I understand it completely actually. I used to work for ES&S. That $9 million is nothing compared to probably what they were losing by holding onto inventory that wasn't being utilized. And in the end, they won't pay a dime. They'll end up *leasing* (because NO ONE buys voting machines) the machines for some discount, then change order or service call the inventory up the wazoo to make up for the cost of the lawsuit. Always happens that way. Always. And anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dream world.
Also, all the paper stock that ES&S uses is funneled through them. You don't get to use anyone else's stock with their machines. So guess what? Here comes the markup on the paper stock too. And the voting paper stock isn't cheap. And the AutoMarks are not touchscreens...they are basically inkjet printers that write directly onto the paper ballot. If there are arguments of inaccuracy, then the PAPER ballots can be hand-counted and examined with the human eye so no electronics can be of fault.
THIS is why I said the spirit of the law isn't being represented here. It doesn't matter if the machine is malfunctioning, has different code, etc. It doesn't matter. With ANY of the AutoMarks, the proof is ON THE PAPER. There isn't some magical electronic record. The receipt is the ballot. This is why this particular lawsuit is absolute garbage. In the end, it's the Secretary of State exerting muscle in a lawsuit that doesn't matter...it's not going to affect one way or the other the accuracy of vote-counting in any election...because for the most part, the machines have already been taken out of the equation. It's nothing but the state of California trying to be a hard-ass and the leader of the states when it comes to election *reform*...or whatever you want to call it. It's 100% politics...has nothing to do with preserving people's voting rights or anything.
This would actually matter if a touchscreen was the machine in question. AutoMarks aren't touchscreens...nowhere close.
At some point, people should hear the other side of the story. Believe it or not, a LOT of Secretary of States out there don't give a damn about the voter. I know this because in my previous position, I worked with at least 6 of them the last 6.5 years. They just give a damn about the voter's *perception* about how the system is working for them. This lawsuit does nothing for the voter except potentially take a relatively good voting solution out of their hands temporarily.
Actually, Diebold is the one with the "MS Access" solution...not ES&S. And this isn't about bullet-proof machines. It's about a Secretary of State making a splash based on the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.
What no one in the Slashdot crowd has every understood (nor does anyone else for that matter) is the economics of building a "bullet-proof" machine. Very simple question: If people are supposed to make and service these machines, what is an acceptable cost to building them, assuming whoever builds them still makes a profit to stay in business?
In all these debates, that has NEVER come up. And it's funny...because it's the only driver in this whole issue. It's as simple as that...money. If jurisdictions really want a bullet-proof machine, they'd pay for one. But laws aren't written to allow people to vote. They're written to discourage people from voting. Knowing that, no one wants a "bullet-proof" voting solution. Knowing that, an affordable "bullet-proof" voting system is a paradox.
Why have people marked this Insightful? It's pretty obvious this person hasn't use an official Red Hat product in some time. They have NOT dumped their desktop product. In fact, they have a fully-supported Server and Workstation product already...they've had it and been supporting it for over 2 years...they've NEVER gotten rid of it.
They have an "Advanced Platform"...targeted at high-end database systems with more than 8 cpu's. They have Server platform targeted at machines with 2 to 8 cpu's. They have workstation platform targeted at, you guessed it, business workstations.
If I were to make a guess, I'd say their desktop offering will be targeted at businesses who don't want to deploy the workstation version, but still want the Microsoft-office-like experience...web browsing, email, excel spreadsheets, and who likewise want the OS BUNDLED with a new Dell desktop or something. The article states they are targeting smalls businesses in underdeveloped countries or whatever...I don't buy that. Businesses develop products to make money. I don't think Red Hat is just going to sell this to Mexico.
CentOS IS Red Hat. They share the same developers. When the devs at Red Hat are done with a release and put it out, a subset of those devs turn around and release the same updates in CentOS. So, your comment is kinda pointless.
Companies who have really high-end people who don't mind deploying CentOS and doing all the update work themselves will use it. Those who don't have that luxury will deploy Red Hat. I've worked for both types of companies, and am an RHCE myself...been using Red Hat for over a decade. It's either to justify the cost of Red Hat updates when it's a fraction of the cost of Microsoft licensing over a 5 year period, and you don't have to really engage any RHCE's except during initial setup to deploy it. After that, you pay the money, get automatic updates deployed everywhere, and that's it.
Less cables. Duh. Why would you want MORE/BIGGER cabling when you can funnel the stuff through the same media and just be done with it? Aside from the DRM concerns, I actually LIKE HDMI...it's just much easier to deal with. Likewise, finding receivers now with enough HDMI inputs vs component inputs is just a hell of a lot easier, just because of space alone. If it weren't for my Playstation 2 at this point requiring component or composite instead of HDMI, my system would be 100% HDMI, and I'd have a bit less cable management to do.
