Re: Voting Machine Company ..
Yeah but so what. It's not as if an investor suddenly loads his voting code into the machine.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Well, it wouldn't really be the "purchasing body" that would review it in this case. It would be posted on an FTP server and IT Security departments all over the world would then have a go. A reasonable step to take.
That would only be the first step - after that you have to be sure that the operational procedures are correct and secure and reliable and traceable, that the code on the machine is the correct one, that the overall tabulation is correct etc. etc.
I remember the Diebold voting machines barfing all over themselves ... well, I fear there may be overall shameful code, possibly a shared codebase with who-knows-what (ATMs, maybe?) which the companies involved don't want to see aired. At all. Because lawsuits might fly.
Maybe not.
The latest "IEEE Security and Privacy" - "e-voting security edition" has this to say in the article "Electronic Voting Security 10 Years after the Help America Vote Act"
(That article is paywalled here but apparently free here. IEEE show really start to gets its act together).
"Merle S. King, executive director of the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, and Brian Hancock, director of voting system testing and certification at the US Election Assistance Commission,
discuss e-voting security 10 years after the Help America Vote Act."
The Help America Vote Act was ratified in 2002, dumping millions of dollars into the voting system market and resulting in a major shift from mechanical to electronic voting machines. Shortly thereafter, several academic studies on the security of these e-voting systems emerged. What’s your perception of e-voting system security in the first few years after HAVA?
Merle S. King: In general terms, the e-voting security movement wrapped too much around the security issue. Don’t get me wrong; security is very important, and e-voting introduced new challenges. But if proper procedures were followed, the machines were safe—we now have a history of thousands of anomaly-free elections conducted on DREs [direct-recording electronic voting machines].
Brian Hancock: I agree. The voting systems that caused the most fuss weren’t network connected, and the attacks that succeeded and were reported happened in a laboratory environment. I would like to have seen more realistic testing conducted in operational environments, with the normal electoral protections in place. As it was, exceptional security weaknesses were portrayed as normal, and situations that rarely occur were represented as common. DRE voting systems remain in wide use, and we still don’t have any reported incidents of confirmed security breaches with them.
Well, the good stuff will probably be found in ARM implementations soon. Is the instruction set really important anymore?
> Imagination says that MIPS will have to hold back $100m of the proceeds from the sales to cover taxes and other liabilities.
This irks me. Good money thrown into the swine's trough that won't be invested in useful things ... OM NOM NOM NOM.
> ARM can't achieve anything remotely near the instructions-per-second ...
That doesn't make sense either from the arse or the genitals side. The instruction set should be pretty orthogonal to attainable "IPS" and indeed the ARM instruction set has been designed for speed and ease-of-implementation, I hear.
"And if you have a patent, every move by your competition looks like a lawsuit."
Totally, completely wrong saying.
Here we rather have the case of the legal caste strategically leaving loaded shotguns lying around to be found by the ego-blowupdolls and retarded babbys from the management layers, who then proceed to shoot each others and their own feet off.
Each shot, however, transforms overall value (for shareholders and the economy-at-large) magically into cashouts for the legal caste.
"Merchants of death", indeed.
> Content filtering is a prime example; few companies subscribe the to the US model of unlimited free speech.
Unlimited free speech in the US? Just a political talking point. For one, there are legal limits [hell, you may go to prison for publishing lewd comics in Pennsylvania] and then there are "things you just don't say" unless you want several TLAs on your ass. Foreigner bashing and outright National-Socialism, even from the Prez and Prez hopefuls, is A-OK, I will grant that.
> Many countries worry what unrestricted access to knowledge will do to their population.
I would say that many countries worry what unrestricted access to knowledge will do to their STATE APPARATUS. Remember the shitstorm about Wikileaks and its pretty mild exposure of the nest of craven idiots that are in the bureaucracy? Yes, that kind of worry.
> demonstrates how citizen journalism can go wrong
Unfortunately the last ten years of unlimited warfare and clueless economic policy and the next four years which to all indication will be far worse, possibly with a few nukes being popped off [and not by Iran because it doesn't have any] show how mainstream journalism is consistently wrong in its message or assessments. Does anyone discuss that? Should we ban the Neocon Post and the War Street Journal from the Internets?
This looks like another discussion round of wankers who know they want more statist control but don't yet know how to sell this program. Or maybe they just want a nice holiday in Baku.
That was a contentless technobabble article, with the obligatory "quantum" thrown in. Also "non-Lipschitz function" because it sounds good. That might designate a Lipschitz-Continuous function, which is basically a function that doesn't do arbitrarily strong jumps or decays into disconnected points.
Is this the bridge of the Enterprise?
Clearly, we currently have the anti-libertarian paradise. No surprises here.
In other news:
Charles Bowden, who has written several books about Mexico and drug trafficking, said policy failures have exacerbated the problems. “The war on drugs is over,” he said. “There are more drugs in the U.S. of higher quality and at a lower price." (...) “In the U.S., murder is bad for their drug business,” he said. “In Mexico, it is business.”
