If you're American, it's nearly time to do your civic duty and pick the lesser of two evils for the greater good... and then to wonder if that vote actually got counted. With Diebold admitting its own machines are
utterly insecure, competitor Sequoia is now under the microscope and, after a little
quality time with the company's machines, Princeton researchers have filed a 158 page report on the ease of replacing their ROMs and winning yourself an election. Okay, we know what you're thinking: "Hacking hardware isn't exactly easy when the computer is in a locked box." Amazingly, it is. A researcher was able to bypass the physical security mechanisms in 13 seconds, despite never having picked a lock before. Now you're thinking: "But you'd need to do that on hundreds of them!" Not so; once infected that malicious code can spread itself to others, and, with no paper trail and an easily bypassed internal audit system, you're well on your way to whatever dark corner of Washington, D.C. you care to occupy!
[Via
Ars Technica]
posted October 24th 2008 10:19AM
That's cuz there are only 12 of you in the whole country. lol.
Yes, but we have voters too dumb to punch holes in paper, so what are you gonna do?
It's cheap, it works, and if it wasn't for the fuck up in Florida in 2000, we would still be using paper ballots. Thanks Al Gore! For nothing.
in soviet russia voter punch you
You don't need to be computer-savvy to hack a computer.
You just need to have enough money to hire someone who is.
Of course you're forgetting the guards and voting officials that will be standing around while you try to pry open the case to insert this malicious code.
Guards and Voting Officials? The only staff present at most polling locations could be mistaken for John McCain's grandparents. Provide them with a piece of hard candy, and you've bought yourself 15 minutes to hack the machine.
Might I suggest a Werther's Original.
@mier: Who said it's going to be the voters who manipulate the machines? It could very well be the staff who inserts the appropriate voting program right before the elections start.
The Sequoia machine I voted on had a paper trail though it was internal to the machine.
There's a big difference between having someone put a stop to a recount where it was known that confirmed registered voters that voted might not be getting their ballots counted and something like Acorn where technically there hasn't even been voter fraud because all the people who were falsely registered would have to show up to try and vote to actually break the law.
ever heard of an absentee ballot there pal?
Son of a b*itch! That was to RocketBoy. GD Engadget comment system.
. . . I'm thinking user error . . .
I never would have thought this was gonna turn into a political discussion.
It's pretty simple: voting machines that have no real security == FAIL
wait.. didnt that happen in Heroes..
LOL, that's a great idea actually... it would bring out more voters from the south and midwest. Just tell them it's shooting practice.
As a system developer I watch in horror everytime the issue of electronic voting comes up.
Software has bugs. Software crash. That's just how it is. Therefore such an important issue as an election should never be allowed to be handled by computers.
Software gets tested. Software gets its bugs fixed.
Don't kill trees just because you've never used a decent software stack.
You'll note I made an assumption based on what I perceived as cynicism on your part towards software in general.
Let me know if that assumption was false.
Uh, the spaceshuttle's system runs OK. Why? Because they have a real team of developers (not copy and paste hackers) writing code and an equally capable team of testers trying to break the code until they have solid code. It's not hard, just tedious and requires hiring developers with a passion for robust code.
Except the space shuttle computers are deliberately simply, come in threes to check eachother, and still fail often.
Just like what Micah did in Heroes to get Nathan to win election, nice...
What did the guy take a fire extinguisher to the lock, cause I'm pretty sure the polling staff will notice that.
Not quite.... sometimes I'm being serious. Most of the time sarcastic. Its just that i need to optimize my work and in other cases others sarcasm meters need to be augmented. I see everything for what it is though that is for sure. So yes the machines are being fucked with and their are real things on the line that matter to you and I but No I don't think Mickey Mouse will lose this election. We have net neutrality friendly hackers right on it!
Now sing along with me:
"Why must the children play in the street?
Broken hearts, faded the dreams
Peace on earth to everyone that you meet
Don't you worry, It could be so sweet"
For the fool who thought there was any human security, most of the time you go into a little cubicle, and since this will be after halloween, just give the old fart volunteers running the place a piece or two of the old person crap candies the senile lady next door game you. Also, getting into one of these things is easier than screwing my schools computer crap in fourth grade. Sadly, once your in you cant quite get the nesesary prossesing power to run UT3, (nowhere near supcom he he) but if you bothered to you could probably play one of the flash shooters off miniclip. (they actually have a 'canidate fite' game and a game where you are the canidate fighting off terrorists.)
