Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Microsoft: Free Windows 7 security updates for 2020 election
Microsoft said Friday it will offer free security updates through the 2020 election in the United States—and in other interested democratic countries with national elections next year—for federally certified voting systems running on soon-to-be-outdated Windows 7 software.
An Associated Press analysis previously found that the vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions in the U.S. use Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts.
Windows 7 reaches its "end of life" on Jan. 14, meaning Microsoft stops providing free technical support and producing "patches" to fix software vulnerabilities, which hackers can exploit. Cash-strapped election officials are scrambling to address this issue and what's essentially a one-year extension on additional costs.
The promise of free updates does not address the cost of putting them in place or the time and cost of certifying such changes to a voting system. Fixing a new vulnerability requires that the companies resubmit the voting system for recertification, which can take weeks or even months.
At a U.S. Election Assistance Commission forum last month, Microsoft's Ginny Badanes, who heads its Defending Democracy Program, said that election administrators should not be forced to make the difficult choice of "using election systems with known vulnerabilities or applying security patches and, in so doing, taking their systems out of certification."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @06:47PM (8 children)
Only niggers use paper ballots because niggers live in poor nigger neighborhoods where they can't risk putting voting machines because everybody knows niggers would steal the voting machines.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @06:52PM (6 children)
Why you talk so bad about yo Big Black Daddy? Yo, nigga, yo mama likes a Big Black Nigga!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @07:03PM (5 children)
Why are you bragging about your own nigger rapist father, quantum mulatto boy?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @07:14PM (4 children)
admit you like that quantum jizz gushing down your throat white boy
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @07:22PM (3 children)
Your mother and your sisters snatch were gushing my jizz last night.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @10:08PM (2 children)
I wondered where the Anonymous Cowards from /. would go. Here, apparently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @10:33PM (1 child)
I was able to log in with an old account and post as Anonymous on /. Are they fucking lazy or are new accounts unable to do it?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday September 22 2019, @01:53AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @07:27PM
You've got it backwards. They are the ones insisting that everything be electronic, because they love their cell phones, and electronic voting machines look like large cell phones.