Monday 23 January 2006

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"
==================
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.
=============

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'
----------------

Re:Update?

(Score:5, Insightful)
by earnest murderer (888716) Alter Relationship 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.
---------------
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.

THE MONEY PROGRAMME
Money Programme reporter Rajan Datar dives into the Google business
The World According to Google


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4598090.stm

Expose 'Radical' Professors || Pixar || and More

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

UCLA Students Urged to Expose 'Radical' Professors: "Re:Bias in academia
(Score:5, Interesting)
by killjoe (766577) Alter Relationship on Saturday January 21, @08:11PM (#14529718)
'Arguing that all the smart people are liberals is amazing ignorant.'

Statistically speaking people with collage educations are more likely to be liberals. Oddly enough the people with passports tend to overwhelmingly liberals. Furthermore a study showed that on average the viewers of the John Stewart show (liberal) were better educated and made more money then the viewers of Bill Oreilly.

I am afraid the facts disagree with you. Sure there are educated conservatives but the majority of people with degrees as liberals by a long shot.
--
evil is as evil does"
================
"I did not say that conservatives tend to be stupid people. I said that stupid people tend to be conservative."
-John Stuart Mill
-----------------------
<van@i2pmail.org> on Saturday January 21, @07:52PM (#14529609) Here's a bit from the article itself (for those that haven't read it..)

" The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a "Dirty Thirty" list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings."

This story was covered a few days ago by one of the local radio programs here. Despite what the slashdot headline says about these guys going after "both sides," in reality it's a conservative witch-hunt... McCarthy would be proud of these clowns. Someone should send them a stuffed jesus doll to cuddle up with at night.
==============
A link to the site in question would help:

http://uclaprofs.com/ [uclaprofs.com]

Not to be confused with the professor review site at http://uclaprofessors.com/ [uclaprofessors.com]
-================

Re:Read my ...

(Score:5, Interesting)
by heinousjay (683506) Alter Relationship on Saturday January 21, @09:30PM (#14530181)
(http://despairat.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 26, @11:30AM)
Well, not exactly right on the money. Shamefully close. I'll try to be as neutral as I can, although some of these are subjective, and my political leanings influence them.

Disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not a republican. I have never voted republican in a national election. I've also never voted democrat. I think national politics in America is an institution rotten to its core.

  1. Powerful and continuing nationalism - check, but this isn't new to Bush.
  2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights - check, and this one makes me sad. Even if the administration was angelic in every other respect, this is an unforgivable fault.
  3. Identifying enemies or scapegoats as a unifying cause - check, but the enemy is real. That's a matter of convenience, I know, but something still has to be done.
  4. Supremacy of the military - check, I'll give this one, but it's sort of overstated in the flash. As a conservative, I recognize the need for a military.
  5. Rampant sexism - no, not really, although it seems unneeded for fascism anyway.
  6. Controlled mass media - again, no. Sure, some media outlets lean the same way as the president. Others don't. It's a pretty good mix, in my opinion. On the other hand, I'm not like most people, which is to say I don't suffer from the disease of wanting to have my opinions parroted back at me. Overall, the media sells what people want to buy.
  7. Obsession with national security - check, but once again, the enemy is real.
  8. Religion and government are intertwined - no, not really. As a devout atheist, I'd probably notice. The President spouting personal religious beliefs does not a religious government make.
  9. Corporate power is protected - half a check. Corporate power is certainly huge, but that's the nature of corporations. I personally don't believe in beating businesspeople down just for doing business in any case, but that won't be a popular sentiment on a site that is so anti-people-making-money-for-themselves.
  10. Labor power is suppressed - half a check. There's not a tremendous amount of supression going on, and the power labor is losing is more related to globalization than anything else. Interestingly, the fix requires more of number 1.
  11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts - I don't see this one. I think it's elitism, frankly. Disdain for the Dixie Chicks was shown, and that's fine by me, but I've thought they sucked from their inception. (I'm being facetious with my example.)
  12. Obsession with crime and punishment - half a check. Outside of the national security angle, this one is surprisingly lowkey for a Republican administration. In the flash it is said that the "police are given almost limitless powers to enforce the laws." A case could be made, particularly regarding the USA PATRIOT act, but right now, it's just not entirely true. Right on the ledge, though. A short consolidation of federal and state powers would do this trick quickly.
  13. Rampant cronyism and corruption - check. That's called politics. It exists everywhere there are politicians. That's not an excuse, of course.
  14. Fraudulent elections - nope. Sorry, there's never been anything produced that points a clear finger toward election fraud. This drum will be beat for a long time, I'm sure, but there's just no evidence.
So I see 7.5 out of 14. We'll call it 8. Terrible score overall, but it doesn't add up to fascism to me. I'm pretty sure we'd see a lot more suppression of dissent if we lived under a fascist regime.
======================

