How much do you trust your (operating) system?
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(3925 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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