Catch Up with 4 Years Ago: Election Officials And Crackers Challenge Diebold

Election Officials And Crackers Challenge Diebold: "Re:It's the news that isn't.
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Cognitive Dissident (206740) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @04:23PM (#14534705)
The reason for this is more than 'apathy', it's active suppression. The major news outlets that aren't actually controlled by the same people who are behind Diebold and its ilk are intimidated by the constant barrage of 'media bias' attacks from the segment of the media that is allied with Diebold & Co. There is a perfectly good book that documents the theft of our last several elections by Mark Crispin Miller, just published a few months ago. But he can't get PBS or NPR (specifically WHYY) to let him appear and promote it. I have submitted stories on this but only get rejected. Can anyone figure how to get this information about censorship onto the main page of slashdot?

Mark Crispin Miller's Blog [blogspot.com]

The story [blogspot.com] on his blog noting Joe Bageant's recent essay on his inability to get airtime on WHYY's 'Fresh Air'

Joe Bageant [joebageant.com] is a journalist and recently a very popular blogger of the plight of the 'redneck' culture in the neo-con political machine. His most recent essay is specifically about the refusal of WHYY to allow Mark Crispin Miller to appear on Fresh Air or otherwise promote his book [joebageant.com] -- Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One, Too (Unless We Stop Them) [amazon.com] He hits tha nail on the head:

It is safe to say that WHYY and the rest of the public media gang are simply scared to death of uttering the book's title on the airwaves. They know that the neocons will jump up all over their asses claiming liberal bias. Maybe even launch one of their infamous letter writing campaigns. The Republican game plan of unrelenting bullshit, that steady grinding away day in day out -- it works. They have managed to we"
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Insanely poor program architecture

(Score:5, Informative)

by James_Duncan8181 (588316)

<jad@jaduncan.QUOTEnet minus punct> on Sunday January 22, @04:27AM (#14531706)
(http://jaduncan.net/)

Windows XP + network connection + data held in an *Access DB* and then transferred by memory card with no crypographic checksum.

If I prepared work like that for a client, I'd expect to get chucked out by security.

I'll also note the following:
a) Diabold say that a paper trail is not needed for security, but provide one on their own ATMs. Apparently independent verification of election results is less important then $$$ transactions.
b) Both local and remote vulns have been demonstrated on their voting machines, but the ATMs have not been pwned.
c) Diabold refuses to let the source code be reviewed, and chose to run on Windows XP so neither the program or the OS of the box can be verified safe.
d) Diabold machines can have the vote totals rewritten on their memory sticks as they do not cryptographically sign or encrypt the totals. That's plain text on a card that can be removed from the machine and has a standard file format.
e) Diabold security is focked whether or not they put the same code they have tested on the box. With tested, verfied boxes they cannot add XP security patches for known flaws after te verification date (and if there is one thing worth keeping an 0-day for...). If they do add security patches etc then we are trusting closed source biaries to be added to election counting machines without the possibility of review. One bad actor and the elecetion is up for grabs.

No thanks. I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but is is as if they were designed to be broken into.

Would a BSD box with one simple program, output to the framebuffer, a results paper trail and a constant SSH tunnel to the FEC be that hard? *sighs*

Fock Diabold.
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The guys in power don't care.

(Score:4, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @04:45AM (#14531758)

If they did we'd have this problem fixed by now. We've know they were insecure for years now; ever since the accidental release of diebolds e-mails detailing backdoors and holes that were not patched. Who remembers that security researcher who went before congress and said specifically that his code, which was to illustrate a backdoor into the machines, was used to hack the elections in ohio? I forget his name.

Fact is, CEO's and friends of voting machine companies get into power. Why? Guess. It isn't the 20% of the vote they need to swing; it's the 6% after they've divided everyone on the issues. Voting laws and policys are consistantly broken, and is anything done about it? The answer lies in the question; Has anyone been taken out of power yet? Dictatorship only works if people are divided; if they stand for something and stand by it for hell or high water.

And I might, just might give credit to the guys who said "well, it's stil the will of the people" if it weren't for that they can't prove their position since there's nothing for them to count. The election board can't even tell them who voted for who so they can go around asking people.

Of course, the best way you can tell the government you don't like what you're doing is to decide you stand for something and stand for it tall. I personally chose the constitution; it ain't perfect, but it's something everyone can agree on. Of course, ever since the civil war and reconstruction the constitution's layed dormant. To make a long story short, if you want to get rid of the current government, the best way is to simply stop working for them; stop giving them your money. How do you do that? Well, basically the 14th amendment set you up to be a federal citizen by the name of a "U.S. citizen" and social security turned you into a corporate legal fiction so that income tax, which worked only on corporations, now works on you. How do you get out? You rescind your federal citizenship, declare your citizenship of your state as it was before reconstruction, rescind your birth certificate (to remove proof of being under the 14th), rescind your social security (to correct your status as a soverign instead of a corporation), then begin rescinding everything else; drivers lisence, fishing lisences, gun lisence, any contract with the federal government and it's munincipal corporations (read; the states are corporations). You can get a non-binding play-ID from the SS office if you want to get a bank account, for example. Then you simply stop paying income and social security taxes, atwhich point you stop giving the government 30% of your income and begin working to reinstate lawful government in your state via holding elections and office and organizing locally. More to the point, if enough people do it quickly enough, the federal government will have about 10 trillion in debt to pay off, and no way repay it back which means a massive collapse.

:X...

The price? Reading a few books; learning how history, governments, and legal documents work. Mabye $500 in books total. A good place to start is here:

http://www.usa-the-republic.com/revenue/true_histo ry/Contents.html [usa-the-republic.com]

Do a find for john ainsworth and ed wahler on this page

http://mp3.rbnlive.com/Stadt06.html [rbnlive.com]

They've been preparing a book and an organization to do this on a massive scale. The book comes out in march-ish along with the publicisation of the startup and they hope to do it state-by-state.
=================

Sigh... This really is a FEATURE

(Score:5, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 22, @02:39PM (#14534225)

Headline here should be corrected; this isn't a huge gmail flaw; seasoned users know it as a feature.

Secret gmail feature #1: you can add and remove periods from your username with no change in mail routing. There is no collision with other accounts since only one account (stripped of periods) is allowed to exist.

Scret gmail feature #2: you can append a plus and any string to your account name and it will still be routed to you. Try creating filters by giving out your address this way: eg example+spam@gmail.com will be delivered to username 'example'
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Re:Update?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by earnest murderer (888716)

on Sunday January 22, @03:39PM (#14534527)

In other news, a gentleman by the name of Due Diligence was found dead on a downtown street, apparently trampled to death.

When asked about it Angry Mob (currently confined at digg.com) replied "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story".

Seriously, this was a pretty big fuckup regurgitating some random assholes blog entry without checking *anything*. I expect this at digg.com where inflamitory and baseless rule the day. Slashdot can claim to merely be a discussion of "news" and not necessarily journalism itself. Ars, I expected more.

--
It only looks like I'm kidding.
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http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe r=12096&topic=1564 [google.com]

I don't want to sound trollish, but this hardly sounds like story material to me.

////////////////////////

The world according to Google

By Charles Miller
BBC Money Programme

In the 18 months since its stock market flotation, Google has been transformed from a company that prided itself on being simple and effective, into a multi-headed high tech beast which wants to get involved in everything.