Daily Archives: May 14, 2006

Diebold: that security hole is a feature, not a bug

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From GMSV…

Are electronic voting machines ever held to any baseline computer security standards? It certainly doesn’t seem so. To wit, the discovery of a security hole in Diebold Election Systems’ touch-screen voting machines that experts are calling the “worst ever” in a voting system. Discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting, the vulnerable technology is intended as a means of quickly upgrading the machines’ boot loader, operating system and application program. But it can be easily exploited to load almost any software without a password or proof of authenticity, potentially without leaving any signs the machines have been tampered with. “It’s worse than a hole,” Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Associated Press. “It’s a deliberate feature that was added by Diebold that we all believe is unwise.” Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who first cast doubt on the reliability of Diebold’s systems in a 2003 report, agreed. The machines are “much, much easier to attack than anything we’ve previously said,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It’s a totally different ballgame.”

Er, it was Diebold machines that decided the outcome of the last Presidential election, wasn’t it?

The invisible war

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Interesting Washington Post piece which helps to explain why Bush’s poll ratings aren’t even lower.

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them — many of whom were still in the service, others who weren’t — to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn’t understand what it’s like…

Who says the BBC doesn’t get it?

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The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties.

The rented island exists in online game Second Life and will hold its first event this weekend with bands including Muse, Razorlight and Gnarls Barkley….

[Source]

Tabloid idiocy

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The thing I detest most about the British tabloid press is its sanctimonious stupidity. It is written by people who couldn’t run a bath, have no experience of any organisational life and to whom the notion of systemic failure is entirely alien, yet who never fail to search for ‘the guilty men’ whenever there is a complex organisational failure. The publication of the two reports into the 7/7 London bombings has called forth another orgy of this retrospective sanctimoniousness. Why didn’t the security services detect the plot? Why was Siddique Khan not monitored more closely? Etc., etc… Henry Porter has an intelligent take on this:

The press is having it both ways: it must be illogical in one set of circumstances to condemn the credulity of intelligence officers while in another to attack them for not acting on every piece of information received, however peripheral it seems. Having sat through the inquiry into David Kelly’s death and read Lord’s Hutton’s report with disbelief, I am disposed to a sceptical line on government reports.

But the two accounts of the 7 July bombings and the intelligence failure do not have the glare of whitewash, nor the slightest glimmer of it. They seem to provide an accurate picture of what happened and the difficulties faced by the security services and Special Branch. What Siddique Khan and his three companions planned was essentially unknowable. …

Quote of the day

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The late JK Galbraith once remarked that left-wing governments’ penchant for intervening meant that they needed to be better at management than right-wing ones. The truth is that practically the only areas the government has got half right – the economy and the railways – are the ones it has removed itself from. Everywhere else, ignoring Galbraith and its own heritage, Labour has marched management backwards.

Simon Caulkin, writing on the irony of how “an administration that sets such store by efficiency and private-sector methods should end up resembling Fawlty Towers”.

The Devil’s new tune

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This morning’s Observer column…

The devil, famously, has the best tunes – ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’, etc. But what do you do when he suddenly starts singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’? This is the kind of puzzle set last week when Warner Brothers announced plans to make over 200 films available for downloading. That’s not the funny bit, though: the real scream is that they propose to use BitTorrent to do it…