My system:
Receiver --> TV via HDMI
HD Cable Box --> receiver via HDMI
DVD --> receiver via HDMI
HD-DVD --> receiver via HDMI
Playstation 2 --> receiver via component video, optical audio
Using 100% HDMI, I'd have a system with at least 2 less cables, and those cables would be pretty small in circumference as well. They'd be easier to manage. You simply mute the TV, and just control the audio from the receiver...only way you're going to get 5.1 digital anyway.
Personally, I think HDMI is better than any other option currently available. The DRM is one thing. But outside of that, there's nothing else really to bitch about. And if you do your homework, you can find great HDMI cables for half the price of component video or optical audio.
Yeah. Sony brand. Best Buy store. They're pretty much always $12.99 for 1.8 meter. Monster/Belkin/etc are always 3-4 times more than the same whitebox brand.
I wired my newest system up 2 weeks ago for less than $700...all HDMI everywhere.
At this point, my biggest gripe about HDMI (or any other connection) is the lack thereof on most receivers for the sheer number of them you need to properly put together a good system...not a top of the line system, but a good one.
Then you're not shopping at the right stores. I picked up five 5' HDMI cables and paid less than $70 for all of them combined. They all work fine with 1080p.
If you buy stuff where you're not paying for the name alone, prices will always be reasonable. The same can be said about your choice of TV.
You missed one. The embedded market...which I'm sorry, but Linux/*nix has had that for a few years now, and no one has noticed.
I'm not talkin cell phones and PDAs. I'm talkin things you use that you NEVER think about. What do you think runs all the slot machines in vegas? Keno machines at truck stops? Station pumps at EVERY BP gas station in the USA? Etc etc. That's a huge marketshare that's pretty much hidden from the public eye.
Linux has already gotten what it's gonna get. Don't expect it to gain any double-digit percentage of market-share in the next decade...it just won't...unless Microsoft takes Novell and incorporates it into their own stuff natively. Maybe we see Windows 2010 with a *nix kernel in it and it runs pretty much all apps.
My question is - why did the initial printout show zero votes? Was this part of the hack to fool the printer, or did the machine just print "zero" for everything since it had just been turned on? And if the latter of those two is true, how in the blue *heck* did anyone think that this was a good idea? Hell, Diebold makes ATM machines - you wouldn't want those to always say zero at bootup. Is Diebold just so incompetent that this escaped them?
Because they obviously have some stupid code either on the memory card, in the optical scanner, or both, that counts negative integers.
Very easy thing to correct...require all integers on the memory card to be zero or positive integers. The fact that you can have undervotes in any tabulation software is a recipe for disaster, intentional or unintentional...doesn't matter. In the vote tabulation world, you shouldn't have anything that allows negative integers...ever. It should be zero or greater...that's it.
But my organization is not allowed to just go to any schmoe who says they support generically Enterprise Linux. There's a reason we get the contracts that we do with customers, and one of the main ones is because we use a WIDELY supported OS (Red Hat EL) that is common criteria certified to a certain level. Likewise, Red Hat has had it's certification program for professionals out for several years now, and we have several people on staff who are certified and know backwards and forwards how to install and support Red Hat as well as Oracle products.
Likewise, the licensing scheme is pretty interesting. That is NOT the price per server. That is the price per CPU...how they determine the actual CPU will probably be something stupid like their database products, where a quad-Core CPU they count as 2.5 or some nonsense.
Also, not sure how many people have called Oracle lately, but when I call for support, I don't want to be transferred to some faker in India who I can't understand, who says their name is Joe. Dell was guilty of that early on, and we saw how well that worked. Now, their Gold and Silver support for the USA is all back to 100% English speaking people usually in the CST time zone. This is the mistake Red Hat never made...when you buy premier support from them, you get access to an RHCE or higher support person in the USA who you can actually understand, who generally isn't guessing on what your problem might be.
If Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat globally (markets OUTSIDE the USA), I can see that. But I think any USA residents would be fools to go with Oracle instead of Red Hat.
Like anything Oracle tries to do after the fact and supposedly *better* than others (Oracle Collaboration Suite?), I think this idea to compete directly against Red Hat is a stupid one. When I have Oracle issues, I don't even call Oracle anymore...I call a 3rd party consultant or an engineer at Red Hat...99% of the time I usually get better/quicker results.
