jwz wrote xscreensaver...


I for one am much looking forward to Sunbird...

Vendor lockin sucks.

Apple lockin sucks harder.

that was, in fact, the final straw.: "

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say 'I told you so' if it makes you feel better.

Anyway, this means several things:

• You shouldn't be holding your breath waiting for a new release of Gronk.

• I also got to stop using the crapware known as Mozilla Sunbird; now I can use iCal, which Just Works (for example, the alarms actually go off, and it doesn't periodically shit a WAV file into my .ics file.)

• The future direction of xscreensaver has become... highly ambiguous.

I'm still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I'm hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I'll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver. It stopped working some time between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 due to some GTK/Fink stupidity where pkgconfig/gobject-2.0.pc never gets installed. I'm trying not to care. That's going quite well.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys."

(Via jwz.)

dork love

Dave's DVD player remote has the same battery as my first graphing calculator (which used three), the Casio 7500, which had 26 user accessible registers and a whole 4 kilobytes of NVRAM. The manual that came with it had a program you could enter into the calculator to solve quadratic equations. I wrote my first program on that machine, a clock that updated every minute, that had a timing loop that had to be hand adjusted.

Sigh.

Did I mention the battery in the remote is almost dead.

Dave? Are you listening? You need 1 CR2025 battery.

Z is for Zedra

Procrastination is hitting full steam this morning.
First, Neil Gaiman on Tea. I'm not quite sure what it is about British writers that brings them to write about tea. I have a hankering suspicion that it may be Love.

I had a discussion with a roommate last night about the defense of the religious. For the record, I'm not opposed to the religious. I'm opposed to the religious ignorant - those that cloak their ignorance in a mantle of religion, and thus denigrate all other religious people.

Now for some gleeful moral equivalence: If a vocal minority of ice cream eaters (say in the larger tens of millions) suddenly takes to fits of savagely beating a good friend of yours (for the sake of the argument, let us call him progress), you might begin to give the ice cream eaters (who coincidentally largely look away and focus on sucking on their cones) some dirty looks.

Just a leetle bit, no?

An article at the nyt reports on the growing movement of the religious ignorant to spread bigotry through the land:

Georgia State Senator Nancy Schaefer on gay/straight alliance clubs in (gay/straight integrated) high schools:

"I just don't feel like homosexual clubs have anything to do with readin', writin' and 'rithmetic."

And now for something completely different

I had forgotten about Pokey.

No longer.

Store Wars

Thanks to Kt for this cute gem:

http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html

I miss Bill Nye.

Two Words: Road Trip.

Singing at the gates or Mordor: "

Spamalot and The Light in the Piazza were the big winners at Sunday’s 59th annual Tony Awards. Any early favorites for next year? From April’s Detroit Free Press:

The next big thing in theater, the musical version of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ is scheduled for its world premiere in 2006 in Toronto. Previews won’t begin until Feb. 2 and the show has yet to be cast but producer Kevin Wallace offered a preview Thursday night to tour operators and other invited guests at the Renaissance Center.




Emphasizing ‘LOTR’s’ human aspects before he mentioned its special effects, Wallace called the show ‘as powerful and emotional a story as you’ve ever experienced in the theater.’




Some particulars: The show will run 3 1/2 hours, including two intermissions; the music is by Indian composer A.R. Rahman (‘Bombay Dreams’) and Finnish folk group Varttina, and there will be Hobbits mingling with playgoers before the show.

Playbill.com recently noted that advance tickets are already being snatched up:

In the first week of sales toward the February 2006 Toronto world premiere of the musical The Lord of the Rings, theatregoers snapped up $7 million (Canadian) in tickets, a spokesperson for the Toronto producers confirmed.




One might cringe imagining a quirky show tune of sweet admonition from Frodo called ‘Oh, Sam!,’ about hobbit pal Sam’s dogged faithfulness. Don’t expect it: Traditional musical theatre is not what India’s most popular composer, A.R. Rahman, and the Finnish group Värttinä, collaborating with Christopher Nightingale, write.




What would the elves sing? What is the sound a hobbit dances to? Can an orc carry a tune?




