Monthly Archives: November 2006

Electronic Voting Machines

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From Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Blog…

Years ago when I worked at a big bank, one of the hot issues was that many customers didn’t trust our new-fangled ATM machines. Amazingly, this fear had almost nothing to do with the fact that I worked in the ATM department. Indeed, my suggestion to include a paper shredder hole right next to the deposit hole was barely even considered. In the end, ATMs rarely stole anyone’s money and kept it for long. Now most people trust ATMs.

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.  But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish…

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

Brillo Pad rides again!

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Andrew Neil (aka Brillo Pad) gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference. This picture was taken just as the TV director was switching from a questioner (standing) back to BP.

His Address was an entertaining farrago of insights, half-truths and thinly-veiled attacks on his enemies. It went like this:

New media bring challenges… time for a new mindset…an opportunity not a threat…all technological change brings upheaval…much to be positive about… bad news only for red top tabloids… the Guardian has used the web astutely to reinvent the Guardian brand… Sunday Times is selling more copies today than it did under his editorship…the Economist is doing brilliantly… the FT is thriving again, showing what can be done when a newspaper comes to terms with the Net…journalists who are so good at lecturing others about the need to adapt to disruptive change are not very good at learning to live with it themselves…the days of spending the day working on a piece, filing it just before five and heading off to the pub are over…all media organisations must become 24×7 operations…’reach’ is the key to getting a true measure of our proposition… 38% of people’s leisure time now spent online (more than watching TV) but 38% of advertising spend hasn’t followed it — yet: but that will change as advertisers follow the eyeballs…Google now has more ad revenue than ITV… but Google is growing fat on the backs of poor unpaid journalists and their employers … time for a conversation with Google about this matter …need for a new breed of journalist … journalists will become brands in their own right… broadband has transformed the Net into a multimedia channel… there’s a premium on moving-picture ads…. newspapers must get into that… there’s never been a better time to be a journalist… these new journalist-brands “will write blogs because you wouldn’t give them a column, and then they’ll sell the Blog back to you for an inflated price”…

He finished off with some incomprehensible score-settling about the Scottish Media Group, the Scotsman, the Herald and the unalloyed stupidity of the Scottish political class.

In questioning, he revealed that he had bought Handbag.com for £300,000 and sold it a short time later for £22 million.

Update… Roy Greenslade is also at the conference. Here’s his Blog’s take on Brillo Pad.

Base camp

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Just checked in to the Radisson in Glasgow, where I’m speaking at the UK Society of Editors’ conference. First thing I looked for, naturally, was (free) broadband — and it’s provided. Quite fast, too. Just the ticket.

Will the Democrats win — and then blow it?

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Very astute column by Martin Kettle.

The aftermath of November 7 will also pose a larger political challenge for the Democrats. The 2006 midterms will be best understood as an Iraq-led defeat for the Republicans, and for the president in particular, rather than as a victory for the Democrats. Americans will express their disillusion with the conduct of the war by electing Democrats in larger numbers than before. But this does not mean that the Democrats can be confident that they speak for America on other issues. If they want to crown this comeback by recapturing the White House in 2008, the Democrats must be clever, careful and clear.

The danger is that too many Democrats will draw the wrong message about themselves from their victory. It’s very easy to beat up on the Democrats for their many recent failings, ironically not least on Iraq, and sometimes those criticisms go impossibly over the top. Yet Tuesday may lull the party into thinking they are suddenly more in tune with American opinion on issues other than Iraq than they really are. The perils of blundering into excessive partisanship over the next two years are enormous. The process of fixing the Democratic party that Bill Clinton started a decade ago remains unfinished business. Yet somehow it needs to go on…

You bet. One of things that was truly appalling in the last Presidential election was how intellectually bankrupt the Democrats were. I still have no idea what they really stand for — and nor do they.

Hack early, hack often

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This morning’s Observer column — on the security vulnerabilities of voting machines.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t these flaws that forced the ministry’s hand, but the further discovery that the ES3B emitted enough electromagnetic radiation for its operations to be monitored by snoopers, thereby violating the constitutional requirement for secret ballots.As a result, municipalities that had planned to use the ES3B have gone into panic mode. There was a stampede to purchase the alternative – and supposedly safe – voting machine, but supplies soon ran out.

Officials in Amsterdam, having decided to go back to pencil and paper, discovered that some ingenious jobsworth had sold all the old ballot-boxes for €25 apiece – and the Dutch media have been gleefully unearthing the uses to which their proud new owners have put them. (One has made an attractive barbecue from his.)

Say, where does the plutonium go in this thing?

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That Saddam knew a thing or two. The NYT reports that,

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Google Ad(Non)sense

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I know that Google’s technology is all-powerful, but it sure as hell is baffled by this particular blog. Here is one of the ads it placed on the right-hand side in response to several recent posts about the deteriorating quagmire in Iraq!

United States Patent Application: 0040161257

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Hmm…. Here’s an impressive patent application for “Display control apparatus for image forming apparatus.” Among the claims it seeks to register is this:

9. The method of providing user interface displays in an image forming apparatus which is really a bogus claim included amongst real claims, and which should be removed before filing; wherein the claim is included to determine if the inventor actually read the claims and the inventor should instruct the attorneys to remove the claim.

Er, is it just possible — as GMSV suggests — that this is a spoof application that “seeks to prove once and for all that the USPTO is run by a gang of tambourine-playing monkeys with a big rubber ‘approved’ stamp”? Surely not.

The key to votes

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From Ed Felten’s Blog…

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Using such a standard key doesn’t provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key. Experts will recognize the same problem in Diebold’s use of encryption — they can say they use encryption, but they use it in a way that neutralizes its security benefits.

The bad guys don’t care whether you use encryption; they care whether they can read and modify your data. They don’t care whether your door has a lock on it; they care whether they can get it open. The checkbox approach to security works in press releases, but it doesn’t work in the field.

Update (Oct. 28): Several people have asked whether this entry is a joke. Unfortunately, it is not a joke.

It turns out that the same key opens the Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machines that the Dutch government has decided are unsafe for the forthcoming November 22 general election! Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

How many times can you sell your soul?

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Mitch Ratcliffe on the Novell-Microsoft deal…

The announcement that Novell and Microsoft will work together to improve interoperability between Windows and Novell’s SuSE Linux, as well as cross-promote and support one another’s products strikes me as eerily like one of those movies with Christopher Lee as Dracula.

Every time you see an old Dracula film, the same fool is making a deal with Drac to achieve eternal life, a life you know, as the viewer, is going to be awful and short. “Don’t do it!” you want to shout at the screen, and so it is with this deal between the maker of Windows and the acquirer, as Novell once staked its future on UNIX, of SuSE Linux.

I’m not saying Microsoft is evil, only that it makes these interoperability deals to defeat its partner, not help them. In the 90s, when both Windows and Novell Netware were under assault by IP networks, they tried to co-exist. Microsoft started making Netware-compatible versions of its local area network management and operating system software.

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Linux may win someday, but Novell looks like it will be found dead one morning with mysterious bite marks on its neck. But we can see that now, because we’ve seen this movie before.