Not a fair comparison because Windows Server 2003 is a one-time sunk cost for that OS. You pay for it once, then you get *updates* for the entire time you have the OS and MS hasn't EOL'ed support for it. Red Hat, you gotta re-up on that support contract every year. For AS, it's a bit expensive. Hell, even for ES it's expensive considering what you get. Only when you go down to WS can you compare the two.
At the end of the day, it costs more money for that jurisdiction to do e-voting than it does to do it the good ol fashioned way, and that's hire cheap employment and just have them count it.
E-voting is only a hot issue because for medium to large jurisdictions (by number of registered voters and average turnout per election), it's ridiculously expensive to hire X number of people every election to just count ballots. They can hire a fraction of those people, just pay an election company X number of dollars per device they provide them, and they can record and tabulate election results without a gymnasium full of people counting ballots.
What I just described was the original intent of e-voting. But what every person with no knowledge of elections other than what NBC nightly news tells them doesn't ever understand is that some problems cannot be solved with technology. The reason the e-voting issue in the USA is so complicated, is because e-voting is trying to solve the issue of money, when what is driving that is the extremely convoluted and out-of-date election laws on the books. E-voting would be pretty damn simple if all you had to do was say:
1. Present a voter with a ballot in the nation's native language
2. Present ONE ballot style to EVERY user in X jurisdiction
3. Allow ballot to be tied directly to the registered voter
4. Only allow voter to vote in the jurisdiction of their residence
But, those four points I just outlined are illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA. If you do #1, you are disenfranchising those who don't necessarily speak/read the language, who are still allowed to vote by law.
If you do #2, one of the political parties will sue you, because for quite a lot of jurisdictions out there, you have to randomize positions on a ballot. Case in point, if George Bush appears as option 1 on a ballot in Dallas, Texas for president, likely he will NOT appear as option 1 on a ballot in Houston, Texas. Seriously. Does it matter? Probably not. But the political parties think that if you are listed as option #1 on a ballot more times than any other candidate, then you have an unfair advantage.
If you do point #3, it can be argued that each person's individual vote is no longer private...now the voter registration data can be directly linked to a person's party association, and more importantly their ballot that they cast...so someone can now go back and look at how this person or persons voted. If the wrong people get a hold of that info, think of union vote corruption...influencing someone to vote a certain way so that their family stays safe...things along that line. So, point 3 is also illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA.
Take point 4. Now, if someone is serving in Iraq, is on vacation, etc etc...you're now disenfrancising them because there's no way they can vote in Bismarck, North Dakota if they are fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The reason voting is not simple, and anyone who says it is is an idiot, is because it starts with any one of the above 4 things I just outlined. Electronics makes it much easier to comply with those things, and it's cheaper...assuming someone has done their homework on the code logic, it's been audited, etc etc. But there's still a cost to that. Now you must put your trust in a machine and the company who made that machine...there's nothing wrong with doing that. But, that machine MUST be audited.
The perfect model for the e-voting case really is the gaming industry (casinos). Those machines are so locked down and audited. But the denominator there is money. With e-voting, there is no one common denominator. Money IS a consideration, but it's not the only consideration. At the end of the day it should be a risk analysis for each type of jurisdiction. I would argue that small jurisdictions would never need e-voting if only 2000 or less people show up in said jurisdiction to vote. It's a pretty simple deal to print that many ballots and hire a few people for a couple
I read the same or similar article...except they named names. AT&T/SBC was given billions of dollars in tax breaks by the US gov't to provide broadband speed capabilities to all their customers. They didn't do it, and kept all the money.
If you don't have something that people can't get at home, it's not worth the trouble.
We had one place that was successful in my area quite a few years back because they could provide a large amount of internet bandwidth for a relatively low cost compared to consumer prices. However, when DSL and eventually cable modem caught on, that market was done.
If this is strictly a gaming cafe, in the age of oodles of bandwidth everywhere, if you cannot support numerous tournaments with worthwhile prizes (that people will potentially play all day or two straight days to get), it won't work.
As other posters suggested, if you combine food/coffee with the gaming, you may be onto something. But a gaming-only cafe, I think that idea was done 6-8 years ago and then it was done. When corporate-level bandwidth started to be available in homes at commodity prices, that was the end of that. You can now play in numerous online tourneys and still get very good prizes and whatnot...and from my perspective that's what a good portion of the people will go to a cafe and play for. When I played, I played for cash or prizes worth over $300 USD. That was the only way I could justify paying to get into a place and then wasting a day or two with the possibility I might get eliminated before I got the chance to earn a top 3 spot (which were the only payouts in a cafe tourney).