Re:Hey, the right to speek freely...

(Score:5, Insightful)
by avxo (861854) Alter Relationship on Saturday January 21, @09:45PM (#14530272)
Let's take a deeper look there vargasgrey, shall we?

Intelligent Design claims that complex natural life forms can only be created by something it terms a designing intelligence. OK... so, let's contemplate that for a bit.

If we allow the creating intelligence to be natural, by our original premise, it too must have a creating intelligence that created it, and so on. We're left with an infinite regress. So, how to go about breaking it?

Well, maybe we could posit a supernatural creating intelligence. But, if we take that option we instantly take Intelligent Design outside the realm of science, and thus automatically forfeit equal status to scientific theories. So, that's no good.

The other option, is to accept that intelligence can arise solely out of natural processes, which clearly contradicts the original premise of Intelligent Design, so that's out the door too.

Dang it. No matter what we do, Intelligent Design ends up being self-contradictory, or non-scientific.

So chew on that.==========

==========[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

Firefox AJAX Debugger

(Score:5, Informative)
by Val314 (219766) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:16PM (#14533539)
pretty usefull: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1843&application=firefox [mozilla.org]

"FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."

thanks http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 01/firebug.html [mozillazine.org] for the tipp
=========================[][][][][][][][]

Re:a company of "almosts"

(Score:5, Insightful)
by Animats (122034) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:47PM (#14533695)
(http://www.animats.com)
That's very insightful.

Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?

Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.

So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.

=====================

======================

Re:Hey, the right to speek freely...

(Score:5, Insightful)
by avxo (861854) Alter Relationship on Saturday January 21, @09:45PM (#14530272)
Let's take a deeper look there vargasgrey, shall we?

Intelligent Design claims that complex natural life forms can only be created by something it terms a designing intelligence. OK... so, let's contemplate that for a bit.

If we allow the creating intelligence to be natural, by our original premise, it too must have a creating intelligence that created it, and so on. We're left with an infinite regress. So, how to go about breaking it?

Well, maybe we could posit a supernatural creating intelligence. But, if we take that option we instantly take Intelligent Design outside the realm of science, and thus automatically forfeit equal status to scientific theories. So, that's no good.

The other option, is to accept that intelligence can arise solely out of natural processes, which clearly contradicts the original premise of Intelligent Design, so that's out the door too.

Dang it. No matter what we do, Intelligent Design ends up being self-contradictory, or non-scientific.

So chew on that.==========

==========[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

Firefox AJAX Debugger

(Score:5, Informative)
by Val314 (219766) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:16PM (#14533539)
pretty usefull: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1843&application=firefox [mozilla.org]

"FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."

thanks http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 01/firebug.html [mozillazine.org] for the tipp
=========================[][][][][][][][]

Re:a company of "almosts"

(Score:5, Insightful)
by Animats (122034) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:47PM (#14533695)
(http://www.animats.com)
That's very insightful.

Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?

Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.

So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.

=====================

======================

Re:Hey, the right to speek freely...

(Score:5, Insightful)
by avxo (861854) Alter Relationship on Saturday January 21, @09:45PM (#14530272)
Let's take a deeper look there vargasgrey, shall we?

Intelligent Design claims that complex natural life forms can only be created by something it terms a designing intelligence. OK... so, let's contemplate that for a bit.

If we allow the creating intelligence to be natural, by our original premise, it too must have a creating intelligence that created it, and so on. We're left with an infinite regress. So, how to go about breaking it?

Well, maybe we could posit a supernatural creating intelligence. But, if we take that option we instantly take Intelligent Design outside the realm of science, and thus automatically forfeit equal status to scientific theories. So, that's no good.

