Monday, October 23, 2006
Are your election officials better than Virginia's?
Princeton researchers put together a video showing security problems with the Diebold machines. Here's a report from Jeremy Epstein in Virginia:
Their attitude is supplemented by outright ignorance:
That's proven wrong every day, and every time there's a security problem in a Microsoft product.
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I'm on the Virginia state commission charged with making
recommendations around voting systems, and we watched the Princeton video as part of our most recent meeting. The reaction from the election officials was amusing and scary: "if this is so real, why don't you hack a real election instead of this pretend stuff in the lab". Pointing out that it would (most likely) be a felony, and people like Rubin, Felten, and others are trying to help security not go to jail didn't seem to impress them.
Their attitude is supplemented by outright ignorance:
P.S. One of the elected officials on the commision insisted that Felten
couldn't possibly have done his demo exploit without source code, because
"everyone" knows you can't do an exploit without the source.
That's proven wrong every day, and every time there's a security problem in a Microsoft product.