Aside from what I just said, if you live in a major metro area, it might work. I would imagine Chicago would be a decent place to try this because of all the bandwidth there and managed hosting of all kinds. I know Hurricane Electric will rent out completely furnished computer labs and such expressly designed for gaming. You pay a deposit to the provider, charge the people to come in and play, etc etc. If you plan it right, you can make money.
I think you'll find that pretty much all the voting companies' machines can be manipulated in some way...especially if you can crack the case open like a clam and mess with the innards. I know...I work for one.
I'm not sure what the public expects in terms of *security* of the device. I'm not saying Diebold or anyone else doesn't use some crappy code/practices sometimes/often. But some of these *research* and *findings* never takes into account how ridiculous the procedures are that a jurisdiction might go through to actually allow the public to vote.
ANY voting machine can be manipulated...whether electronically or manually. It's all dependant on the process, and how vigilant the jurisdiction in question is about securing the process of voting that's built around that very device.
I could sit around and tell stories for days of voting machines getting *manipulated* without ever accessing one line of code or ever hitting a reset button or anything of the sort. You know, maybe a pollworker from a pre-dominantly Democrat jurisdiction (who happens to be Republican themselves) might *forget* a voting machine or two in their trunk after the polls close. Guess what? That happened in Florida in 2002...you know, after the whole 2000 fiasco and subsequent legislation that was supposed to fix the issues.
Well, notice I didn't say it was outright illegal...nor did I allude to it being illegal across the board. I said in certain jurisdictions you might get into trouble by doing it...whether it's company policy or whether you just do it as a network admin. I don't believe my company is in any of those jurisdictions...but I have come across more than one company in the past where privacy issues have come up like that. Likewise, in a previous gov't job where they allowed employees to do certain internet functions under the guise of security, there might be a couple of lawsuits issued if people came to realize that indeed their SSL session was not hidden from certain eyes. Again, that's not a technology issue. That's an issue of policy and how enforceable the policy is.
Who said anything about attacking? I simply stated that if you used a transparent proxy to inspect ALL packets as they go in/out your network, you have a man-in-the-middle issue...I.E., a privacy issue. If user A thinks they are going to their personal banking website, when in fact you are intercepting their packets, looking at them, deciding if they are legit, then allowing/denying them, then that's a man-in-the-middle. It's not an attack, it's simple a man-in-the-middle. MITM =! attack. It just means that something is actively inspecting your stuff (SSL or not) and deciding whether it gets forwarded or not. Are YOU paying attention?
Ever heard of a transparent proxy? You don't need the settings in a browser. You can simply change the default gateway in your network, or better yet, just tell your upstream router to route any/all packets trying to leave your network to go to the internet to the upstream proxy server. All of this would be completely *transparent* to the end-user...thus the term, transparent proxy.
There are howto's all over the internet to turn a Squid machine into a transparent proxy.
Already been down that road. The only way to defeat it using port 443 as well is to REQUIRE that all SSL'ed traffic pass through a device that can break down the SSL'ed traffic and look at it. You're basically setting up a man-in-the-middle scenario. If that's the case, you have two issues:
1. You need to have a way to decrypt the SSL'ed traffic on the line. That basically requires you to run certificates that YOU control on the proxy host as well as on the end-user's computer.
2. You now have a privacy issue that would become a real pain in the ass at least in the USA in many jurisdictions.
Even if you established a policy that allowed let's say going to a banking site to do personal banking during approved hours, you would still have someone legally challenging a company's ability to completely take apart and read someone's supposedly private SSL session. In layman's terms, it means even if I have that padlock in the bottom right-hand corner of my browser, someone upstream who is NOT my bank can see my username and password. This is problematic from a legal standpoint...it has nothing to do with technology.
The security risk isn't the only issue. Maybe a netadmin or two don't want a couple users using up a noticeable piece of bandwidth with an application they don't need to be using to do their jobs. Policy can do nothing but dictate that the person(s) in question should be disciplined or fired. It cannot get your bandwidth back. Being a network and security admin for the company I'm with, there are more reasons that security that I would want it off...I already explained one of those reasons.
It's probably due to the fact that pretty much all of Texas is wired for oodles of bandwidth, there is very little inclement weather there, tech workers are a dime a dozen, and there are less taxes in Texas, which would attract all those tech workers who are a dime a dozen.
Likewise, several large players in the telecom and high-end server market have major presence there.
