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How much do you trust your (operating) system?
Showing all messages in thread #1257471999
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
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How much do you trust your (operating) system?
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
The USA and Brazil both use electronic voting machines.
The USA uses Windoze-based systems; Brazil uses a Linux-based system.
Brazil recently announced a contest to allow hackers to try to crack their system.
The teams will be given the source
code for everything
and will be granted physical access to the hardware.
I like Roy's phrasing of the situation:
Read the title bar of your browser to see what I mean.
The results are already in on the USA's systems: They're ABYSMAL--e.g.
cache
of http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/08/07/2233250.shtml#24518103
A bit of levity to make the point clearer:
http://xkcd.com/463/
Why any American would trust his bit of the democratic process to this fiasco
and not demand a paper ballot[1], I truly don't know.
It will be interesting to see how things go with the hackers in Brazil.
The advantage to having a completely OPEN mechanism like this
is that voters are made aware of the warts.
You can be quite sure that any vulnerabilities discovered will be quickly fixed
--and tested again by a SEPARATE team from the guys who did the fixing.
NONE of this transparency is applicable to the USA's systems;
they are proprietary and closed, they receive shamefully bad testing/oversight,
and they run the world's most infectable operating system..
[1] In my state, you can't be denied a *real* ballot.
...and I think it's a TERRIBLE idea to store votes as bits--even under Linux.
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re: How much do you trust your (operating) system?
Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Posted by MartinM
(7551 messages posted)
Gewg,
I wondered what you'd be writing about when the last W98 machine bit the dust.
Now I know :-)
LoL
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re: How much do you trust your (operating) system?
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 9:51 am
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
MartinM wrote:
|I wondered what you'd be writing about when the last W98 machine bit the dust.
There isn't anything I've seen that says that the HORRIBLE software
that Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S produce *couldn't* run under Win9x.
(Again, the USAian system is all secret.)
In this example, on the one hand you have the world of Security Through Obscurity
where when faults are found another layer of band-aids are applied
--rather than fixing the core problem.
On the other hand you have guys
who not only invite you to bring your battering ram right up to the gate,
they give you the blueprints to the castle.
The contrast is stark.
I don't really like the way this site spreads articles across 4 pages,
but the guy does delineate why the world is moving to Free(dom) Software:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20528/1154/
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20528/1154/1/1/
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20528/1154/1/2/
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20528/1154/1/3/
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The results are in (was: How much do you trust your (operating) system?)
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 9:29 am
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
gewg_ wrote:
|Brazil recently announced a contest to allow hackers to try to crack their system.
|The teams will be given the source code for everything
|and will be granted physical access to the hardware.
|[...]I like Roy's phrasing of the situation:
|Read the title bar of your browser to see what I mean.
|[...]It will be interesting to see how things go with the hackers in Brazil.
The final tally:
For 4 days, 38 teams hacked at the code and the physical system.
One minor flaw (which would not compromise the overall results) was found.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/11/14/1936200
Googles's automated Portugese-to-English translation of the results summary
is amazingly clear.
My question: Is Portuguese that cool or is that author that good?
...and I still think it's a lousy idea to store votes as bits.
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