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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the starting-to-get-attention-now dept.

Another item from Def Con 26, which ended the other day, an 11-year-old was easily able to change tallies on real electronic voting equipment within minutes. These machines are designed not to leave any evidence when tampering happens so it was useful that there were many witnesses present for her demo.

Election hackers [sic] have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers [sic] find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.

In a room set aside for kid hackers [sic], an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

Earlier on SN:
Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct
South Carolina's 13k Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable, Unreliable
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:13PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:13PM (#721395)

    Hey there, tax protester. Here's what you should do for real. Go to the liquor store and buy something and refuse to pay sales tax. Then explain to the cops how you're not robbing the store. Have fun!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:50PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:50PM (#721404)

    I pay what the proprietor and I agree on.

    If the proprietor sets aside some of his payment as "tax", then that's his issue.

    Voluntary interaction. How does it work?

    • (Score: 2) by Snow on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:54PM (7 children)

      by Snow (1601) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:54PM (#721418) Journal

      So when you rent a hotel room, you refuse to pay the tax portion, right?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:59PM (6 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:59PM (#721420)

        Government is that guy who starts washing your windshield unsolicited (with dirty water no less).

        The only way I'm paying that guy is if he sticks a gun in my face and says "Pay your fair share, comrade."

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:13PM (5 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:13PM (#721428)

          WTF are you doing on my government-funded Internet ?

          • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:22PM (4 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:22PM (#721436)

            Besides, the Internet is being captured by governments; it was not created by governments.

            • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:46PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:46PM (#721445)

              Huh, coulda fooled me.

              The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. The technology continued to grow in the 1970s after scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a communications model that set standards for how data could be transmitted between multiple networks. ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet. The online world then took on a more recognizable form in 1990, when computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. While it’s often confused with the Internet itself, the web is actually just the most common means of accessing data online in the form of websites and hyperlinks. The web helped popularize the Internet among the public, and served as a crucial step in developing the vast trove of information that most of us now access on a daily basis.

              Pretty heavy development that used taxpayer dollars. These days the data lines / towers are mostly privately owned but they use easements to use public space to run their wires and government granted licenses to operate wireless. Keep sucking on that corporate teat, we will all pray that one day you get a clue about how society works.

              • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:05PM (#721455)

                Networking was the big thing in computing at the time; everyone and his dog, including corporations, were coming up with stuff. The government threw some money at one small team of your folks, and then the military mandated their protocols when it became clear that a standard would be useful.

                What about GOPHER? What about AOL? All sorts of shit built the Internet, and the government played very little part other than granting monopolies to telephone companies earlier in the century. In contrast, France's government did try to build a comprehensive full-stack network, and it failed miserably; the Internet of today is fully and completely the product of git-er-done free-wheeling market-based Capitalism.

                • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:28PM (1 child)

                  by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:28PM (#721520)

                  The government role in creating the Internet back when it was ARPANet was largely in funding the research on all the pieces and parts that made it work, and of course being connected to it early enough that they thought ".gov" and ".mil" would be useful TLDs back in 1985, 7 years before the Internet became a thing. Al Gore in particular was very interested in making sure the Internet happened throughout his entire political career, from funding the research in the 1980's to turning it from ARPANet into the Internet in 1992 to championing it as vice-president. Folks like Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn [umich.edu] who were heavily involved in that research are all very clear on that point. There was certainly also heavy involvement from corporations and universities, because WANs sure seemed like a very useful thing to have, but to claim the government wasn't involved flies in the face of demonstrable facts.

                  I'm guessing you're someone who believes the government inherently can't do anything useful. Well, this is one of those cases where relatively modest levels of government effort really managed to hit one out of the park. Now, I get that your instinct is to throw out that information because it doesn't conform to your belief system, but that doesn't make you right.

                  --
                  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:51PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:51PM (#721530)
                    From your link:
                    • Here is the definitive statement on Gore's involvement in "inventing" the Internet, from the guys who really did

                      ORLY?

                    • No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community.

                    • Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s.

                    • As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network."

                    • Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.

                      It should be noted that there were already other commercial networking solutions to large-scale networking; government did what it does worst: Chooses winners and losers. Most of the modern Internet actually came from private enterprise shoehorning protocols together to make things work, and to expand capabilities. Look at the protocol stack of networking equipment—it's bonkers.

                    • There are many factors that have contributed to the Internet's rapid growth since the later 1980s, not the least of which has been political support for its privatization

                    So, a multi-decade, multi-organization effort was spotted as being interesting by one particular government official decades after the major work of networking began. Oh, and these 2 guys got some money from taxpayers. Wow.