If you're talking about the electoral college, that and the Senate representation (two per state regardless of the size of the state) was a compromise to keep the big states from completely dominating the small states. That's part of the rulebook and it's necessary.
If however you're talking about electronic ballot fraud, hey man, right there with ya! Google my name with "Diebold" or the like.
Right, the "lying for security needs" argument. And it's valid, in a lot of cases.
But then a lot of non-security-related stuff gets shoved under the same rug.
The Wikileaks cables dump is FULL of such stuff. For example, you have high-level diplomats and other US government actors saying "hey, the Saudis are massively overstating their oil reserves". And that's considered "secret". Seriously? Sure, it's been suspected by insiders in the oil biz for some time now but those "theories" just got a huge bump. Well guess what? The US government plays the stock and commodities markets just like everybody else. If any other player in the oil biz had that sort of inside track on oil futures and kept it secret while playing the oil markets, there's a term for that: "insider trading".
WTF?
The rules need to be "use secrets for stuff that REALLY matters, like a downed pilot's fake ID behind enemy lines, and if the gov't screws up and uses secrecy laws either to prop up financial markets or cover their own fucktardedness, somebody like Manning steps up and releases it AND YOU DON'T JAIL THE WHISTLEBLOWER AS A RESULT".
Instead we see Manning basically in hell and weird-ass charges against Assange by the sockpuppets in Sweden...
There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:
http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:
On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?
If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.
Jeez, look at what's NOT there: nothing remotely kinky, nothing disrespectful of ladies, some humor, a HELL of a lot of truth...
?
The only "odd" bit is preference for gals from places that have seen a lot of "reality" and even there, yeah, I see where he's coming from. He's trying to avoid the "vapid" types that care more about the ads in the latest issue of Vanity Fair or whatever than they do about stuff that matters. Not at all odd, given who he is:).
Why would anybody call him a "douche" or whatever based on this?
Basically I'm getting the 'net with speeds like these guys were talking about "free" with the cellphone I'd be paying for regardless.
I travel a lot and need "internet anywhere". I was using Verizon's cellmodem (EVDO) service with an Expresscard device (Kyocera KPC680) for $60 a month flat rate, plus $80 a month for unlimited talk on a regular cellphone. It was just too much. Speed at speedtest.net was generally about 1.2mb/s inbound, creepy-slow outbound (little better than dialup, no hope of uploading a video).
I did some research, scored a Tmobile-branded Sony-Ericsson TM506 phone at a pawn shop for $60. Doesn't look like much but it was their first 3G phone and mine happened to be completely tether-friendly in Linux. $80 a month at TMobile turns it on for voice AND data - and in any reasonably urban area I seem to find 3G coverage at which point the thing can do data and voice at the same time - data obviously slows down some but what the hell, at least I can take a call. Tether speeds are around.8mb/s inbound, about.3-.4 outbound, so uploading a video is actually practical. Tethering speeds between USB and Bluetooth seem more or less identical, at least in Ubuntu Lucid.
You have to do your research on which phone to get - the TM717 is a later variant of my phone that has to be hacked on a bit to tether but it's no big deal. Some of the late versions of my phone might need tweaking. For anything else the key feature you need is HSDPA data and do some googling for Tmobile compatibility. TMobile is the most tether-tolerant of the major cellcos.
Point is, speeds in this range are usable. Doesn't sound like much and is absolutely not going to be a good idea for major torrents and such, but for basic stuff including Youtube/Hulu/etc. it works.
I can show you a bunch of cases of textbooks saying outright that the 2nd Amendment is purely about the states rights to form state militias and that there's no personal civil right to arms - and some still say it even when published after the 2008 Heller decision where the US Supreme Court said otherwise in no uncertain terms.
The left has been doing a LOT more social indoctrination crap in the schools over the years than the right, largely because the teacher's unions are fairly hardcore lefties. The ONLY surprise now is that the right has been caught doing it.
Schools are not supposed to be indoctrination camps for either side. It's just as evil either way.
Second, "code that defines races" can be used to alter results. I have a lot of experience playing with Diebold databases because we've had access to those since 2003 when Diebold left an FTP site open. If you swap the candidate ID numbers between two candidates in the Diebold database (run in MS-Access), you'll flip the election. In a heartbeat.