The other option, is to accept that intelligence can arise solely out of natural processes, which clearly contradicts the original premise of Intelligent Design, so that's out the door too.

Dang it. No matter what we do, Intelligent Design ends up being self-contradictory, or non-scientific.

So chew on that.==========

==========[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

Firefox AJAX Debugger

(Score:5, Informative)
by Val314 (219766) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:16PM (#14533539)
pretty usefull: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1843&application=firefox [mozilla.org]

"FireBug is a new tool that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter."

thanks http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/ 01/firebug.html [mozillazine.org] for the tipp
=========================[][][][][][][][]

Re:a company of "almosts"

(Score:5, Insightful)
by Animats (122034) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @12:47PM (#14533695)
(http://www.animats.com)
That's very insightful.

Someone should write a book on how Sun blew it with client-side Java. They gave the product away and spent tens of millions marketing it. In a marketing sense, they succeeded; everybody has a Java interpreter on their desktop. Yet almost nobody uses them any more. Why?

Part of the problem is that Sun's top technical people, including Joy, never really figured out GUIs. Sun went through three bad in-house window systems before finally giving up and going with X-Windows. Then in the Java era, they went through the AWT and Swing eras, both of which combine complexity with poor performance.

So Sun ended up as a "server company", the place SGI went after they failed to survive the transition to low-cost graphics.

=====================

Re:Super Q

(Score:5, Funny)
by vonahsen (745394) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @06:20PM (#14535234)
And Jobs did it with one thing: Quality. And Marketing. Ok, two things.

and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope....
--
I don't want to fit in, I just don't want to stand out
================
If he manages to pull Disney out of their spiral of mediocrity, he'll have earned every penny...
Yes, because being the owner of the world's largest collection of turtle necks is an expensive hobby
===============
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood [wikipedia.org]
----------------------------
by Fantastic Lad (198284) Alter Relationship on Sunday January 22, @03:41PM (#14534536)
The Next Big Thing, as suggested by the bold new marketing frenzy which the media and advertising gurus and venture-capitalists poised on the periphery are salivating over can be summed up by the following quote recently overheard at the watering hole at your local Ad firm. . .

"For the entire month of December 2005, there was a new iPod being sold every 2 seconds!!"

--The idea, of course, being that iPods are suddenly this brand-new giant ten million user-huge market which Apple has unique content-control over, which in turn, it is supposed by the media gods, means that ten million people are just begging to be advertised at. Sadly, the logic is pretty solid. Ad driven content is on the way. (In economic bubble-form of course, which naturally will burst in a big messy splotch, but not before Apple has ballooned into something larger and even stranger than it already is. .
.).

So Jobs now has a controlling hand over at Disney? When the heck did Apple become a world-shaping media-production company? Why wasn't I paying attention. Pixar kind of just crept up all quiet-like. When a big media company starts making good movies, it pays to watch out, because there's some big sneeze coming along a few years down the road!

And what a world it will be! Media and Advertising already smack of the same dumbed-down, candy-coated, lowest-common-denominator brain-goo which Apple has been peddling since the first Mac graced the scene. --That is, to people who like big glossy companies to do their thinking for them. (Ooooh, it's so hard to plug an inexpensive hard drive into an IDE port. Bite me.)

--And while we're at it, gag me with an iPod. What's next? Nuclear Devastation of a large American city at the hands of some Pentagon-funded fake-Islamic covert group? Well, yeah, but. . .

So unless it runs Linux in some flavor, Apple can go blow. I can't stand the idea of Apple having a direct line into the public subconscious. Ugh.

Think:

If you own and love your iPod, does that make you a, "Pod Person"? Well, duh. Of course it does. If the term 'Pod' doesn't twang the creepy-chord deep in your belly, then you're simply not paying attention, or you are and you've chosen to ignore the queezy body-snatchers vibe and opt into Stepford-ville with your eyes open. Congrats! --Anybody who doesn't respect metaphysical etymology is missing a whole mess of clues. . . iPod = "The Aliens have gained control of my brain by implanting a small device on my head. I am now very submissive. Allow me mod points, beloved overlord, in service of the empire. Fantastic Lad irritates us."
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