Diebold just can't seem to keep its nose clean these days. The nation's largest manufacturer of ATMs admitted not too long ago what everybody already knew: that their
e-voting machines were totally bunk. Apparently in the course of that investigation it emerged that the company also thought it would be a laugh to load the open source Ghostscript Postscript interpreter software into those faulty machines without releasing its changes or paying the proprietary usage license fee -- leading Aritex, its developer, to file a lawsuit. It doesn't really instill confidence any further to hear that our nation's
terrible electronic voting machines are running on stolen software, guys -- and to be honest, we're kinda starting to wish you'd get out of the ATM business, too.
posted Nov 8th 2008 12:02AM
I'm voting Dr. Evil.
Are you stupid?
Dr. Evil goes to a racist church that hates British people, he's secretly a capitalist and there is proof on the internet that he's secretly a muslim. Don't let his white skin and bald head fool you.
flashpoint really needs to get laid or something
Phanbouy
i remember when someone called you out on the fact you post on Engadget like 50 times every single day and you barely get a 8 hour sleep.
Are you still keeping up your posting behavior? let me check.
flashy, you're a creepy gaseous windbag who top posts the first post with self-serious tripe on every single article, hypocrite. learn to take a joke xD
For once, I agree with Phanbouy. C'mon, 8 hours of sleep is overrated anyways. I go for 5.
in before phanbouy fan
In fact, there's evidence that 6 hours sleep is better for your health than 8.
I don't quite understand it, but I'm throwing it out there anyway. Surely someone reading this post does.
speak for yourselves! if i don't get 8 hrs sleep i turn into a flashpoint
and in any case, why does melting point care how much sleep i get?
You've posted 3 times as many times as I have and half of your bullshit has been low ranked.
give it up... YOU FAIL like SARAH FAILIN.
give what up, crybaby? yeah, i've gotten into some arguments recently that got me lots of low ranks, mostly by being foolish enough to take troll bait, but remember your MONTHS long meltdown where 10 different people were arguing with you and you kept screaming "I DONT CARE KEEP LOW RANKING ME! WAAAHH"? i'm pretty sure you hold the record for most low ranked comments -- more than clak, zak, and ieye even.
you're counting my posts but i guarantee you've typed 3 times as many words as i have.
*Rolleyes*
49% of phanbouys comments are pretty good...the problem is the majority of them make him sound like a real douche.
With a little effort you could swing my personal poll back in your favor though.
@ phanbouy + Flashpoint
Get a room.
Flashpoint vs. phanbouy
Ready... FIGHT!
This has got to be the saddest example of trollism I have ever seen.
I'm still of the opinion that clak and iEye are worse. Phanbouy and Flashpoint are just the neighbourhood clowns :)
This argument has got me rigid.
@Samboini
rigid huh....
rig·id (rjd)
adj.
1. Not flexible or pliant; stiff.
are you tryin to say you're gettin off on their argument?
lolz. just statin' the facts XD
Who else is going to hack the vote? APPLE?
This is an abomination!
Not that the machines are running illegal licenses, but that the mainstream media TOTALLY ignored the candidacy of Dr.Evil / Mini Me
Burt,
You got it backwards. Technically, it was the Mini-Me/Dr. Evil ticket, and they're done with their two terms, or will be in a few weeks, so their candidacy is pretty unconstitutional.
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!
Why havnt those shit heads been shut down yet? Hmph and people worry about stealing music and stuff when there private information about funds could be hacked and thier votes altered...
They are needed by the Dems to constantly "contest" something.
But hey, looks like the Reps have a use for 'em now.
That's exactly the reason I don't wanna use or incorporate any GPL software, never know when you are gonna be suit for violation. Compare to that, I like BSD and commercial more.
You can be pretty sure you won't be sued for violation at all if you don't, you know, violate it!
You can quit the FUD about using it; you can use GPL software _without even agreeing_ to the GPL, in which case the default "All rights reserved" applies as for any copyrighted work, including that you cannot distribute it or a derived work.
Actually incorporating it into a derived work is permitted by the GPL (if you accept it), and will not get you sued if you just follow the conditions of the GPL. If you, like Diebold, decide not to follow those, but distribute a derived work anyway (i.e. you _violate_), then you indeed never know when you're gonna be sued for violation, so maybe you shouldn't do that.