It *appears* there's code present in this Sequoia database to do the same thing. Note the word "appears". The best way to find out, and the most MORAL way, was to put it up for public review.
Risking exposure of our technical warts, sure. Still worth it. Check the discussion areas at the wiki - we're learning a hell of a lot, very quickly.
But yes, it's true: I don't know MS-SQL, and nobody else at EDA does either. So we were faced with a choice: find a few people who did know it, pay 'em a bunch of donated money to write a formal report behind closed doors, or do a public review and exam even if that means exposing any mistakes we make, knowing they'll be caught pretty damn quick.
Hey, a couple of people tried to load it, it failed big. Apparently we screwed up.
That's so far by far the ugliest wart that's popped up, and we did say the vandalism thing was "preliminary".
Sigh. That's the kind of risk we took with a totally public reveal. We didn't have anybody on our own team who knows SQL.
But, would you rather have us mess around on our own for God knows how long, or do a public reveal?
All of these voting system reviews so far have happened behind closed doors. That's morally wrong. We took a different route, the first public exam ever, despite the risks.
Beat us up all you want, but do we really deserve it?
Quoting: --- The more you read at the ultimate site more you realize the people digging thru this garbage know nothing about what they are reading, and not much about programming either.
Just because you know how to run grep or strings does not mean you can use the data it reveals. ---
And you're right. Except first, this appears to be an open and shut violation of FEC rules - I'm not an SQL programmer BUT I know that rulebook. And based on the *volume* of code present, there's a lot of calculation going on.
Yes, it's an open question as to what the security implications are. But at least we have a chance at evaluating those implications publicly.
And public study of this stuff is the only sane and responsible thing to do - EVEN if it reveals our own warts.
What it looks like so far is that Flicker claimed they'd gotten a DMCA when in fact they hadn't and wanted to censor the image themselves.
That's why whoever put the pic up never got the notice.
I once recieved a take-down notice as the guy who put up content, from the claimed copyright holder (in that case Diebold again) *through* my ISP. That's how it works. I wrote a response back to my ISP, taking the responsibility for my site's contents off my ISP and firmly onto ME.
...if they fraudulently claimed a DMCA takedown notice when there wasn't one.
Committing fraud via the DMCA, if that's what Flicker has done, is major bad mojo. Diebold Election Systems paid over $125,000 for a wrongful DMCA takedown notice:
Whether it's an "insider" who works for your agency or an outside contractor, it doesn't matter: either way you have to trust somebody.
The only solution that makes sense is an audit trail that records file transfers and can't itself be modified - which is a real bitchkitty to implement. Does anybody know of any decent products that cover both servers and workstations?
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster:).
1) "We have to let the blind and disabled vote privately". This is huge. See, even before Diebold got into voting, they were giving big money to the National Federation of the Blind, who would sue banks that didn't use "accessible" ATM (cash) machines, and then as part of the settlement the bank was supposed to buy "accessible" ATMs made by, you guessed it, Diebold.
Once Diebold got into voting in 2002 they pulled the same scam. The same National Federation of the Blind crew came in and flooded state-level voting system evaluation boards with tear-jerk stories of being able to vote privately for the first time with electronic voting (and an audio track telling them what to push for which votes).
2) A lot of the fiasco in the Florida 2000 race got blamed (mostly unfairly) on bad/old equipment. So the US Fed Gov't poured $3.5bil into voting system improvements in the form of grants to states and counties in 2002. Diebold got into voting in 2002 when the ink was barely dry on this bill (the "Help America Vote Act")...basically, it was blood in the water that attracted sharks. ES&S seriously ramped up production at that point.
3) There are claims that paper can be hacked too, and that's actually correct. What they didn't understand was that in order to do paper fraud you need a lot of people - it's "retail fraud" where each fraudster only affects a small number of votes. You damn well CAN do that but it takes a big corrupt political machine like Chicago in the '60s/'70s, Tamany Hall in NYC prior to 1913, etc. Electronic voting introduces "wholesale fraud" where one guy or a small team hacks a bunch of votes at once.
