Diebold Drama

A Study lead by Professor Edward Felten demonstrated the possibility of tempering with Diebold voting machines. He went on network TV news shows to demostrate the flaws in Diebold's voting machines by inserting virus to them. By infecting machines before the polls open, attackers will be able to control the outcome of an election no matter what the voters do when they cast their votes. Better yet, there is no paper trail for audit.

Professor Felten's Research with abstract:
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

A high-Quality video can be found here at Princeton U's official site:
http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/videos.html

Princeton U's release video - http://www.youtube.com/v/aZws98jw67g


Fox News interview with Professor Felten - http://www.youtube.com/v/8JESZiLpBLE


I originally seen a clip recorded of CNN but it's now gone. The CNN clip also had Professor Felten doing the presentation. He show in the video that it's possible to plant a computer virus to alter election results. Infection of more machines is possible when poll workers swipe cards from one machine to another.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/

After Professor Felten showed his demo, the reporter read Diebold's reply saying, there are like 20+ screws before you can remove the case, and other procedures before you can reach the storage card where the attacker can temper with the card.
the CNN video clip is shown with a screen snapshot at utah-vote.org - http://www.utah-vote.org/

Diebold, the maker of the voting machines responded said it's not so easy to open the machine to temper with them, but a blog post suggest it's possible to open the machine with a common hotel "minibar" key.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1064

A search on Princeton's website will bring you to this link featuring Prof Felten's research claiming e-voting machines are at risk of temper.
http://engineering.princeton.edu/news/felten06


Post on Engadget even suggests that a monkey can mess with the diebold voting machine.
http://www.engadget.com/2004/09/27/floridians-beware-monkey-can-actually-hack-diebold-voting/


http://youtube.com/watch?v=5WMG34cv0zM

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/14296.html


If you or anyone you know works at the voting places, come see me and get a smart card. I'm running for the governator of California by the way. Sidenote, some reported in 2004 California official calls for banning the use of Diebold machines at the polls; some news claimed it was only a rumor.


Credit goes to Professor Felten and his team at Princeton U.

Blogs becoming main stream media

In a few short years blog (or weblogs) has made tremendous impact on society. It got so much attention, CNN now is doing a report (Blog Watch?) based on political blogs every weekday. Beats than going out there to find important news, let's just go on the net to see what people are chatting. And even if those blogs are just rumors or gossips, it still has more truth than your average Fox news reports.

Sure, most of the blogs out there are done by people who don't know what the heck HTML is or how to setup a website/homepage. When we were teenagers (like a few years ago), we actually learn about all that internet stuff. With the simplification of web publishing, anyone with some free time gets to put stuff on the net. The vast majority of blogs are about the average folk just put their boring diary for the world to see. No doubt, there are countless teen girls with their rants about their boring jobs at some little accounting firm (really, accounting isn't sexy? adding and subtracting a whole bunches of numbers over and over again not fun and sexy. what a shock - *sarcasm*). Or they will write about how boys don't notice their signs for a closer relationship; how boys are not into them; or why boys are mean because their signs were ignored and not into them. I dislike blogs because it's annoying, and even the term blog is annoying. Now there are even video blogs, and mobile blogs (cellphone video blog). But I shouldn't judge anything without at least giving it a chance, so let's see what this blog thing can do. After all, Howard Dean had lots of support from the web communities mainly from bloggers.

So is there a point to reading this blog? First of all, I don't like blogs, let's call it a chronicle. Greetings to all and let's see what life take us. Cheers!