Oddly enough, you can also be sued for violation of BSD or commercial licenses too, should you elect to violate them...
Clearly, Obama stole the election with a 51/49 die-bold flip-flop.
It's rigged! Obama should have won the election by a far greater election!
(margin)
i liked it the first way better
I thought Obama already had a greater erection than McCain.
Why touchscreen? What was wrong with ATMs with buttons down each side? We still have them in Australia, and guess what? No controversy. If there's an input error, it's entirely due to the user being incompetent, and that's the way it should be.
I've never seen a touch screen ATM in the US, I think it's just the voting machines. Touch screen doesn't seem robust enough for the amount of use that ATMs get.
I guess there just isn't enough demand for voting machines. That must be why these companies can get away with really crappy products.
They're robust enough. All the ATMs in Japan are touchscreen, and most people do all their banking on them, from college kids to grandparents.
The two biggest banks in the SF Bay Area (Wells Fargo and Bank of America) are making all of their ATMs touchscreen. They really work pretty well.
It's not just the touchscreens. It's the fact that the GOP had hired a guy to write a program that changed Dem votes to Repub votes back in 2000.
Most of the National City ATMs in Cleveland are touchscreen.
@ Adam: I see more touchscreen ATMs in MA than I see non-touchscreen. *shrug*
Oh come on. "ATM Machine"? Really?
You Have Selected:
-Donate to RNC-
Press No to Approve.
Don't worry kerry, I got it. On a related note, if you're coming to my party, RSVP please. It's an acronym-butchering party. My buddy will be MCing then we're going to go for rides in my esuvee.
You mean your SUV vehicle, right?
@ jorvay: The "P" in "RSVP" doesn't stand for "Please."
@Eric
It's french. RSVP: répondez, s'il vous plaît. In english, that would be: reply please.
So, please RSVP is "please reply please"
The literal translation is, "answer, if you like." I suppose that it could be interpreted as, "answer, if you please," but that's a stretch. It also doesn't mean that the "P" stands for "please." The "P" stands for "plait."
LOL. their voting division is getting stale in the news department, are we branching out now to trash their ATM division too? That will be alot harder considering their massive market share and surprisingly exceptional service they provide for them....
I have a simple solution for their GPL issue. they pay for the appropriate GPL license plus lawsuit reparations and walk away. It still won't change the fact however that their voting system stinks...
Anyone else think that pic would be so much better if it was showing IRV in action? id go with 1 write in Kucinich 2 superman 3 Washington 4 Dr Evil
I, for one...
Would welcome back the paper ballots.
lol, pwned. Too bad they couldn't steal enough votes this time around.
How hard can it be for a company to make a good voting machine? This is 2008 we should have to pull a lever and flick switches to vote.
Shouldn't...
Millions of bank account holders use Diebold ATMs everyday without a hitch.
So why they fuck can't they take an ATM and load some voting software on it? It boggles my mind.
We can send people into space yet we can't get a pile of microchips and wiring to count some votes. *sigh*
When NASA and others send people into space, they're not also secretly working behind the scenes to scupper the mission and kill the astronauts. Same for ATMs - save for a couple of exceptions, banks and their employees don't try to cheat their customers out of their money.
The problem with voting machines is that the people setting them up are often the crooked ones. To borrow McCain's expression, "Joe the Plumber" isn't exactly going to be the agent of the vote-rigging conspiracy.
die boldly
Who needs faulty machines to tweek the vote? Have you ever really read a proposal? You never know if yes means no or no means yes.
Wouldnt it really be a problem for democracy itself if these guys wrote their own code?
Don't over think things too much. You don't steal elections by trying to coordinate disparate precincts. It's much simpler to organize on the ground the Chicago way....ala ACORN.
Pay off the homeless with cigarettes, register the dead, etc. It's really not that hard. If it's close, you might be able to flip some votes in a recount...Al Franken is doing that right now. They found 100 votes for him and Obama, but the timestamp on the printout is two days before the election.
People have short memories...you forget that the Daley family has a history of stuffing ballot boxes...the 1960 election was very questionable. But go ahead and worry about some shadowy effort by the GOP to rig elections nationwide with ninja hackers while ACORN with it's dozens of front groups tries to avoid a RICO investigation for voter fraud.