4) Costs of election processing. See, in the US we don't just have "Democracy", we have gobs of it. We vote for lots of races that would just be appointees elsewhere: "town clerk", judges, a ton of other minor officials. In most states we also vote on issues, bond measures, whether to buy parkland, whether to have gay marriage or not, stuff like that. So we end up with these huge ballots to a point where hand-counting starts to look ugly.
Right now, one fast solution might be to do paper ballots that get scanned, NOT touchscreens, and then once the ballots are fed through the "official count" scanners make by head cases like Diebold, ES&S and the like, we then run them through standard scanners saving graphic images to a hard disk and then to DVDs. Those would get handed out to political parties and activists on election night plus copied up to the web.
That way, anybody who wants to can do a hand-count of any one race or all races, by getting enough people together to count the graphic images. We basically have the existing "black boxes" (because all this Federal testing insanity is now enshrined in law and all these counties have bought junk systems already) and run them through a "white box" consisting of basically Ubuntu, an old P4, a decent hard disk, DVD burner and the biggest scanner SANE supports.
We can get that running in most places by 2010 because this "afterscanner white box" isn't a tabulator. In fact we do NOT want it to have OCR at all or know what's on the ballots, that way it can't be programmed to cheat. So since it's not a tabulator, it doesn't need certification, so it can be set up fast and cheap with off-the-shelf hardware and FOSS software with at most a simple front and and maybe an Ubuntu re-spin customized for this purposes.
Some have even been booted out of the process for poor performance, most recently when NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) started looking at them. Systest was just kicked out, see this story and links from there for details:
Cyber was so bad, you could jam a cheap pocket calculator halfway into a banana, pay 'em enough money and they'd have declared it "an acceptable election technology" or somedamnthing.
This was written for the Stonewall Democrats. It includes boilerplate public records text at the end, some examples of dirty stuff seen in public records, examples of screwed-up facilities (with pictures) and more.
This is an example of an after-action report written along these principles:
I'm doing another right now for Monterey County California for the election of June 3rd '08. Found all sorts of crazy stuff. That should be posted at http://blackboxvoting.org/ in a day or two.
Jim March Member of the board of directors Blackboxvoting.org
I haven't booted Windows as bootloader OS on any computer I own since September 2006. I don't dual-boot either.
BUT, I do use VirtualBox and a WinXP VM some of the time.
I have to be able to take apart voting databases, and that means MS-Access (puke) - it doesn't work in Wine. Scads of other people are stuck with some Windoze app(s) and VirtualBox is a Godsend.
That Windoze Vista sticker on the bottom of my laptop would make it damned difficult for Microsloth to complain about my Pirate Bay Special XP (thank you whoever "eXperience" is).
The XP VM also lets me troubleshoot client problems and...hell, every once in a while I run into a Blockbusters DVD rental that just chokes hard on every possible Linux codec I throw at it. By around the second time that happened and hours of tweaking, I just kinda went "hell with it" and watched my freakin' movie in the VM.:)
A Windows license also helps if you tweak Wine with various actual Windows DLLs and such, which people often do...
If you really, REALLY can go absolutely Stallman-pure FOSS, cool. Some of us can't.
Besides: how hard is it really to throw the make/model of what you're interested in into google with the word "ubuntu" and see whether it's likely to work?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking about the electoral college, that and the Senate representation (two per state regardless of the size of the state) was a compromise to keep the big states from completely dominating the small states. That's part of the rulebook and it's necessary.
If however you're talking about electronic ballot fraud, hey man, right there with ya! Google my name with "Diebold" or the like.
Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors,
http://blackboxvoting.org/
Right, the "lying for security needs" argument. And it's valid, in a lot of cases.
But then a lot of non-security-related stuff gets shoved under the same rug.
The Wikileaks cables dump is FULL of such stuff. For example, you have high-level diplomats and other US government actors saying "hey, the Saudis are massively overstating their oil reserves". And that's considered "secret". Seriously? Sure, it's been suspected by insiders in the oil biz for some time now but those "theories" just got a huge bump. Well guess what? The US government plays the stock and commodities markets just like everybody else. If any other player in the oil biz had that sort of inside track on oil futures and kept it secret while playing the oil markets, there's a term for that: "insider trading".
WTF?