These things look like the upgrade stations in Dead Space
I've never posted anything serious b4. And here goes my first serious post.
In my humble opinion, the US will be in an economic and financial disaster if McCain were to run the country.
Heck, I am not even American and not care so much who will win (although I did stayed for a few years in the states during College).
When you see empty trucks driving around Iraq just so that it could be tracked by GPS so the contracting company can bill the goverment to pay them ridiculous prices for nothing, then you know something is wrong.
If you quite follow the financial bailout plan, you would be shocked about how the Bush administration (via Paulson) originally wanted to give premium money for something that people would call toxic and worthless in exchange for nothing. The gov should have asked for equity stakes from the companies in exchange of buying all that worthless assests that are going to be foreclosed anyways. Only after bewilderment and ridicule from EU states did the original bailous plan was scrapped. Now Paulson is in a state of panic because the gov should at least be seen to be doing something (regardless of its effectiveness).
Throwing money at hedgefunds and investment banks is not solving the root cause. The root cause is the american people are suffering. The American people cannot pay their mortgage. It's that simple. The gov should look into that and not look at the well being of those hedgefunds' and investment banks' owners.
America is a great country with wonderful friendly people. I hope one hideous evil will not be preceeded by another evil.
The greater good...
It would be nice if this time instead of hacking the machines to help the Bush clown, they were hacke to help Kinko the clown become the president. That would be a hack that would make me laugh. Watch:
http://current.com/items/89404694_kinko_for_president
If McCain wins its because the evil republicans owners of mercenary companies don't want to be held accountable. Palin would become vicepresident then president so Cheney can continue running the country at his pleasure.
There were reported issues with polling places back in March. Now this is even more of a threat to our Democracy.
Hey! Now I actually have a chance of winning!
If only my name was on the ballot...
You're all a bunch of idiots. We've had electronic voting in Belgium for over 15 years. Sure, you could probably get to a few computers and have override whatever the user's doing, but you can't hack 'm all. So there's no value in it.
Everyone gets a plastic card, just like you used to get a piece of paper, and the computer is totally unconnected and uses the simplest piece of software running on good ol' DOS and its only job is to mark your vote on the magnetic stripe. Then, you push your fresh vote in a box which has a card reader on top and that counts the vote as you put it in the box. There's a card for everyone, and only one card for each vote. All the cards are counted and all the boxes are sealed so if there's anyone tampering with the counts they can still open the box again and do a recount.
But of course, this is all because we invented electronic voting long before everyone had the Internet and every gizmo needed to be connected to that.
That's a bit dumb though, because punching a hole is the exact same thing as what you describe, it also enables a computer to read the vote and leaves a copy, that's not computerised voting at all and them getting tons and tons of magnetic cards is just a more expensive way of doing it, plus a magnetic vote can easily be overwritten on the card too, or you can rig the verification machine. Whereas refilling a punched hole is harder obviously and can be visually confirmed.
Only good thing about your alternative is that haliburton can supply the blanks maybe, at a small premium to the taxpayer...
Electronic voting is inherently insecure. We need to go back to hand counting paper forms, not punch cards. It's better to wait a few days for results than to allow even 1 candidate to steal an election.
Here in California we still use pen and paper too. This shit got voted out of our state!
for those actually willing to sit through the video, everything before 43 minutes is just about how the process is supposed to work. He doesn't get around to the cracking until 46 minutes in.
"Remember, folks, it's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes."
---Anonymous
Frankly I'm at some strange level amazed that it's needed to go through lengths to prevent cheating in the US, I thought that americans had some decency at that level at least, but (recent-ish) history shows otherwise of course.
How about the american patriotism? Seems to me that rigging votes is somewhat counter-patriotic.Or the love for the foundation of american democracy and all that jazz?
As a poll worker in this coming election, and more particicularly a machine judge, allow me to educate. I have no idea where this "urban" myth came from, but it's bull shit! None of the machines we'll be using here in Colorado are intercontected except for the electrical connection. The hard drives are completely individual to each machine. Even if an individual attempted to alter the machine in some way to affect the outcome, it would only be on one machine. There would be no way in hell they could damage the results on multiple machines. Second, if you think anyone would allow someone to get to the workings of the machine in order to actually attempt to sabatoge the election, your battyer than a bed bug. It's amazing how ignorance can create fear out of thin air. Princeton had no record of any of this so called experiment. It exists totally in the mind of some ridiculously moronic person.
So how are the results of all the machines tallied then? By a machine perhaps?