Expect varied Asian- and European-influenced sounds to suggest the many tribes of the story.

No word yet as to whether or not the Orcs will dance Bollywood style in the background.

"

(Via Sepia Mutiny.)

Köszönöm to Antonia enlightening me on the correct spelling of köszönöm.

Also, Shanakah nears...

I want gills.

It amuses me to no end that the Times does reviews of hip-hop albums.

Where is the stodginess of that old fashioned journalism?

FW: [IP] Clyde Prestowitz: Globalization game

This reminds me a discussion I had with Ziv this morning about the problem with Consumption's valuation in GDP.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Sunday, Jun 5, 2005 7:58 am
Subject: [IP] Clyde Prestowitz: Globalization game

Begin forwarded message:

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@westnet.com>
Date: June 5, 2005 4:58:15 AM EDT
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Clyde Prestowitz: Globalization game
From the Boston Globe -- http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/05/31/globalization_game/

Globalization game
By Clyde Prestowitz

US PRESSURE on Beijing to revalue its yuan is now dominating the news, but China is only following Japan as a manifestation of a much bigger problem. Globalization is broken. As currently structured, it is undermining US productive capability and becoming unsustainable.

Without fundamental change in the rules of globalization, any conceivable yuan revaluation now won't have much impact on world economic imbalances. Remember that economists said a 20-30 percent revaluation of Japan's yen (then at 260 yen to the dollar) would balance trade in the 1980s. But the yen has more than doubled since then, and Japan still maintains a large trade surplus both globally and with the United States, as do all of the world's major economies.

The real problem is that globalization is a different game for many countries than it is for America. While China's peg of the yuan to the dollar is now the focus of criticism, most Asian countries have long managed their currencies to remain weak against the dollar in order to stimulate their exports. Japan has spent over $300 billion in currency intervention in recent years to keep the dollar up and the yen and export prices down. In addition, many countries offer tax holidays, financial incentives, and protected markets to attract new facilities in ''strategic" industries that no one expects to move just because currencies fluctuate.

These actions follow from policies specifically aimed at accumulating large trade and dollar surpluses as a matter both of stimulating growth from exports and of assuring national economic sovereignty by avoiding dependence on foreign lenders.

While US state governors extend financial incentives to attract investment, they have only peanuts to offer compared to foreign countries, and, of course, do not control their own currencies. The federal government has long shown no interest in attracting foreign factories to or keeping US factories on its shores. Rather, America's emphasis is entirely on consumption-led growth. Banks aggressively offer credit cards to students with only part-time jobs. Home equity loans with tax deductible interest payments are used to pay for vacation trips. Not only does the White House call for tax cuts in wartime, but tells consumers it's their patriotic duty to buy more.
Americans at all levels really do believe that debt and deficits don't matter.

The confluence of America's consumerism with the strategic, export- led growth policies of many other countries has produced a world with one net consumer, the United States, which now consumes about $700 billion a year more than it produces. All other major economies are net sellers, depending directly or indirectly on US-bound exports for much or all of their growth. Because America consumes more than it makes, it must borrow from abroad to finance its excess consumption.
In a kind of vendor finance program, a few foreign central banks provide the financing by buying US Treasury bills and other US assets.

Thus, globalization has evolved into a kind of pyramid scheme. To maintain global growth, the United States must consume and borrow ever more while foreign banks buy ever more US Treasuries so their producers can export ever more.

America has long been ambivalent about this situation. Consumers love the low import prices, US CEOs love the foreign tax holidays, and the
US government loves the foreign lending that helps keep US interest rates low. But the chronically overvalued dollar and the foreign investment incentives also cause a steady transfer of production and technology abroad while putting downward pressure on wages and building large foreign claims on future US income. This results in political pressures and US charges of unfairness against trading partners with big surpluses. In the past, cosmetic ''fixes" like
''voluntary" export restraint agreements were used to relieve pressure while the fundamental forces kept operating until the next
''fix."

Now the sustainability of the system has been put in question by the entrance of 3 billion new players from China, India, and the former
Soviet bloc at a moment when the Internet and global air express have negated time and distance along with the long standard economic assumptions that labor, capital, and technology don't move between countries.

