Legal Troubles Continue To Mount For Diebold 115
dstates writes "The State of Maryland has filed a $8.5M claim against Premier Election Systems (previously known as Diebold), joining Ohio in seeking damages from the company. The claim alleges that election officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address multiple security flaws in the machines. Previously, Diebold paid millions to settle a California lawsuit over security issues in their machines. The dispute comes as Maryland and Virginia prepare to scrap the touch screen electronic voting systems they bought after the 2000 presidential election. California, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa have already switched to optical scanners, and voters in Pennsylvania are suing to prevent the use of paperless electronic voting systems in their state. Meanwhile, Artifex Software is suing Diebold for violations of the GPL covering the Ghostscript software technology used in the proprietary voting machines."
Re:Remind me... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
All wonderful jokes, but Xmas (in my mind at least) is the consumerism day, while Christmas represents the true, original spirit of the holiday, before corporations got their grubby little paws on everything.
The X stands for chi, the Greek letter and first letter in the Greek word Christ. Xmas is simply an abbreviation for Christmas.
Re: what's in a name? (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, xmas might sound more consumerist precisely because the filthy corporations tried to distance themselves from Christ, both to persuade Christians to think more about shopping and to include, er, heathens in the consumerist orgy.
Of course, Christ never had anything to do with Christmas anyway. He was probably born in August-ish if he existed at all, and Christmas was just the Catholics' attempt to usurp yet another pagan holiday that had been around ever since people knew what a solstice was. So perhaps "Xmas" is a (slightly) better thing anyway.
Happy Newtonmas, everyone!
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:!Paperless (Score:5, Informative)
The programming itself is quite straight-forward but the system design is subtle due to the need for verifiability at every step, not just for experts, but so that interested laymen can at least grasp the verifiability in overview.
The Diebold systems fail on all counts INCLUDING the straight-forward programming.
They also managed to fail at version control, source audit and binary certification by loading unapproved patches onto unknown binary versions the night before an election while refusing to reveal the source even to government auditors.
The fact that they have anti-virus software on them (which has caused at least one problem) shows that they REALLY didn't design it right. A device like a voting machine should only accept new executable code through a JTAG or similar port locked safely inside the case. That means that Windows was a poor choice for an underlying OS. Windows just does far too many things without explicit commands and apparently can't be configured not to. It's source is also a problem to audit by anyone.
More proper options would have been programming on the bare metal or a seriously stripped down Linux or *BSD. Not so much for size but to simplify auditing and testing.