Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site

Harrington writes "In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. " Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.

Re:Déjà vu?

[Deanalator]

Yes, if slashdot did some automated submission comparison like digg, we might actually be able to avoid some of these dupes. Slashdot has a lot to learn from digg, and should copy it in every possible way. Maybe they can keep the cowboy Neal polls just for the nostalgia.

Spreading Democracy Begins at Home

[Doc Ruby]

Any country making both democracy and security its highest priorities for years, even at cost of a perpetual state of emergency, suspended liberty, thousands dead and many tens of thousands wounded (multiplied in the non-American casualties), unsupportable debts, alienating allies and activating enemies, would immediately remove these untrustworthy machines and never allow their vendors or technologies into the critical path of its government again.

Such a country would never have allowed such a risk at all, either before or after such vulnerabilities were publicly exposed.

But instead, this story will become a footnote. Precisely because there's an election going on. An election that is threatened by these untrustworthy machines.

Since those priorities were set and executed by a government installed on the reports of these kinds of untrustworthy machines, I guess we've got everything we deserve.

Re:Old stories from Digg

[Jugalator]

Yeah, either this is from Digg, or from Reddit. I saw the same old today on Reddit... I haven't bothered comparing the dates to see who was first though.

But it's an interesting new problem in social news reporting. News tend to spread like wildfire, but that also includes bad or confusing reporting. This isn't the first time it has happened, at I predict it will become tremendously more common in the future, the more interconnected and popular social news sites like Slashdot (it now is one too especially since Firehose was implemented -- and no doubt have you seen the signs of this lately), Digg, Reddit, etc. :-(

Re:Déjà vu?

[gnick]

Do you know what you get when you

copy [digg] in every possible way

?

You get digg. If you prefer digg, the address is: http://www.digg.com/ [digg.com].

Although I agree - An automated dupe checker seems appropriate for things like this...

Social Engineering

[ObiWanStevobi]

While this story may be old, it was not a major election year when it ran, and all the e-voting problems still have not been fixed. So it is at least worth mentioning again, I think. Also, this story serves as a reminder that the most fearsome element of malicious "hacking" is not some geek with uber skills in a dark room, it's the information we willingly give out without realizing the danger.

Ok, I done trying to be constructive. I always was mostly a crowd follower, so here goes: Slashdot sucks and I hate them for posting this story.

Slashdot's Downward Spiral

[PortHaven]

In the past year or two Slashdot has been IMHO on a downward spiral. Enough so, that if I had stock - I'd be selling it off.

I personally attribute this downward trend to the site's decision to become more political and less geeky. More and more I feel as if I am reading a political blog rather than a geek science & tech blog.

Good article submissions are passed up. Interesting news never posted. And numerous politically charged items find themselves reposted repeatedly - sometimes simply as a link to a different article on the same issue and other times the same article (just a year later).

More and more of my friends express that they no longer read Slashdot. Reason given...the interesting news appears later than many other online sources. And I must concur! Years back, most of the info I read on Slashdot was the first I heard of the matter. Now, over half the entries I read on Slashdot, I've already heard - many days and weeks before. In fact, I am finding that I am hearing things on CNN.com before they reach Slashdot. That's just a shame...

Can we stop with the "politicizing" of Slashdot. And return to geekiness of nerdworthy news - thank you!

- The Saj

Re:Well...

[Miseph]

I've got an even better one for stamping out abuse... use paper ballots designed such that each potential vote is listed on one line with a hollow oval at the far end, then have each voter fill in the appropriate dot with a provided pen and run the ballots through a machine designed to read such ballots and compile the results as appropriate.

You know, the same way that many institutions grade multiple choice exams.

The best part is that this is not only comprised entirely of existing technology, but that it is already how at least one state does things, demonstrating that the methodology works just fine. It's how I voted just yesterday.

It's completely obscene that ballot design has become so convoluted and messy that people can reasonably cast an incorrect vote, and it's just stupid to leave yourself without any means for a manual recount.

If they'd post the vote...

[fahrbot-bot]

...the machines are pre-programmed to cast, someone could photocopy that and save us all the trouble of actually voting.

Re:Déjà vu?

[Megane]

Except that this was a dupe on digg yesterday. Oops! So much for the "automated submission comparison"!

Maybe if the submitters (and /. editors) would actually pay attention to URLs with obvious dates in them?

Re:Spreading Democracy Begins at Home

[bughunter]

You seem to be misunderstanding the plan. The easiest way of "spreading Democracy" to the parts of the world under the rule of despots and corrupt plutocrats is not ridding the world of despotism and corruption.

No, it's by redefining "Democracy at home" to include despotism and corruption.

So far, their plan is working well.

You trust ATMs?

[argent]

Can someone please explain to me why an electronic voting machine is a Bad Thing(tm)?

If something goes wrong with your ATM you know it happened right there when it happened, you contact your bank and get it fixed right then. And even then, you don't really *trust* the ATM. At least I hope you take your paper receipt, and check your balance, and if they don't match you can STILL call the bank about it.

If something goes wrong with your voting machine you NEVER know about it, because you don't get any feedback (like, you know, the money doesn't come out). So what you need to do is to take your paper ballot from the machine and put it in a box and make sure that the boxes and the papers are safe and *those* are what need to be retained for a recount when someone thinks things don't match and needs to "call the bank about it".