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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Topic Author's Original Post - Feb 7, 2018 - 06:00pm PT
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Other threads have touched on it, but the message is diluted by impertinent bickering. Some people are sufficiently jaded about our choice of candidates that they claim elections don't even matter anyways. While I think we have a long way to go to have fair elections, it can be a heck of a lot worse in terms of reflecting the will of the people, and we are heading in that worse direction.
Current news item that brought this top of mind for me:
 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/russians-penetrated-u-s-voter-systems-says-top-u-s-n845721
We should first clarify that, because of technical problems in the systems coupled with stupid decisions by the local governments that manage them, that nearly anyone with basic computer security experience can hack a voting machine. No reason to single out the Russians or Chinese or other state players as a bogeyman, other than that state and corporate players have enough resources to hack enough different individual voting machines to actually alter election outcomes.
We should also point out that the hacks can be performed in a way that leaves little to no trail to identify who do it. Maybe some massive centralized effort sourced from Russian IP addresses to voting machines or local government computers would be evidence of attacks sourced from Russia. But for now I think most of the attacks are easier to do in person from a parking lot or in person while voting in the booth, so claiming "it's definitely the Russians" reeks of b.s That's not to say that separate types of attacks on the voting systems have been identified and sourced to Russians. But in the security world, it would be just as easy to have other state players (or even USA agencies) use compromised machines in Russia as a sort of "false flag" operation to make the Ruskies look bad. Bottom line is our voting system is in shambles and it's not mainstream news. Maybe blaming it on Russians is a way to build political will to bring people together to fix it?
Some references:
A step-by-step example of anonymously changing electronic votes for machines used in Virginia a while back, showing how ridiculously easy it is or was: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/an_incredibly_i.html
Summary of weaknesses immediately discovered by hackers with no specific experience on voting machines at a security conference:
https://www.the-parallax.com/2017/08/11/defcon-voting-machines-no-quick-fix/
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/20/538312605/the-insecurity-of-americas-old-and-underfunded-voting-systems
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-arent-ready-election/
Discussions that led to a high profile and legal demonstration of how pervasive the problem is last year:
https://forum.defcon.org/forum/defcon/dc25-official-unofficial-parties-social-gatherings-events-contests/dc25-villages/voting-machine-hacking-village/226138-new-for-def-con-25-voting-machine-hacking-village
What they accomplished:
https://www.cnet.com/news/defcon-hackers-find-its-very-easy-to-break-voting-machines/
Voting machine vendors are fighting back, sending threatening letters to Ebay sellers saying it is illegal to sell them (which it is not), trying to block the Defcon hackers from getting access to the voting machines to demonstrate how much they suck:
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/26/voting-machine-makers-are-already-worried-about-defcon/
Karl Baba shared right here some real world consequences of that more than a decade ago:
http://www.supertopo.com/inc/postreply.php?topic_id=130872
It's not a new problem, and 13 years after Karl's post here on Supertopo it's as bad or worse than ever.
Today, eletronic voting automates/simplifies crime and subversion of democracy as much as it automates the legitimate voting process.
The technical solutions would be simple enough and cheap enough with super-cheap computers and open source operating systems and encryption software, that it is hard to believe it is NOT a conspiracy to subvert the will of the people with a pre-determined dictated outcome.
Where is the uproar of the public about having the will of the people actually captured accurately in the first place? Between this, and the gerrymandering b.s., and the differential access to voting, and the opaque money-driven process of nominating candidates in the first place, we have some serious problems to resolve.
But for now, let's at least focus on accurately recording what is the will of the people, however silly that may end up being.
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seano
Mountain climber
none
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(Sorry, completely OT and possibly not climber-y enough...)
What a piece of work is a man!
We created a monoculture of bananas, they all succumbed to one disease, and now bananas taste worse.
We sold millions of identically flawed web cameras, and they all got hacked to form the Mirai botnet.
We stored millions of people's personal data in one place at Equifax, they got hacked, and now pretty much every American with credit in 2017 has to deal with identity theft for the rest of his or her life.
We connected thousands of identical voting machines to the internet, and... what do you expect?
Programmers took years to mostly solve the problem of separating lines of text in 3 different ways. I can't imagine how long it will take them to fix the Internet of Sh#t,
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