I doubt they need to worry now...their biggest donor just won the election.
lolz. here come the acorn trolls. guess what, no one cared about your Lush Rimjauhb talking points the first time, but keep at it, i'm sure someone still has their tinfoil hat on out there
Are they sure Superman is eligible? He wasn't born in the USA, after all.
If Krypton was a US military base then he would be eligible and that would explain everything from his past.
What really needs to happen (and might very-well do so) is that the new Obama Govt. needs to standardize on a completely open-source, transparent voting system that top academics and analysts agree is both tamper-proof and accurate.
I recall reading an article about the Australian Govt. using exactly this sort of thing (although I think they eventually made it closed-source, which is a mistake).
Have all of the terminals connected to a central authentication server that just generates signing keys, burn the individual votes on a non-rewriteable DVD-R, each one accompanied with the signed key to verify authenticity, etc.
They need to make sure that voting fraud is never seen again.
"Have all of the terminals connected to a central authentication server that just generates signing keys"
Just like Windows Genuine Advantage that works oh so spectacularly to combat piracy.
I never understood the push to computerized voting systems after the 2000 elections. I think optical scanning voting systems are the way to go. They are accurate, eliminate the "chad" problem, allow for a paper recount, don't require the person to learn how to use the ballot (as is the case with voting machines) and are cheaper than computerized systems.
What I love about these anti-Diebold posts is that many aspects they share with say... Chariot of the Gods by von Daniken. You start with a fragment of fact (Artifex is threatening to sue Diebold) then ask a few questions, assume your own answers, use that for the basis of more speculation and hey presto - you've 'proven'.. well nothing.
So, let's start. The article refers to PES as a "Yet another Linux device maker ". Wrong. All of PES hardware uses Windows CE including their optical scan hardware. They cite that Artifex wants to impound all PES scanners "such as the AutoMark scanner" except AutoMark scanners aren't actually made by PES, they're made by AutoMark which soon will be a division of ES&S. If that's where they found the Ghostscript code, then it's not actually PES' fault.
The problem with finding the code in the PES optical mark scanners is that they're just that - scanners. They do something very simple: they image a page of marks and try to locate the mark that are filled in. They don't print anything other than a tally sheet on a small thermal printer (if that option is included), so there's literally no use for Ghostscript in one of these devices - and given the processor speed and limited memory, it's not even clear HOW it would be useful.
You'll also notice that they don't actually say precisely what was included or what was found. Clearly, it's highly improbable that PES would just include the entire Ghostscript - it's rather large and there's just not that much memory/flash in one of those things.
Is it possible that some code for Ghostscript is in there? Of course, but it seems fairly unlikely - or at most, that perhaps a few routines were used without the programmer who did it informing his managers or team leads that he did. Seriously - if you were shown source to an app that ran into hundreds of modules, could YOU pick one or two routines out of that as being part of Ghostscript? I think a lot of you live in some kind of paranoid fantasy land.
Oh.. and speaking of paranoid fantasy lands, one last thought. Those of you who still go on about PES being a pawn of the Republican party, give it a rest already. That was ONE guy at PES who said something mindnumbingly stupid at a Republican fund raiser. He was *fired* for it less than two weeks later along with many of the staff members he hired as personal staff.
Diebold is a *publically traded company* (the only one of the major evoting machine companies that is, BTW - you might want to think about that - you believe Diebold is rigging elections? you can actually buy a few shares and show up at a shareholder meeting and grill the president - you can't do that with ES&S or Sequoia) which means they have to expose a lot of internal information. EVoting systems makes up a tiny part of their entire revenue base. And contrary to what a lot of people believe, rigging an election would be a very, VERY difficult thing to do for any poll that wasn't virtually a tie.
You guys vote, right? You voted on Nov 4th? Most polls with touchscreens have them out in the open with a monitor watching people to make sure they don't linger too long. There's a balloting judge watching everything - and often scrutineers from all parties watching too. Do you really think there was enough opportunity for someone to spend SIX MINUTES dismantling a vote scanning unit to change a chip in it as shown in a recent post here - and not be noticed by ANYONE???
I know it's fun to be all angry about something. At least pick something real.
tl;dr