Reply to post: Blame Huawei

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise, politicians will philander... And US voting machines will be physically insecure

Cuddles

Blame Huawei

The fact that voting machines remain hilariously insecure is sad, but not really surprising. The part I found particularly interesting, though, was this:

"found in one machine a hard-wired IP address pointing to an overseas address block. The exact purpose and nature of whatever underlying feature used this address remains undetermined, but it underscores questions about foreign control over voting system supply chains"

All kinds of noise have been made about the dangers of foreign hardware, especially in relation to Huawei but also including plenty of others. Yet here we have real voting machines in actual use containing foreign-made hardware with hardcoded connections to foreign IP addresses for unknown purposes, and apparently no-one gives the slightest shit about it. It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone here, but it almost makes one wonder if security isn't actually the main concern, and maybe there are some ulterior motives involved in starting a global trade war.

Edit: On a different note, there's also this:

"This can easily create long lines at a polling place, since, as we also observed, it can take up to 15-20 minutes for these devices to complete a reboot cycle."

Speed and convenience seems to be the only argument actually in favour of electronic voting. Except they don't actually provide speed and convenience and can instead massively slow things down even when they're not being hacked.

Seriously though, 15-20 minutes to reboot? I didn't have to wait that long to load Spectrum games from tape. And that's including multiple attempts after the plug fell out just before it finished. How is anyone producing anything today that takes that long to boot up?

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