It's not hard at all to figure out why they are scoping Texas. It's cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand it completely actually. I used to work for ES&S. That $9 million is nothing compared to probably what they were losing by holding onto inventory that wasn't being utilized. And in the end, they won't pay a dime. They'll end up *leasing* (because NO ONE buys voting machines) the machines for some discount, then change order or service call the inventory up the wazoo to make up for the cost of the lawsuit. Always happens that way. Always. And anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dream world.
Also, all the paper stock that ES&S uses is funneled through them. You don't get to use anyone else's stock with their machines. So guess what? Here comes the markup on the paper stock too. And the voting paper stock isn't cheap. And the AutoMarks are not touchscreens...they are basically inkjet printers that write directly onto the paper ballot. If there are arguments of inaccuracy, then the PAPER ballots can be hand-counted and examined with the human eye so no electronics can be of fault.
THIS is why I said the spirit of the law isn't being represented here. It doesn't matter if the machine is malfunctioning, has different code, etc. It doesn't matter. With ANY of the AutoMarks, the proof is ON THE PAPER. There isn't some magical electronic record. The receipt is the ballot. This is why this particular lawsuit is absolute garbage. In the end, it's the Secretary of State exerting muscle in a lawsuit that doesn't matter...it's not going to affect one way or the other the accuracy of vote-counting in any election...because for the most part, the machines have already been taken out of the equation. It's nothing but the state of California trying to be a hard-ass and the leader of the states when it comes to election *reform*...or whatever you want to call it. It's 100% politics...has nothing to do with preserving people's voting rights or anything.
This would actually matter if a touchscreen was the machine in question. AutoMarks aren't touchscreens...nowhere close.
At some point, people should hear the other side of the story. Believe it or not, a LOT of Secretary of States out there don't give a damn about the voter. I know this because in my previous position, I worked with at least 6 of them the last 6.5 years. They just give a damn about the voter's *perception* about how the system is working for them. This lawsuit does nothing for the voter except potentially take a relatively good voting solution out of their hands temporarily.
Actually, Diebold is the one with the "MS Access" solution...not ES&S. And this isn't about bullet-proof machines. It's about a Secretary of State making a splash based on the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. What no one in the Slashdot crowd has every understood (nor does anyone else for that matter) is the economics of building a "bullet-proof" machine. Very simple question: If people are supposed to make and service these machines, what is an acceptable cost to building them, assuming whoever builds them still makes a profit to stay in business? In all these debates, that has NEVER come up. And it's funny...because it's the only driver in this whole issue. It's as simple as that...money. If jurisdictions really want a bullet-proof machine, they'd pay for one. But laws aren't written to allow people to vote. They're written to discourage people from voting. Knowing that, no one wants a "bullet-proof" voting solution. Knowing that, an affordable "bullet-proof" voting system is a paradox.
Why have people marked this Insightful? It's pretty obvious this person hasn't use an official Red Hat product in some time. They have NOT dumped their desktop product. In fact, they have a fully-supported Server and Workstation product already...they've had it and been supporting it for over 2 years...they've NEVER gotten rid of it.
They have an "Advanced Platform"...targeted at high-end database systems with more than 8 cpu's. They have Server platform targeted at machines with 2 to 8 cpu's. They have workstation platform targeted at, you guessed it, business workstations.
If I were to make a guess, I'd say their desktop offering will be targeted at businesses who don't want to deploy the workstation version, but still want the Microsoft-office-like experience...web browsing, email, excel spreadsheets, and who likewise want the OS BUNDLED with a new Dell desktop or something. The article states they are targeting smalls businesses in underdeveloped countries or whatever...I don't buy that. Businesses develop products to make money. I don't think Red Hat is just going to sell this to Mexico.
CentOS IS Red Hat. They share the same developers. When the devs at Red Hat are done with a release and put it out, a subset of those devs turn around and release the same updates in CentOS. So, your comment is kinda pointless. Companies who have really high-end people who don't mind deploying CentOS and doing all the update work themselves will use it. Those who don't have that luxury will deploy Red Hat. I've worked for both types of companies, and am an RHCE myself...been using Red Hat for over a decade. It's either to justify the cost of Red Hat updates when it's a fraction of the cost of Microsoft licensing over a 5 year period, and you don't have to really engage any RHCE's except during initial setup to deploy it. After that, you pay the money, get automatic updates deployed everywhere, and that's it.
Less cables. Duh. Why would you want MORE/BIGGER cabling when you can funnel the stuff through the same media and just be done with it? Aside from the DRM concerns, I actually LIKE HDMI...it's just much easier to deal with. Likewise, finding receivers now with enough HDMI inputs vs component inputs is just a hell of a lot easier, just because of space alone. If it weren't for my Playstation 2 at this point requiring component or composite instead of HDMI, my system would be 100% HDMI, and I'd have a bit less cable management to do.