These new players are unusual. While having the low wages of developing countries, several hundred million of them have first world skills. That they are effectively next door and also planning to grow by exporting to US markets dramatically increases the pressure on an already stressed system. Even for America there are ultimate limits on consumption and borrowing. US borrowing already absorbs 80 percent of the world's available savings. At 100 percent the global economy will be in deep crisis.

The only way to avoid that is to insist that the globalization game be played the same way by all its players. Sure, China needs to revalue, but without other big changes, globalization as we know it will be on life support.

Clyde Prestowitz is the author of the recently published ''Three
Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the
East."

-------------------------------------

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

FW: [IP] !!! More on Apple to Ditch IBM

Now this sounds quite credible.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Saturday, Jun 4, 2005 7:47 pm
Subject: [IP] !!! More on Apple to Ditch IBM

Begin forwarded message:

From: Anthony Baker <anthony@thinkbigideas.com>
Date: June 4, 2005 6:06:43 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: More on Apple to Ditch IBM

Dave,

This is a post from Anonymous Coward over on Slashdot. He's provided a lot of great insight on Apple issues in the past and this message, in response to another post, seems to make a lot of sense.

If true, it just means that Apple might be arranging a deal with
Intel to have them manufacture PowerPC chips for them -- not switching to the x86 chipset.

-----------

You are close but your anger is clouding your vision. I will fix up your list.

- IBM and Apple sign a multi chip agreement with very specific clock speed, power usage, production quantities and target dates built into the contract. the first chip is the PPC970.

- Jobs and IBM publicly trumpets that the chip will hit 3GHz in a year's time which is actually well below the contractual promises IBM made.

- Jobs and IBM get humiliated by the fact they didn't even come close and still aren't there after 2 years.

- Jobs throws constant fits and points out that IBM has missed every metric they contractually promised to meet. Jobs also points out that the way the contract is structured that Apple now has a right to a significant chunk of IBM IP and the right to shop for a manufacturer who is able to produce any and all of the chips under the original agreement.

While this is unfolding, IBM has been making the same pie in the sky promises to Sony and MS. As with Apple, IBM begins significantly scaling back the promises made to Sony and MS.

- Jobs get jealous of the attention paid to said console manufacturers

- Jobs exercises the options available and IBM gets taken to the cleaners.

I will restate. The contract Apple has with IBM has a "Moto" contingency. There are extremely tough provisions in the contract that Apple insisted upon to prevent another Motorola scenario from happening. IBM had no problem with the provisions because they were positive the could beet the goals by two in half the time. IBM fucked up badly.

Apple now owns a large amount of PPC IP and Intel will now be manufacturing and designing PPC chips.

One last comment on the Altivec "debacle." Considering that 99% of the chips IBM will manufacture over the next five years will have
Altivec or a close derivative, the debacle is IBM's blindness to the importance of vector processing for so long.
-------------------------------------

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

Ok, this news is everywhere. Having said that, I'm very very curious to see how apple pulls off promoting its outdated PPC hardware since people know that there's new hardware coming.

Palm has had this problem for the last year, where they announced PalmOS 6.0 (Cobalt), and then immediately pointed out that there was a version coming right after that with the features everybody wants. Not surprisingly, everybody has been waiting for PalmOS 6.1. Then Palm announced that they were switching to Linux, and we all want to wait till that comes out...

There's also the story of the PC maker in the early 80s which started selling a model, and then immediately announced a better model that wasn't going to be out for many months. Everybody stopped buying their current model, and Osbourne went out of business shortly thereafter.

But I hope that Apple does succeed at this, and I look forward to making a tidy profit installing OS X on your PC (because say what they will, we WILL find ways to run OS X on your PC.)

Steve Jobs, like Howard Hughes, Mystifies: "

Some men dream the future. He built it.