The rules need to be "use secrets for stuff that REALLY matters, like a downed pilot's fake ID behind enemy lines, and if the gov't screws up and uses secrecy laws either to prop up financial markets or cover their own fucktardedness, somebody like Manning steps up and releases it AND YOU DON'T JAIL THE WHISTLEBLOWER AS A RESULT".
Instead we see Manning basically in hell and weird-ass charges against Assange by the sockpuppets in Sweden...
There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:
http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/violating-terms-of-service-equals-hacking/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew
They actually failed in that case:
http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/ ...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal
On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?
If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.
It said "Maternity Ward"...
Jeez, look at what's NOT there: nothing remotely kinky, nothing disrespectful of ladies, some humor, a HELL of a lot of truth...
?
The only "odd" bit is preference for gals from places that have seen a lot of "reality" and even there, yeah, I see where he's coming from. He's trying to avoid the "vapid" types that care more about the ads in the latest issue of Vanity Fair or whatever than they do about stuff that matters. Not at all odd, given who he is :).
Why would anybody call him a "douche" or whatever based on this?
Basically I'm getting the 'net with speeds like these guys were talking about "free" with the cellphone I'd be paying for regardless.
I travel a lot and need "internet anywhere". I was using Verizon's cellmodem (EVDO) service with an Expresscard device (Kyocera KPC680) for $60 a month flat rate, plus $80 a month for unlimited talk on a regular cellphone. It was just too much. Speed at speedtest.net was generally about 1.2mb/s inbound, creepy-slow outbound (little better than dialup, no hope of uploading a video).
I did some research, scored a Tmobile-branded Sony-Ericsson TM506 phone at a pawn shop for $60. Doesn't look like much but it was their first 3G phone and mine happened to be completely tether-friendly in Linux. $80 a month at TMobile turns it on for voice AND data - and in any reasonably urban area I seem to find 3G coverage at which point the thing can do data and voice at the same time - data obviously slows down some but what the hell, at least I can take a call. Tether speeds are around .8mb/s inbound, about .3-.4 outbound, so uploading a video is actually practical. Tethering speeds between USB and Bluetooth seem more or less identical, at least in Ubuntu Lucid.
You have to do your research on which phone to get - the TM717 is a later variant of my phone that has to be hacked on a bit to tether but it's no big deal. Some of the late versions of my phone might need tweaking. For anything else the key feature you need is HSDPA data and do some googling for Tmobile compatibility. TMobile is the most tether-tolerant of the major cellcos.
Point is, speeds in this range are usable. Doesn't sound like much and is absolutely not going to be a good idea for major torrents and such, but for basic stuff including Youtube/Hulu/etc. it works.
...when the left does it.
I can show you a bunch of cases of textbooks saying outright that the 2nd Amendment is purely about the states rights to form state militias and that there's no personal civil right to arms - and some still say it even when published after the 2008 Heller decision where the US Supreme Court said otherwise in no uncertain terms.
The left has been doing a LOT more social indoctrination crap in the schools over the years than the right, largely because the teacher's unions are fairly hardcore lefties. The ONLY surprise now is that the right has been caught doing it.
Schools are not supposed to be indoctrination camps for either side. It's just as evil either way.
Which do you think is cheaper, asking for a bunch of .DOC files as data put on a 25 cent CD, or an 8" stack of paper printouts?
And then once you get 'em, you have the ability to run searches.
Running up the costs by printing dead trees out is an old trick that can now be beat by asking for metadata.
First, I'm the guy that built that wiki page.
Second, "code that defines races" can be used to alter results. I have a lot of experience playing with Diebold databases because we've had access to those since 2003 when Diebold left an FTP site open. If you swap the candidate ID numbers between two candidates in the Diebold database (run in MS-Access), you'll flip the election. In a heartbeat.
It *appears* there's code present in this Sequoia database to do the same thing. Note the word "appears". The best way to find out, and the most MORAL way, was to put it up for public review.
Risking exposure of our technical warts, sure. Still worth it. Check the discussion areas at the wiki - we're learning a hell of a lot, very quickly.
But yes, it's true: I don't know MS-SQL, and nobody else at EDA does either. So we were faced with a choice: find a few people who did know it, pay 'em a bunch of donated money to write a formal report behind closed doors, or do a public review and exam even if that means exposing any mistakes we make, knowing they'll be caught pretty damn quick.