My system:
Receiver --> TV via HDMI
HD Cable Box --> receiver via HDMI
DVD --> receiver via HDMI
HD-DVD --> receiver via HDMI
Playstation 2 --> receiver via component video, optical audio
Using 100% HDMI, I'd have a system with at least 2 less cables, and those cables would be pretty small in circumference as well. They'd be easier to manage. You simply mute the TV, and just control the audio from the receiver...only way you're going to get 5.1 digital anyway.
Personally, I think HDMI is better than any other option currently available. The DRM is one thing. But outside of that, there's nothing else really to bitch about. And if you do your homework, you can find great HDMI cables for half the price of component video or optical audio.
Yeah. Sony brand. Best Buy store. They're pretty much always $12.99 for 1.8 meter. Monster/Belkin/etc are always 3-4 times more than the same whitebox brand. I wired my newest system up 2 weeks ago for less than $700...all HDMI everywhere. At this point, my biggest gripe about HDMI (or any other connection) is the lack thereof on most receivers for the sheer number of them you need to properly put together a good system...not a top of the line system, but a good one.
Then you're not shopping at the right stores. I picked up five 5' HDMI cables and paid less than $70 for all of them combined. They all work fine with 1080p.
If you buy stuff where you're not paying for the name alone, prices will always be reasonable. The same can be said about your choice of TV.
E-voting pilots have been going on in the UK every year since 2002.
Damn...wrong thread.
This is horrible...plain and simple.
You missed one. The embedded market...which I'm sorry, but Linux/*nix has had that for a few years now, and no one has noticed.
I'm not talkin cell phones and PDAs. I'm talkin things you use that you NEVER think about. What do you think runs all the slot machines in vegas? Keno machines at truck stops? Station pumps at EVERY BP gas station in the USA? Etc etc. That's a huge marketshare that's pretty much hidden from the public eye.
Linux has already gotten what it's gonna get. Don't expect it to gain any double-digit percentage of market-share in the next decade...it just won't...unless Microsoft takes Novell and incorporates it into their own stuff natively. Maybe we see Windows 2010 with a *nix kernel in it and it runs pretty much all apps.
My question is - why did the initial printout show zero votes? Was this part of the hack to fool the printer, or did the machine just print "zero" for everything since it had just been turned on? And if the latter of those two is true, how in the blue *heck* did anyone think that this was a good idea? Hell, Diebold makes ATM machines - you wouldn't want those to always say zero at bootup. Is Diebold just so incompetent that this escaped them?
Because they obviously have some stupid code either on the memory card, in the optical scanner, or both, that counts negative integers.
Very easy thing to correct...require all integers on the memory card to be zero or positive integers. The fact that you can have undervotes in any tabulation software is a recipe for disaster, intentional or unintentional...doesn't matter. In the vote tabulation world, you shouldn't have anything that allows negative integers...ever. It should be zero or greater...that's it.
You're confusing Sex Panther with an OS? LOL.
But my organization is not allowed to just go to any schmoe who says they support generically Enterprise Linux. There's a reason we get the contracts that we do with customers, and one of the main ones is because we use a WIDELY supported OS (Red Hat EL) that is common criteria certified to a certain level. Likewise, Red Hat has had it's certification program for professionals out for several years now, and we have several people on staff who are certified and know backwards and forwards how to install and support Red Hat as well as Oracle products.
Likewise, the licensing scheme is pretty interesting. That is NOT the price per server. That is the price per CPU...how they determine the actual CPU will probably be something stupid like their database products, where a quad-Core CPU they count as 2.5 or some nonsense.
Also, not sure how many people have called Oracle lately, but when I call for support, I don't want to be transferred to some faker in India who I can't understand, who says their name is Joe. Dell was guilty of that early on, and we saw how well that worked. Now, their Gold and Silver support for the USA is all back to 100% English speaking people usually in the CST time zone. This is the mistake Red Hat never made...when you buy premier support from them, you get access to an RHCE or higher support person in the USA who you can actually understand, who generally isn't guessing on what your problem might be.
If Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat globally (markets OUTSIDE the USA), I can see that. But I think any USA residents would be fools to go with Oracle instead of Red Hat.
Like anything Oracle tries to do after the fact and supposedly *better* than others (Oracle Collaboration Suite?), I think this idea to compete directly against Red Hat is a stupid one. When I have Oracle issues, I don't even call Oracle anymore...I call a 3rd party consultant or an engineer at Red Hat...99% of the time I usually get better/quicker results.