Steve Jobs, the maverick who has architected one of the greatest comebacks in the history of Silicon Valley, continues to prove that he is a modern day Howard Hughes. Unpredictable, charming, loving, petulant, and perhaps more than anything deviously mysterious. But more than anything brilliant. When everyone including Intel’s own CEO designate said, that it would be a cold day in hell, before Apple uses Intel’s x86 chips, Jobs goes ahead and does it anyway.

It is a Machiavellian move, directed to rattle the Rajahs of Redmond. It is a subtle message - all things equal, Apple OS is much better than Microsoft’s Windows and the market place will prove it. You might think it is bit of conjecture, but look at the reality of the situation. Now Apple can get Intel’s marketing subsidies. The economics of x86 that Microsoft so adroitly has made work over decades now start to benefit its rival, in the mainstay PC business. The price and speed factors, two issues the Wintel PC makers have so often touted are now working for Apple as well. That leaves the platform - Windows XP versus OS-X! Insecure versus Secure! Work versus Fun! Bill versus Steve!

So how do I see this playing out?


First, this deal is going to be all about the laptops, especially those which can handle OS-X nicely, are light weight and consume less power. Because if that was not so, then Apple could as easily have signed a deal with AMD, which makes better x86 chips for the desktop. IBM has failed to deliver the low power consuming yet muscular versions of its G5 chips fine tuned for Powerbooks. Secondly, I think Apple will exploit Intel’s chips for often rumored Tablet PC, that could have features in common with Nokia 770 tablet. I would not be surprised that Monday morning, the announcement circles around XScale, or low powered Centrino chips.

The implications of this announcement for rest of the industry are not trivial. Intel, with this deal, and its previous efforts with Linux, is willing to part ways with its partner in crime, Microsoft. Expect, Microsoft to get cozier with AMD. It also would ensure that AMD chips might end up in Dell machines, since all bets are off. These are trying times for Microsoft, but I would not even wager even a dime against Chairman Gates.

There is more to this move, and it has got nothing to do with the PC platform. Its all about the consumer electronics devices. Jobs knows that he has to get the Apple a bigger footprint in the computer business, if he can successfully execute on his CE strategy. It needs to ensure that it can still use iPod as the carrot and the stick, not just for consumers but also for the media business. He needs to ensure his DRM is a better option than Windows. In his own autocratic way he wants the world to march to his tune. And if consumers respond well, he might get his wish.

Wall Street Journal has just confirmed that on Monday, Apple is going to announce that it is slowly going to transition to the x86 chips. C/Net had reported on Friday that Apple would make an announcement on Monday at WWDC. WSJ had reported about the likelihood in its Heard On The Street column on May 23rd. (Thanks Bill!)

PS: Just to clarify, this means Apple will make computers that will use Intel x86 chips, not that you can run OS-X on a Stink Pad.

"

(Via Om Malik on Broadband.)

Interesting things come up when you google for "2850 hardware RNG".

Another excellent centrist pithy political blog.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Bush administration abhors a truce. Not coincidentally, many people think that vacuums and the Bush administration both suck.

Krispy Kreme's free doughnut day: "Today only, Krispy Kreme celebrates Doughnut Day by giving away a free doughnut of your choice at all participating retail stores, as we mentioned...(more)"

(Via dealnews - 20 most recent deals..)

Beautiful Photos of Calcutta's other big train station, Howrah (which was always across the bridge for me).

[IP] Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Wednesday, Jun 1, 2005 9:20 am
Subject: [IP] Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)

Begin forwarded message:

From: EEkid@aol.com
Date: May 31, 2005 9:55:00 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)
Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)
Tuesday, 31 May 2005, 1:10 pm
Article: www.blackboxvoting.org
Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways) - BBV Exclusive

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ - Source URL

Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer
Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia
County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand- counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.

A little man living in every ballot box

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election.
The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.

Ion Sancho: Truth and Excellence in Elections

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho and Information Systems
Officer Thomas James had already implemented security procedures in
Leon County far exceeding the norm in elections management. This testing, done by a team of researchers including Black Box Voting, independent filmmakers, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and special consultant Harri Hursti, was authorized by Mr. Sancho, in an unusual act of openness and courage, to identify any remaining holes in Leon County's election security.

