the electronic.
The point I was making is that the Republican party is constantly accused of vote tampering, voter intimidation, etc. All of which require a large number of people to be "in on it", and, if the conspiracy theories are true, involves a lot of people high up. So once again we come back to your original claim about physical vote tampering being effectively impossible because of the logistics and number of people involved. Yet, if these accusations are being made, then clearly it is possible and it does happen. So which is it? It's either improbable or happens every time there's an election, as is claimed. And furthermore, no one's ever been brought up on any charges despite the "overwhelming evidence" you claim would exist in such a scenario. So are we to conclude that previous allegations of vote tampering, voter intimidation, etc. are bogus or actually happened and no evidence (that could tie anyone to the crimes) exists?
Your comment about not networking the machines is similarly incorrect; the machines don't need to be networked to propagate a virus from one to the other. Someone with enough knowledge of the systems could probably write a virus that propagated via the same smartcards that are used to collect the "votes" and take them to the tabulation system, and from there infect the tabulation system and modify other votes. You don't know, when you plug a smart card (or USB stick, or floppy disk) into the machine, what's being written to it; it could just as easily be a virus as legitimate data. Computer viruses existed back before computer networks; they spread at whatever the speed that data is being moved around is.
Granted, but think about what that would involve. Lots of people infecting voting machines at various precincts, completely unnoticed. It certainly couldn't be done by just one person if there's no network connectivity. So here we are again, running up against the problem of sheer numbers of people and logistics.
How come fraud accusations have occurred/still occur in places where electronic voting is not used? Face it, "voting fraud" is always going to be cried when unfavorable/unexpected election results occur, no matter what technology is used. It just becomes even easier to point the finger with electronic machines since "everyone knows" Bush and Diebold are secretly rigging the machines to favor Republicans and "it's so easy" to rig the vote using them. The truth of the matter is, those anecdotes are just that -- anecdotes.
And the "deliver Ohio" promise was completely misinterpreted. The Diebold executive didn't say "Diebold is going to make you win Ohio Mr. Bush!", he said that Diebold would deliver the Ohio results, as in, "we've rolled out a lot of Diebold machines in Ohio, and hence many of the votes are going to be delivered by Diebold machines." But please, carry on with your paranoid conspiracy theories.
Or we could go all paper, which has the advantage that it's worked for a zillion years, and is hugely difficult to fraud on a large scale.
Then why is it that every election (or at least, every election with a favorable Republican outcome) the Republicans are accused to rigging the vote, either by tampering with ballots or by intimidating voters? Seems like that fraud sure is easy to detect but yet no one has been sent to jail over it. And this isn't just a party thing, this happens all the time in countries where an unfavorable/unexpected outcome arises. Everyone is "absolutely sure" voting fraud happened, but damned if anyone can prove it.
Electronic voting just makes it easier to point the "fraud" finger at the party who won.
First, because that requires a conspiracy of a large number of people.
That doesn't stop people from believing that the electronic voting machines are a conspiracy that go all the way up to the president and his administration. And, in areas where blacks vote, that there's plenty of hired Republican goons to intimidate the voters. And that there's still ballot tampering going on in other areas. Your point? Even an electronic voting scam would require a large number of people and eventually make its way up to the party in power.
Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes, requiring teams of people, and keeping it all a secret? It's virtually zero.
Doesn't stop people from believing that the Republicans do it every election...
he smell of burning paper coming from the polling places might tip someone off; and if it doesn't, the barrels of paper ash probably would. Or the truckloads of ash that you're hauling away to dump in the river/ocean/whatever. It becomes a big logistical problem.
Why would you burn the ballots at the polling stations? And remember, if all you're doing is changing 2-3% of the vote, that doesn't turn into a massive amount of paper ballots. Ten thousand votes at a polling station turns into two or three hundred ballots that need to be changed. Not hard to conceal at all. Throw them in your trunk, take them out to the boondocks, burn them, at bury the ash (making sure the ballots are thoroughly burned and the ash is mixed in the dirt). Voila! No evidence!
Third, an electronic attack could self-propagate. If you infected a machine, or firmware loader, it might be possible to make that machine infect other machines, without any intervention on your behalf.
So make sure the machines aren't network connected...
Fourth, the ways of manipulating elections via the paper-ballot systems are long established and for the most part, well recognized.
That sure doesn't stop the Democrats from charging Republicans with tampering with ballots. But none of the charges ever stick, so I can only assume those dastardly Republicans are quite good at covering their tracks.
Yes, it is definitely easier, seeing as how digitally manipulating anything is easier than doing it by hand. Although I would argue that, properly secured, the reverse would eventually be true: that paper ballots would be easier to tamper with than electronic ones.
I just think it's ridiculous for this knee-jerk hostility towards electronic voting and irrational acceptance of the "foolproof" nature of paper balloting to be going on at Slashdot. See for example, everyone saying that a paper receipt for electronic voting would somehow fix things.
Contrast this with Diebold and their crap voting system based on fucking MICROSOFT ACCESS. Jesus Christ! That screams Mickey Mouse half-assed bullshit solution to me. ACCESS? That's like having fricking Mattel or Hasbro stamped on the side in kid-friendly primary colors. You know just by hearing that little factoid that fraud is completely possible. Securing an access database is a fantasy.
I suppose it would be more secure if Linux and MySQL were used? Sheesh, it's a perfectly capable database, get over yourself.
Voter fraud is always going to be possible, but I'd rather a system that requires people to print fake ballots and lug the real ballots to a river or something, rather than a system that can untracably introduce a 2 or 3% error to favor one side over another.
Well, seeing as how everyone thinks these rigged machines are a conspiracy going all the way up to the president himself, I fail to see how printing a bunch of new ballots is any trouble. And throwing them in a river? Huh? Wouldn't it be smarter to burn then? That's pretty untraceable, you know.
And remember, all you need to do is introduce paper ballot error to a bunch of districts. There's no need to replace all the ballots in every single district.
I would argue that paper ballot fraud is easier to pull off than you may imagine.
Sure it's easier, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Hypothetical situation: let's say it came to light that the 2000 presidential election (I don't think there were any electronic machines used in that one, but if there were, let's pretend that wasn't the case) was indeed rigged. Enough paper ballots were replaced to give Bush a slim lead (oh, 50K or whatever makes sense). Now what did that involve?
Just changing a few hundred to a thousand ballots in several precincts across the country.
Let's say this really did happen. How would you feel about paper ballots then?
Face it, it's not foolproof. "Security through difficulty" is just as bad as "security through obscurity".
OK, so he's altered the votes for that one precinct -- and?
You seem to think that the effort required for paper ballots would somehow deter someone who was determined to rig the vote.