SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)
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)
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
ORLY?
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.
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.