Which was better?
Hey, a couple of people tried to load it, it failed big. Apparently we screwed up.
That's so far by far the ugliest wart that's popped up, and we did say the vandalism thing was "preliminary".
Sigh. That's the kind of risk we took with a totally public reveal. We didn't have anybody on our own team who knows SQL.
But, would you rather have us mess around on our own for God knows how long, or do a public reveal?
All of these voting system reviews so far have happened behind closed doors. That's morally wrong. We took a different route, the first public exam ever, despite the risks.
Beat us up all you want, but do we really deserve it?
Jim March
Yes, this was damned risky on our part from a PR point of view.
WITHOUT QUESTION we will make mistakes, we'll screw up, and the whole world will see it and people will gripe on /.
But a fully public exam and disclosure was also the right thing to do.
We're learning things it would have taken months to sort out in private, in a matter of hours, and this is all our votes at stake.
Part of what we're doing here is answering a key question: is a public exam of voting systems even possible?
Because remember, as partially retarded as this one is, it's the first one ever.
Jim March
Quoting:
---
The more you read at the ultimate site more you realize the people digging thru this garbage know nothing about what they are reading, and not much about programming either.
Just because you know how to run grep or strings does not mean you can use the data it reveals.
---
And you're right. Except first, this appears to be an open and shut violation of FEC rules - I'm not an SQL programmer BUT I know that rulebook. And based on the *volume* of code present, there's a lot of calculation going on.
Yes, it's an open question as to what the security implications are. But at least we have a chance at evaluating those implications publicly.
And public study of this stuff is the only sane and responsible thing to do - EVEN if it reveals our own warts.
Hell, ESPECIALLY if it reveals our own warts.
Jim March
What it looks like so far is that Flicker claimed they'd gotten a DMCA when in fact they hadn't and wanted to censor the image themselves.
That's why whoever put the pic up never got the notice.
I once recieved a take-down notice as the guy who put up content, from the claimed copyright holder (in that case Diebold again) *through* my ISP. That's how it works. I wrote a response back to my ISP, taking the responsibility for my site's contents off my ISP and firmly onto ME.
Here's Diebold's letter to my ISP:
http://www.chillingeffects.org/fairuse/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1423
And here's my response back to my ISP, who then forwards it to Diebold:
http://www.chillingeffects.org/responses/notice.cgi?NoticeID=4045
In the Flicker case, no such letter by any "claimed content holder" appears to exist. That means it's Flicker that created the DMCA fraud.
...if they fraudulently claimed a DMCA takedown notice when there wasn't one.
Committing fraud via the DMCA, if that's what Flicker has done, is major bad mojo. Diebold Election Systems paid over $125,000 for a wrongful DMCA takedown notice:
http://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold
Whether it's an "insider" who works for your agency or an outside contractor, it doesn't matter: either way you have to trust somebody.
The only solution that makes sense is an audit trail that records file transfers and can't itself be modified - which is a real bitchkitty to implement. Does anybody know of any decent products that cover both servers and workstations?
...because we already know Sony is evil as hell and we don't buy their laptops.
And anybody who went and forgot that lesson deserves whatever abuse Sony heaps on 'em.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddn4MGaS3N4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2aH4XLbto
Etc...
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster :).
...or to put it another way, four excuses used:
1) "We have to let the blind and disabled vote privately". This is huge. See, even before Diebold got into voting, they were giving big money to the National Federation of the Blind, who would sue banks that didn't use "accessible" ATM (cash) machines, and then as part of the settlement the bank was supposed to buy "accessible" ATMs made by, you guessed it, Diebold.
Once Diebold got into voting in 2002 they pulled the same scam. The same National Federation of the Blind crew came in and flooded state-level voting system evaluation boards with tear-jerk stories of being able to vote privately for the first time with electronic voting (and an audio track telling them what to push for which votes).
2) A lot of the fiasco in the Florida 2000 race got blamed (mostly unfairly) on bad/old equipment. So the US Fed Gov't poured $3.5bil into voting system improvements in the form of grants to states and counties in 2002. Diebold got into voting in 2002 when the ink was barely dry on this bill (the "Help America Vote Act")...basically, it was blood in the water that attracted sharks. ES&S seriously ramped up production at that point.