Not a fair comparison because Windows Server 2003 is a one-time sunk cost for that OS. You pay for it once, then you get *updates* for the entire time you have the OS and MS hasn't EOL'ed support for it. Red Hat, you gotta re-up on that support contract every year. For AS, it's a bit expensive. Hell, even for ES it's expensive considering what you get. Only when you go down to WS can you compare the two.
At the end of the day, it costs more money for that jurisdiction to do e-voting than it does to do it the good ol fashioned way, and that's hire cheap employment and just have them count it.
E-voting is only a hot issue because for medium to large jurisdictions (by number of registered voters and average turnout per election), it's ridiculously expensive to hire X number of people every election to just count ballots. They can hire a fraction of those people, just pay an election company X number of dollars per device they provide them, and they can record and tabulate election results without a gymnasium full of people counting ballots.
What I just described was the original intent of e-voting. But what every person with no knowledge of elections other than what NBC nightly news tells them doesn't ever understand is that some problems cannot be solved with technology. The reason the e-voting issue in the USA is so complicated, is because e-voting is trying to solve the issue of money, when what is driving that is the extremely convoluted and out-of-date election laws on the books. E-voting would be pretty damn simple if all you had to do was say:
1. Present a voter with a ballot in the nation's native language
2. Present ONE ballot style to EVERY user in X jurisdiction
3. Allow ballot to be tied directly to the registered voter
4. Only allow voter to vote in the jurisdiction of their residence
But, those four points I just outlined are illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA. If you do #1, you are disenfranchising those who don't necessarily speak/read the language, who are still allowed to vote by law.
If you do #2, one of the political parties will sue you, because for quite a lot of jurisdictions out there, you have to randomize positions on a ballot. Case in point, if George Bush appears as option 1 on a ballot in Dallas, Texas for president, likely he will NOT appear as option 1 on a ballot in Houston, Texas. Seriously. Does it matter? Probably not. But the political parties think that if you are listed as option #1 on a ballot more times than any other candidate, then you have an unfair advantage.
If you do point #3, it can be argued that each person's individual vote is no longer private...now the voter registration data can be directly linked to a person's party association, and more importantly their ballot that they cast...so someone can now go back and look at how this person or persons voted. If the wrong people get a hold of that info, think of union vote corruption...influencing someone to vote a certain way so that their family stays safe...things along that line. So, point 3 is also illegal EVERYWHERE in the USA.
Take point 4. Now, if someone is serving in Iraq, is on vacation, etc etc...you're now disenfrancising them because there's no way they can vote in Bismarck, North Dakota if they are fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The reason voting is not simple, and anyone who says it is is an idiot, is because it starts with any one of the above 4 things I just outlined. Electronics makes it much easier to comply with those things, and it's cheaper...assuming someone has done their homework on the code logic, it's been audited, etc etc. But there's still a cost to that. Now you must put your trust in a machine and the company who made that machine...there's nothing wrong with doing that. But, that machine MUST be audited.
The perfect model for the e-voting case really is the gaming industry (casinos). Those machines are so locked down and audited. But the denominator there is money. With e-voting, there is no one common denominator. Money IS a consideration, but it's not the only consideration. At the end of the day it should be a risk analysis for each type of jurisdiction. I would argue that small jurisdictions would never need e-voting if only 2000 or less people show up in said jurisdiction to vote. It's a pretty simple deal to print that many ballots and hire a few people for a couple
I read the same or similar article...except they named names. AT&T/SBC was given billions of dollars in tax breaks by the US gov't to provide broadband speed capabilities to all their customers. They didn't do it, and kept all the money.
If you don't have something that people can't get at home, it's not worth the trouble.
We had one place that was successful in my area quite a few years back because they could provide a large amount of internet bandwidth for a relatively low cost compared to consumer prices. However, when DSL and eventually cable modem caught on, that market was done.
If this is strictly a gaming cafe, in the age of oodles of bandwidth everywhere, if you cannot support numerous tournaments with worthwhile prizes (that people will potentially play all day or two straight days to get), it won't work.
As other posters suggested, if you combine food/coffee with the gaming, you may be onto something. But a gaming-only cafe, I think that idea was done 6-8 years ago and then it was done. When corporate-level bandwidth started to be available in homes at commodity prices, that was the end of that. You can now play in numerous online tourneys and still get very good prizes and whatnot...and from my perspective that's what a good portion of the people will go to a cafe and play for. When I played, I played for cash or prizes worth over $300 USD. That was the only way I could justify paying to get into a place and then wasting a day or two with the possibility I might get eliminated before I got the chance to earn a top 3 spot (which were the only payouts in a cafe tourney).
