On 1/4/06, Tanner Lovelace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Rick, you mention "programs", but didn't go any further. Let me elaborate > on that a bit. :-) > > Not only are there "programs" on the Diebold flash cards, but they are > written in an interpreted language called AccuBasic. This is a serious > problem because the Federal Election Commission standard > specifically stipulates that interpreted code in a voting machine is > absolutely not allowed. The interesting thing on this is that these > machines were FEDERALLY CERTIFIED! You've got to wonder just > what that means now that it has been shown that the Dielbold machines > should have in no way, no how been passed.
Well, they probably got around this because it depends on the meaning of interpreted. AccuBasic is compiled in the same sense that Java is compiled. I'm not sure that interpretation is really that much less secure anyway. Sure you can hide stuff in the interpreter, but as Ken Thompson pointed out in his Turing Award lecture http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/ you can hide stuff in the compiler as well. And as far as I know, the federal government doesn't actually certify voting machines, this is done by the state and local governments under federal guidelines. The recent lawsuit over the illegal certification of Diebold DRE machines was against the state of North Carolina. There's seems to be quite a bit of decertification activity lately, and some jurisdictions are already looking for new money to buy replacements for the machines they purchased under the Help America Vote Act. And I'm surprised and concerned that the test last month in Leon county FL, shows that the optical scan machines might not be as good a solution to verifiable voting as many open voting advocates, including me, thought they were. If any of you have seen George Carlin recently, and in particular his recent "Life is Worth Losing" HBO concert, he opines that democracy is just an illusion. I fear that he might have a point. -- Rick DeNatale Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/ -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
