Have you tried a plastic rock?
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think paper is just better for some things than digital. I’m not talking the typical curmudgeonly things like “reading from a screen will never replace a book,” or “my manuscript should be on paper, how dare you ask me to submit electronically” – in those cases, going digital makes some decent amount of sense.
I’m talking about things like, oh, say, voting. In Virginia where I’m registered to vote, we had the option of using either a touch-screen system or a paper scantron ballot. When I voted in the last election, there was a line of people waiting to use the single touch-screen system.
I’ll repeat that. There was a line of people waiting to use the single touch-screen system. With six stations open to mark a scantron ballot, most people were heading for the touch-screen option. Me? I took a paper ballot and filled it out. Because I like to believe on some level that my vote can actually be counted physically, instead of depending on a digital system. Especially one that can be easily hacked.
Speaking of which, you might have heard that the Diebold systems – which can be easily hacked by anybody with a key (or basic lockipicking skills) – are even less secure than previously thought. Because Diebold published pictures of their key on their website. And now it’s been proven that you can copy them from the pictures. [link via boingboing]
But the folks at Princeton who discovered the hack (after our own organization, VelvetRevolution.us, gave them the Diebold touch-screen machine on which to perform their tests) had resisted showing exactly what the key looked like in order to hold on to some semblance of security for Diebold’s Disposable Touch-Screen Voting Systems.
But guess what? Diebold didn’t bother to even have that much common sense.
This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website’s online store! (Screenshot at end of this article.)
Of course, they’ll only sell such keys to “Diebold account holders” apparently—- or so they claim—- but that’s hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold’s website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!