> No, but you can give them the data within the file
That would mean that there is something called "data" that can be within a "file" but is not, actually, the "file" in and of itself (i.e. the bytestream - one shall abstract from problems of how that bytestream is internally represented or even coded on the disk or in RAM or on tape).
That seems nonsensical.
You could go all marketing hog and say that within the "data" there is "knowledge" that is not, in and of itself, the "data". And within the "knowledge" there is "wisdom", which is not, in and of itself the "knowledge". All equally bizarre statements that have no grounding whatsoever.
Ultimately it comes to down to the similarity of these situations:
"I want access to the bytestream on the server in front of which you put armed goons. I put it there when access to the server was permitted. Give it to me!"
and
"I want access to the notebook in the locker in front of which you put armed goons. I put it there when access to the locker was permitted. Give it to me!"
"Tax evasion is widely seen as an important factor in Greek's economic malaise"
So-called "Tax evasion" is *always* an important factor in an "economic malaise", if not in reality then at least in the political showroom full of noise and thunder.
There are always those that think that State Owns Everything does not actually need to restrict its means and can indeed spend more than comes in. This leads to the conclusion that someone, somewhere, hasn't paid enough if the chicken comes home to roost.
Perfected doublethink then blends out the fact that the enormous public debt was politically easy to accumulate because of preferential EUR rates, that there is no money left in pension schemes and social security and that everything went to make-work schemes, public amusements, public *servant* amusements, military adventures, special projects for cronies and well-connected cousins and that now there is no way out any longer.
It may be that the "tax evaders" are the aforementioned "cronies", so they should get what they deserve - but not because of tax evasion but because of cronyism. And the politicians should be hung alongside.
> Suddenly, your legal department becomes a major cost centre and that's bad for business.
Seriously, have you just discovered that?
> Apple didn't start this tit-for-tat cycle of litigation. They could easily have settled out of court (or even just bought the plaintiff outright); they certainly have the money.
Wait, what? Apple buys Samsung what. The hell?
> This isn't business. It's politics.
You mean Apple selflessly highlights problems with the current IP regime? Well, some people believe there are aliens in US army fridges, so who knows?
Well, as long as you don't breath it in and keep it off your skin, you should be good. It's not classified as a carcinogen either (though diesel burn products are):
"In a multi-site, case-control study, there was evidence for an increased risk of prostate cancer and squamous cell carcinoma of the lung [36] but this effect could not be attributed to any particular chemical. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have evaluated diesel fuels as being “not classifiable as to their carcinogenicity to humans (Group 3)” [9]: there is “inadequate evidence” to classify diesel as a human carcinogen and “limited evidence” for the carcinogenicity of diesel to experimental animals.
What is amazing is that generators are on the upper floors. I seriously doubt that is a good idea. What if a fuel line breaks?
Quite so. But in order to have all those "positive shop experiences" (in particular, well informed staff - a PDF or a point-by-point comparison from the Internet is very hard to beat by a human), and the risk of customers then turning around and "buying off the net" anyway, I can't imagine the shop can make any money competing against a well-stocked, well-done and reputable online shop. Checkmate for this kind of economical actor?
Wrinkled mummified zombie icon, then.
"It remains to be seen whether improving the security and reliability of its products will convince governments such as the US and Australia that Huawei doesn’t pose a national security risk, however."
Don't make me laugh. This is like expecting "governments" (scare quotes mandatory) such as the US to agree that Iran doesn't actually pose a nuclear threat - it's very inconclusive, after all it's just its own intelligence assessments, its generals, and the IAEA (the latter under a lather of sexed-up scary cat innuendos, to be sure) which say so.
Point is, political decision is political.
Actually, when software patents were discussed, I think I remember Microsoft basically sitting in the corner and saying neither Nay nor Aye. The lawyer types however, were salivating everywhere while dire predictions came from the technical press. I would need to dig up some old IEEE magazines for that though.
I'm so tiled, I mean tired.
Oberon Operating System circa 1985, maybe. MAYBE?
Also the ACME text editor...
"The Microsoft design principles are the overall set of principles that are driving the Windows 8 Store applications."
A more bizarre and meaningless phrase couldn't be uttered by a lifelong scholar of Hegelian Dialectic Materialism As Applied To Marxism/Leninism who needs to say exactly what needs to be said lest he be put on the passenger list of a train to a re-education institution.
I am so disappoint.
The only good side is that the Keynesian Delusionalists à la Krugman will now be held up to their words: After this, the economy should rebound swiftly, right? No I don't believe so either. The broken window fallacy applies. But I'm sure we will soon hear moans that Sandy didn't destroy ENOUGH for a sustainable rebound.
What the hell is that? Would I be going to club fed if I withdrew USD 9000 twice in a row (even though I know nothing about any "reporting requirements" and haven't signed anything about any "reporting requirements" that I can remember)? Even though several three-letter agencies-cum-gestapo-outfits have the records anyway? What kind of downtrodden people accepts this sh*t without storming Venerable Places Of High Discourse with sharpened showels and lead pipes?