Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Florida vote-rigging: the programmer speaks
A followup to farmer's post here, via Blue Lemur. One comment on what programmer Curtis says, posted there:
Alert reader bobo mentions a thread on Slashdot: Hre it is. One good quote on the "you will not see it" after the vote issue:
I dunno.
Alert readers stress the tinfoil hat stories that have later been shown to be true ("Killing Castro with an exploding cigar? Pshaw!"). Alert readers here, as did those at Blue Lemur, also stress the possibility of Dan Rather-style disinformation, where a discredited version of real events ended up obliterating the entire story. (Funny how it happens when we get close...).
It would be nice if Curtis kept a backup of the code, so we could test it and inspect it. That might, at least, answer some of the technical questions....
“If you inspect the code, you will see it,” [programmer Curtis] states. I understand this point.
“Once the vote is flipped, you will not.” What the hell does this mean?
We need to be as clear as possible when reporting on this issue and press on Mr.Curtis for further details. We don’t need another Karl Rove worm to spoil the hard work of ALL our net community members.
Mr.Curtis,
Thankyou for your bravery in these cowardly times but please provide more details.
Alert reader bobo mentions a thread on Slashdot: Hre it is. One good quote on the "you will not see it" after the vote issue:
Some of what hes said isn't entirely true - you could certainly find any rigging from looking at the binary, it might take allot of work but it would always be possible. What you really need is to have the program stored on a memory card in the machine, you could then design it to write over the incriminating parts of itself after the election. You would need two versions of the source code - one would be the dirty original which you would want to keep secret and the other would be the 'public' version which would compile to the identical binary that was in the machine after it had over-written itself, obviously you would have to prevent inspection of the binary in the machines until after the election and the whole thing would be very difficult to design, but do-able. Come to think of it, the diebold machines stored their programs on flash didnt they?
I dunno.
Alert readers stress the tinfoil hat stories that have later been shown to be true ("Killing Castro with an exploding cigar? Pshaw!"). Alert readers here, as did those at Blue Lemur, also stress the possibility of Dan Rather-style disinformation, where a discredited version of real events ended up obliterating the entire story. (Funny how it happens when we get close...).
It would be nice if Curtis kept a backup of the code, so we could test it and inspect it. That might, at least, answer some of the technical questions....