The results of the memory card hack demonstration will assist elections supervisors throughout the U.S., by emphasizing the critical importance of accounting for each and every memory card and protecting access.

Findings:

Computer expert Harri Hursti gained control over Leon County memory cards, which handle the vote-reporting from the precincts. Dr.
Herbert Thompson, a security expert, took control of the Leon County central tabulator by implanting a trojan horse-like script.

Two programmers can become a lone programmer, says Hursti, who has figured out a way to control the entire central tabulator by way of a single memory card swap, and also how to make tampered polling place tapes match tampered central tabulator results. This more complex approach is untested, but based on testing performed May 26, Hursti says he has absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Three memory card tests demonstrated successful manipulation of election results, and showed that 1990 and 2002 FEC-required safeguards are being violated in the Diebold version 1.94 opti-scan system.

Three memory card hacks

1. An altered memory card (electronic ballot box) was substituted for a real one. The optical scan machine performed seamlessly, issuing a report that looked like the real thing. No checksum captured the change in the executable program Diebold designed into the memory card.

2. A second altered memory card was demonstrated, using a program that was shorter than the original. It still worked, showing that there is also no check for the number of bytes in the program.

3. A third altered memory card was demonstrated with the votes themselves changed, showing that the data block (votes) can be altered without triggering any error message.

How to "Roll over the odometer" in Diebold optical scan machines

Integer overflow checks do not seem to exist in this system, making it possible to stuff the ballot box without triggering any error message. This would be like pre-loading minus 100 votes for Tom and plus 100 votes for Rick (-100+100=ZERO) -- changing the candidate totals without changing the overall number of votes.

A more precise comparison would be this: The odometer on a car rolls over to zero after 999,999. In the Diebold system tested, the rollover to zero happens at 65,536 votes. By pre-loading 65,511 votes for a candidate, after 25 real votes appear (65,511 plus 25 = 65,536) the report "rolls over" so that the candidate's total is ZERO.

This manipulation can be balanced out by preloading votes for candidate "A" at 65,511 and candidate "B" at 25 votes -- producing an articifial 50-vote spread between the candidates, which will not be obvious after the first 25 votes for candidate "A" roll over to zero.
The "negative 25" votes from the odometer rollover counterbalance the "plus 25" votes for the other candidates, making the total number of votes cast at the end of the day exactly equal to the number of voters.

While testing the hack on the Leon County optical scan machine,
Hursti was stunned to find that pre-stuffing the ballot box to "roll over the odometer" produced no error message whatsoever.*

*We did not have the opportunity to scan ballots after stuffing the ballot box. Therefore, the rollover to zero was not tested in Leon
County. This integer overflow capability is discernable in the program itself. We did have the opportunity to test a pre-stuffed ballot box, which showed that pre-loaded ballot boxes do not trigger any error message.

Simple tweaks to pass L&A test and survive zero tape

Though the additional tweaks were not demonstrated at the Leon County elections office, Hursti believes that the integer overflow hack can be covered up on the "zero tape" produced at the beginning of the election. The programming to cover up manipulations during the "logic
& accuracy test" is even simpler, since the program allows you to specify on which reports (and, if you like, date and time of day) the manipulation will affect.

The testing demonstrated, using the actual voting system used in a real elections office, that Diebold programmers developed a system that sacrifices security in favor of dangerously flexible programming, violating FEC standards and calling the actions of ITA testing labs and certifiers into question.

In the case of Leon County, inside access was used to achieve the hacks, but there are numerous ways to introduce the hacks without inside access. Outside access methods will be described in the technical report to be released in mid-June.

Security concerns

Putting an executable program into removable memory card "ballot boxes" -- and then programming the opti-scan chip to call and invoke whatever program is in the live ballot box during the middle of an election -- is a mind-boggling design from a security standpoint.
Combining this idiotic design with a program that doesn't even check to see whether someone has tampered with it constitutes negligence and should result in a product recall.

Counties that purchased the Diebold 1.94 optical scan machines should not pay for any upgraded program; instead, Diebold should be required to recall the faulty program and correct the problem at its own expense.

None of the attacks left any telltale marks, rendering all audits and logs useless, except for hand-counting all the paper ballots.