3) There are claims that paper can be hacked too, and that's actually correct. What they didn't understand was that in order to do paper fraud you need a lot of people - it's "retail fraud" where each fraudster only affects a small number of votes. You damn well CAN do that but it takes a big corrupt political machine like Chicago in the '60s/'70s, Tamany Hall in NYC prior to 1913, etc. Electronic voting introduces "wholesale fraud" where one guy or a small team hacks a bunch of votes at once.
4) Costs of election processing. See, in the US we don't just have "Democracy", we have gobs of it. We vote for lots of races that would just be appointees elsewhere: "town clerk", judges, a ton of other minor officials. In most states we also vote on issues, bond measures, whether to buy parkland, whether to have gay marriage or not, stuff like that. So we end up with these huge ballots to a point where hand-counting starts to look ugly.
Right now, one fast solution might be to do paper ballots that get scanned, NOT touchscreens, and then once the ballots are fed through the "official count" scanners make by head cases like Diebold, ES&S and the like, we then run them through standard scanners saving graphic images to a hard disk and then to DVDs. Those would get handed out to political parties and activists on election night plus copied up to the web.
That way, anybody who wants to can do a hand-count of any one race or all races, by getting enough people together to count the graphic images. We basically have the existing "black boxes" (because all this Federal testing insanity is now enshrined in law and all these counties have bought junk systems already) and run them through a "white box" consisting of basically Ubuntu, an old P4, a decent hard disk, DVD burner and the biggest scanner SANE supports.
We can get that running in most places by 2010 because this "afterscanner white box" isn't a tabulator. In fact we do NOT want it to have OCR at all or know what's on the ballots, that way it can't be programmed to cheat. So since it's not a tabulator, it doesn't need certification, so it can be set up fast and cheap with off-the-shelf hardware and FOSS software with at most a simple front and and maybe an Ubuntu re-spin customized for this purposes.
Jim March
Member of the Board of Directors, http://blackboxvoting.org/
And California:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4985
Some have even been booted out of the process for poor performance, most recently when NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) started looking at them. Systest was just kicked out, see this story and links from there for details:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/79428.html
Cyber was so bad, you could jam a cheap pocket calculator halfway into a banana, pay 'em enough money and they'd have declared it "an acceptable election technology" or somedamnthing.
We can do whole-disk encryption and If asked for the password, plead the 5th. So far courts are going along with that.
So I run whole-disk encryption and don't try for encryption secrecy...
But I also don't take a lappy outside the US.
http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/files/Stonewall_handout.pdf
This was written for the Stonewall Democrats. It includes boilerplate public records text at the end, some examples of dirty stuff seen in public records, examples of screwed-up facilities (with pictures) and more.
This is an example of an after-action report written along these principles:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/sequoia/Maricopa-County-Elections-Report.pdf
I'm doing another right now for Monterey County California for the election of June 3rd '08. Found all sorts of crazy stuff. That should be posted at http://blackboxvoting.org/ in a day or two.
Jim March
Member of the board of directors
Blackboxvoting.org
I haven't booted Windows as bootloader OS on any computer I own since September 2006. I don't dual-boot either.
:)
BUT, I do use VirtualBox and a WinXP VM some of the time.
I have to be able to take apart voting databases, and that means MS-Access (puke) - it doesn't work in Wine. Scads of other people are stuck with some Windoze app(s) and VirtualBox is a Godsend.
That Windoze Vista sticker on the bottom of my laptop would make it damned difficult for Microsloth to complain about my Pirate Bay Special XP (thank you whoever "eXperience" is).
The XP VM also lets me troubleshoot client problems and...hell, every once in a while I run into a Blockbusters DVD rental that just chokes hard on every possible Linux codec I throw at it. By around the second time that happened and hours of tweaking, I just kinda went "hell with it" and watched my freakin' movie in the VM.
A Windows license also helps if you tweak Wine with various actual Windows DLLs and such, which people often do...
If you really, REALLY can go absolutely Stallman-pure FOSS, cool. Some of us can't.
Besides: how hard is it really to throw the make/model of what you're interested in into google with the word "ubuntu" and see whether it's likely to work?
...are "wind powered". By hot air.