Aside from what I just said, if you live in a major metro area, it might work. I would imagine Chicago would be a decent place to try this because of all the bandwidth there and managed hosting of all kinds. I know Hurricane Electric will rent out completely furnished computer labs and such expressly designed for gaming. You pay a deposit to the provider, charge the people to come in and play, etc etc. If you plan it right, you can make money.
Did they get the machine legally?
I think you'll find that pretty much all the voting companies' machines can be manipulated in some way...especially if you can crack the case open like a clam and mess with the innards. I know...I work for one.
I'm not sure what the public expects in terms of *security* of the device. I'm not saying Diebold or anyone else doesn't use some crappy code/practices sometimes/often. But some of these *research* and *findings* never takes into account how ridiculous the procedures are that a jurisdiction might go through to actually allow the public to vote.
ANY voting machine can be manipulated...whether electronically or manually. It's all dependant on the process, and how vigilant the jurisdiction in question is about securing the process of voting that's built around that very device.
I could sit around and tell stories for days of voting machines getting *manipulated* without ever accessing one line of code or ever hitting a reset button or anything of the sort. You know, maybe a pollworker from a pre-dominantly Democrat jurisdiction (who happens to be Republican themselves) might *forget* a voting machine or two in their trunk after the polls close. Guess what? That happened in Florida in 2002...you know, after the whole 2000 fiasco and subsequent legislation that was supposed to fix the issues.
Well, notice I didn't say it was outright illegal...nor did I allude to it being illegal across the board. I said in certain jurisdictions you might get into trouble by doing it...whether it's company policy or whether you just do it as a network admin. I don't believe my company is in any of those jurisdictions...but I have come across more than one company in the past where privacy issues have come up like that. Likewise, in a previous gov't job where they allowed employees to do certain internet functions under the guise of security, there might be a couple of lawsuits issued if people came to realize that indeed their SSL session was not hidden from certain eyes. Again, that's not a technology issue. That's an issue of policy and how enforceable the policy is.
Who said anything about attacking? I simply stated that if you used a transparent proxy to inspect ALL packets as they go in/out your network, you have a man-in-the-middle issue...I.E., a privacy issue. If user A thinks they are going to their personal banking website, when in fact you are intercepting their packets, looking at them, deciding if they are legit, then allowing/denying them, then that's a man-in-the-middle. It's not an attack, it's simple a man-in-the-middle. MITM =! attack. It just means that something is actively inspecting your stuff (SSL or not) and deciding whether it gets forwarded or not. Are YOU paying attention?
Ever heard of a transparent proxy? You don't need the settings in a browser. You can simply change the default gateway in your network, or better yet, just tell your upstream router to route any/all packets trying to leave your network to go to the internet to the upstream proxy server. All of this would be completely *transparent* to the end-user...thus the term, transparent proxy. There are howto's all over the internet to turn a Squid machine into a transparent proxy.
Already been down that road. The only way to defeat it using port 443 as well is to REQUIRE that all SSL'ed traffic pass through a device that can break down the SSL'ed traffic and look at it. You're basically setting up a man-in-the-middle scenario. If that's the case, you have two issues: 1. You need to have a way to decrypt the SSL'ed traffic on the line. That basically requires you to run certificates that YOU control on the proxy host as well as on the end-user's computer. 2. You now have a privacy issue that would become a real pain in the ass at least in the USA in many jurisdictions. Even if you established a policy that allowed let's say going to a banking site to do personal banking during approved hours, you would still have someone legally challenging a company's ability to completely take apart and read someone's supposedly private SSL session. In layman's terms, it means even if I have that padlock in the bottom right-hand corner of my browser, someone upstream who is NOT my bank can see my username and password. This is problematic from a legal standpoint...it has nothing to do with technology.
The security risk isn't the only issue. Maybe a netadmin or two don't want a couple users using up a noticeable piece of bandwidth with an application they don't need to be using to do their jobs. Policy can do nothing but dictate that the person(s) in question should be disciplined or fired. It cannot get your bandwidth back. Being a network and security admin for the company I'm with, there are more reasons that security that I would want it off...I already explained one of those reasons.
It's probably due to the fact that pretty much all of Texas is wired for oodles of bandwidth, there is very little inclement weather there, tech workers are a dime a dozen, and there are less taxes in Texas, which would attract all those tech workers who are a dime a dozen. Likewise, several large players in the telecom and high-end server market have major presence there. It's not hard at all to figure out why they are scoping Texas. It's cheaper.