Please enlighten us as to why it is "only a good thing". As far as I can see, it is yet more firmware that can be manipulated by a malicious vendor to inject malicious software into a voting system.Ron, The trusted computing platform is only a good thing for Voting systems, regardless of how you feel about it on your home computer.
Once I thought there might be a practical way to ensure reasonably secure e-voting, and that OVC was pioneering that way. Now I believe that there is no such way, and that those who would plant malicious code will always be several steps ahead of those who would uproot it. Computers will only get more flexible and capable, and hacks (whether planted by vendors or otherwise) more complex and difficult to detect. Further, others' discussions of the nature of representative democracies have convinced me that, even aside from its many unsolved security issues, e-voting removes effective supervision of elections from the general public and places it (and thus the determination of who controls the levers of power) with a very small elite. Thus 21st-century technology births 12th-century politics.While devel's advocacy is always an important job, I'm puzzled about why you are on this forum if you intrisicly oppose computerized voting. Maybe you should enlighten us.
-----Original Message----- From: Ron Crane <voting@lastland.net> Sent: Aug 26, 2005 9:00 PM To: Open Voting Consortium discussion list <ovc-discuss@listman.sonic.net> Subject: Re: [OVC-discuss] Fw: Meet the $499 Mac. That's included in the $599 and $699 models: http://www.apple.com/macmini/ . And 6 months from now it'll probably be in every one. Along these lines, Intel recently announced a single-chip WIFI solution. You just plop it down, connect it to VCC and ground, add an antenna (which can be a trace on a circuit board), and connect the command/data bus, and voila! instant WIFI. This kind of thing, along with BPL, will soon become broadly standard in COTS systems. And when Intel's "Trusted Computing Initiative" (read: hardware DRM) gets going, it'll probably be used to monitor, and to report on, your use of DRM-protected materials. Lest you think this is paranoid nuttery, wouldn't film studios love to know which movie scenes viewers replay the most, and wouldn't music companies love to know which songs each person just can't get enough of? It's "Trusted Computing" alright -- the studios and music companies can trust it; everyone else (including those who would use this hardware for e-voting systems) had better beware. -R Fred McLain wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Isn't it true that all of the newer Macs have internal wireless networking, including the Mac Mini we're talking about? -Fred- On Aug 26, 2005, at 3:17 PM, Nathan L. Adams wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alan Dechert wrote:When you say, "used in school," that could turn out to be a reason to consider the Mac. They are widely used in schools. There may be business reasons for doing it that way in some circumstances. I vote at a school. The same school has a computer room with a bunch of Macs. If, say, a half dozen of those school computers were in secure enclosures, I don't see any reason they couldn't simply be reconfigured for Election Day (disable harddrive and network, boot from CD/DVD). If Apple and the schools were on board with it, then it could be quite cheap -- no more than a couple hundred dollars per year.Don't bet the OVC farm on reusing school equipment as voting equipment. Some folks will (rightly) argue that it may not be a good idea to subject your voting equipment to clever, resourceful, immature school aged hackers for the better part of the year. But my main point was that x86 as a hardware platform is far more 'open' and generally understood than anything that Apple will offer us. I also want to deter anyone from believing that OS X is a) F/OSS b) a viable platform for OVC software. Nathan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDD5Tr2QTTR4CNEQARArvGAKCdx948DPr0BXZFIWu0yIGlPb54+wCeMEK7 A2936P6W1biGdlVJFjZvk2U= =HLqB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ OVC discuss mailing lists Send requests to subscribe or unsubscribe to arthur@openvotingconsortium.org-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) iD8DBQFDD82n/KggZvnzDLIRAgkVAKCxC0bIvAV6YGTmUQzl3lbLGXonUgCgg/1q H+oYIaQd4cmmuYPDavg+Wk0= =huYA -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ OVC discuss mailing lists Send requests to subscribe or unsubscribe to arthur@openvotingconsortium.org_______________________________________________ OVC discuss mailing lists Send requests to subscribe or unsubscribe to arthur@openvotingconsortium.org _______________________________________________ OVC discuss mailing lists Send requests to subscribe or unsubscribe to arthur@openvotingconsortium.org
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Received on Wed Aug 31 23:17:33 2005
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