Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
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Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#2"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact. The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."
Ouch.
Incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Or is this by design?
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#3Now make it so you have to eat the ghost labeled as the candidate you want to vote for, and it records the vote.
I might actually go to the polls.
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#4"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact. The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case." Ouch. Incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Or is this by design?
Could very well be security theater. Or maybe the researchers missed another layer of seals that protected the screws.
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#5"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact. The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case." Ouch. Incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Or is this by design?
"What's inside the AVC Edge? It has a 486 SLE processor and 32 MB of RAM—similar specs to a 20-year-old PC. The election software is stored on an internal CompactFlash memory card. Modifying it is as simple as removing the card and inserting it into a PC."
Seems to be a history of dubious competence for this machine and company:
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#6Now make it so you have to eat the ghost labeled as the candidate you want to vote for, and it records the vote. I might actually go to the polls.
They should have hacked it to play Pole Position, where the winner of the race was the candidate who gets the vote.
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#7Now make it so you have to eat the ghost labeled as the candidate you want to vote for, and it records the vote. I might actually go to the polls.
Alternatively, a 1 minute quiz on the constitution and/or your countries system of governance. Get all the answers right and you can vote!
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#8It is one of the curious facts of modern culture that the people who love technology the most also seem to be the most opposed to electronic voting.
I think it's because the people who most understand how computers work also understand that no data can be considered trustworthy if somebody else has been in possession of the hardware. Yet governments continue to trust the impossible promises of the people who make voting machines that their machines are secure, despite a continuous stream of demonstrations to the contrary, both intentional and accidental.
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#9"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact. The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case." Ouch. Incompetence doesn't even begin to describe it. Or is this by design?
"What's inside the AVC Edge? It has a 486 SLE processor and 32 MB of RAM—similar specs to a 20-year-old PC. The election software is stored on an internal CompactFlash memory card. Modifying it is as simple as removing the card and inserting it into a PC." Seems to be a history of dubious competence for this machine and company: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:vVOdcOpBZ_EJ:w... http://sourcewatch.org/index.…
Mind you, this could be because they were
- spending years on certification and legal compliance of hardware to many jurisdictions
- already had an old and tried platform that is powerful enough to do the job
Before anyone cries "obsolete", be aware that e.g. your Canon digital cameras run a DOS clone (ROM-DOS) on similar CPUs. You don't really have to have quad core everywhere just because you can.
But of course it doesn't address the whole seals fiasco.
Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals
#10It is one of the curious facts of modern culture that the people who love technology the most also seem to be the most opposed to electronic voting. I think it's because the people who most understand how computers work also understand that no data can be considered trustworthy if somebody else has been in possession of the hardware. Yet governments continue to trust the impossible promises of the people who make vot…
I don't know that we're opposed to it in theory, it's just that every single implementation thus far has been terrifically bad. Making the code open source would go a long way, I think, as would establishing open working groups to establish security standards. I may be an optimist, but I do believe that theoretically (at least information-theoretically[1]), it can be done well.
[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Information-theoreticall...