Is it real? Or is it Memorex?

For example, Election Supervisor Ion Sancho was unable to tell, at first, whether the poll tape printed with manipulated results was the real thing. Only the message at the end of the tape, which read "Is this real? Or is it Memorex?" identified the tape as a tampered version of results.

In another test, Congresswoman Corrine Brown (FL-Dem) was shocked to see the impact of a trojan implanted by Dr. Herbert Thompson. She asked if the program could be manipulated in such a way as to flip every fifth vote.

"No problem," Dr. Thompson replied.

"It IS a problem. It's a PROBLEM!" exclaimed Brown, whose district includes the troubled Volusia County, along with Duval County -- both currently using the Diebold opti-scan system.

This system is also used in Congressman John Conyers' home district, in contentious King County, Washington, and in Lucas County, Ohio
(where six election officials resigned or were suspended after many irregularities were found.)

Diebold optical scans were used in San Diego for its ill-fated mayoral election in Nov. 2004.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Optical scan systems have paper ballots, but election officials are crippled in their ability to hand count these ballots due to restrictive state regulations and budget limitations.

The canvassing (audit) procedure used to certify results from optical scan systems involves comparing the "poll tapes" (cash register-like results receipts) with the printout from the central tabulator. These tests demonstrate that both results can be manipulated easily and quickly.

Minimum requirements to perform this hack:

1. A single specimen memory card from any county using the Diebold
1.94 optical scan series. (These cards were seen scattered on tables in King County, piled in baskets accessible to the public in Georgia, and jumbled on desktops in Volusia county.)

2. A copy of the compiler for the AccuBasic program. (These compilers have been fairly widely distributed by Diebold and its predecessor company, and there are workarounds if no compiler is available.)

3. Modest working language of any one of the higher level computer languages (Pascal, C, Cobol, Basic, Fortran...) along with introductory-level knowledge of assembler or machine language.
(Machine language knowledge needed is less than an advanced refrigerator or TV repairmen needs. The optical scan system is much simpler than modern appliances).

The existence of the executable program in the memory card was discernable from a review of the Diebold memos. The test hacks took just a few hours for Black Box Voting consultants to develop.

Nearly 800 jurisdictions conducted a presidential election on this system. This system is so profoundly hackable that an advanced-level
TV repairman can manipulate votes on it.

Black Box Voting asked Dr. Thompson and Hursti to examine the central tabulator and the optical scan system after becoming concerned that not enough attention had been paid to optical scans, tabulators and remote access.

Thompson and Hursti each found the vulnerabilities for their respective hacks in less than 24 hours.

"Open for Business"

When it comes to this optical-scan system, as Hursti says, "It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.'"

The question now is: How brisk has business been? Based on this new evidence, it is time to sequester and examine the memory cards used with Diebold optical scans in Nov. 2004.

The popularity of tamper-friendly machines that are "open for business" in heavily Democratic areas may explain the lethargy with which Democratic leaders have been approaching voting machine security concerns.

The enthusiasm with which Republicans have endorsed machines with no paper ballots at all indicates that neither party really wants to have intact auditing of elections.

The ease with which a system -- which clearly violates dozens of FEC standards going back to 1990 -- was certified calls into question the honesty, competence, and personal financial transactions of both testing labs and NASED certifiers.

Revamp and update hand-counted paper ballot technology?

Perhaps it is time to revisit the idea of hand-counted paper ballots, printed by machines for legibility, with color-coded choices for quick, easy, accurate sorting and counting. We should also take another look at bringing counting teams in when the polls close, to relieve tired poll workers.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00381.htm

------------------------------------
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

I am very very very close to wiping OS X from my machine and installing OpenBSD or linux.

grrrr.

What's the point of a very complicated beautiful operating system for me if it keeps crashing, can't sync with my palm properly, and can't switch between wireless modem and Wifi.

How long is it going to be before a Bagle variant appears that doesn't download from a preset list of URLs, but instead has an embedded trackerless Bittorrent client.

You Windows users are so screwed.

No, You windows users are so going to screw us over...