Researchers Reprogram Voting Machine To Run Pac-man 132
Philom writes "Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that electronic voting machines can be reprogrammed to steal votes, so when researchers Alex Halderman and Ari Feldman got their hands on a machine called the Sequoia AVC Edge, they decided to do something different: they reprogrammed it to run Pac-Man. As states move away from insecure electronic voting, there's a risk that discarded machines will clog our landfills. Fortunately, these results show that voting machines can be recycled to provide countless hours of entertainment."
Game over, man (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://www.google.com/pacman/ [google.com]
Let the games (re)commence*.
*This post is in no way responsible for any and all loss of productivity caused by it's contents.
Who do we blame? (Score:2)
The Republicans or Democrats for the stupidity of rushing head-long into computerized voting? I knew it was a bad idea right from the start.
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>>>Ultimately I'm a proponent of computerized voting
But the flaw with this and virtually all the other machines adopted between 2001 and 2003 is there's no paper trail. That means the results can easily be changed and no way to audit the results.
The system we had in Maryland (before it got thrown out) was just about perfect. You simply drew a line next to the candidate you wanted, and then the ballot was scanned immediately and tallied. It ensured the vote was registered before the voter left, h
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It is extremely difficult to throw-out a couple million ballots (or add a couple million ballots), simply because of the sheer weight of moving all that material (thousands of pounds)
That's why the paper trail is difficult to alter.
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The voter can look at the paper to make sure it's what he voted before dropping it into the box.
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On A Voting Machine? (Score:5, Funny)
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No, but it would be nice if we could deny the vote to those so mentally challenged that they can't successfully pass the first level...
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"The computer ate the vote tally" (Score:1)
Someone had to say it first....
What would Namco say? (Score:3, Interesting)
Expect a cease and desist like this one [slashdot.org] in 3, 2, 1...
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Cease and desist what exactly? They aren't distributing anything other than a video. As a news item about re-purposing voting machines, fair use seems to be on their side concerning Pac-Man imagery appearing in the video.
Re:What would Namco say? (Score:5, Insightful)
If Namco doesn't like it they'll send the letter anyways. If if you're legally ok, is it worth hiring a lawyer to go to court and fight it? Namco (like most large companies) keeps one on staff, so sending him to court is just them using a paid for asset.
The sad truth is that in today's society, if a corporation says to stop doing something, it's usually smart to stop it. You can't afford to prove your innocence.
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Really? And what would you do about it? Make it illegal for a company to sue someone who is infringing on their copyrights or trademarks? Make bootleg products legal?
Why would any company invest in hiring people and spending money to develop something if they have no recourse when someone can simply set up to sell bootlegs of the finished work with no consequences?
Sure, it's fun to hate lawyers. Until it's you being ripped off.
Re:What would Namco say? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd make it a criminal offense to assert copyright violation where none exists.
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To *knowingly* assert a copyright violation where none exists. Often they may think there is one, and only find out later that there isn't.
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Since a copyright lawyer SHOULD know copyright law, just make a pattern of errors in that regard be grounds for disbarment due to incompetence. If the lawyer doing it claims not to be a copyright lawyer, make it for malpractice since after the first time he should have realized he didn't know enough to practice in that area.
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To *knowingly* assert a copyright violation where none exists. Often they may think there is one, and only find out later that there isn't.
IANAL, but if they haven't done due diligence, they shouldn't be willing to go to court over it, nor send threatening letters / C&D, etc.
If there is a copyright violation, and if the people have a lawyer on staff or whatever, they can afford to wait a week or two to confirm it, or do whatever else it takes to find out. Copyright violation isn't murder; there is no dangerous situation if you don't handle it immediately. The stolen copyright is not going to decide it likes the second party better and le
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Section 117 of US copyright law allows for this.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/117.html [cornell.edu]
Unfortunately, I have to agree with a sibling post. It's too expensive to defend oneself against unjustified lawsuits.
Difficulty of staying 117 compliant (Score:2)
Section 117 of US copyright law allows for this.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/117.html [cornell.edu]
Which a judge isn't likely to apply in your favor if you are working from a ROM that you downloaded from the Internet. As I understand 117, in order for a MAME ROM to be considered lawfully made, you have to desolder the ROM ICs from the authentic PCB and then dump each of them with an EPROM programmer. It's easier for Sega Genesis and Super NES software, for which a cartridge dumper [retrode.org] exists.
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On a Pac-Man PCB the ROMs are socketed so getting dumps is not at all difficult, especially for people capable of performing this hack. Since there is no evidence that the ROMs were downloaded and the burden of proof rests with Namco, I don't see a judge even allowing the case to proceed.
Split burden of proof (Score:2)
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It's not that cut and dry and you contradict yourself when you say the hackers have to prove anything. I think that was just a slip of the keyboard. Even in civil cases, the burden of persuasion usually rests with the plaintiff. However, "fair use" is an affirmative defense so the burden could shift to the defendant. If it did, the hackers have the original ROMs, are not redistributing copies of them, are not making "archival" copies (hardware ROMs are specifically not covered by section 117.a.2), and are p
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Even in civil cases, the burden of persuasion usually rests with the plaintiff.
Assume the plaintiff has persuaded the judge that the audiovisual work embodied in the game was reproduced, that it was performed publicly, and that the reproduction and performance were not authorized by the plaintiff. As I understand it, it becomes the defendant's turn to persuade the judge that the reproduction and performance are permissible despite not having been authorized by the plaintiff. In this case, Halderman and Feldman admit that the work was performed publicly at the USENIX Security conferenc
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The case you cite bares little resemblance to what we a talking about, and the rest is spurious at best. You say public performance, I say reasonable expectation of educational fair use exemption at a private conference. I also really doubt filing for dilution of trademark will get them anywhere. The hackers can easily show non-commercial, non-competing, non-confusing, nominative fair use.
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The hackers can easily show non-commercial, non-competing, non-confusing, nominative fair use.
You've made what appears to be a good case for the defense. But how would they come up with the money to pay a lawyer to make such a case before a judge?
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At the risk of going in circles, see GGGGGGGP post. Else, hope for a pro bono EFF lawyer to take pity.
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Then don't. The only winning move is not to play. Honestly, we get so riled up around here about fighting nuisance lawsuits that we forget that the best strategy is to just ignore them, let the other side get a hojillion dollar default judgement, wait for them to pass it on to a debt collection agency, then tell them that the "debt" is under dispute with the creditor. That's the last you'll ever hear about it.
Ultimately, it's cheaper to c
just make a clone and call it vote eater! (Score:2)
just make a clone and call it vote eater!
Atari v. Philips (Score:2)
just make a clone
Namco owns a copyright on the physical appearance of the character Pac-Man. Namco and its then U.S. console partner Atari successfully sued a cloner in 1982 for copyright infringement ( Atari v. Philips [wikipedia.org]). So if the player character of Vote Eater looks too much like a sphere with a lune [wikipedia.org] for a mouth, and if the chasing characters look too much like Bloo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends without a valid parodic reason [deviantart.com], Namco would still have enough of a case to make the author of Vote Eater spend beauc
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Should have made it the head of Al Gore, eating chads, being chased by lawyers draped in bedsheets. Pac-Chad.
wrong title (Score:5, Funny)
"Corporate Dollars Reprogram Voters To Elect PACmen"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee [wikipedia.org]
You still on K5? (Score:2)
I think we're still accepting refugees at Hulver's.
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Pacman would probably make a WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA kind of a president. Not much different from the usual candidates.
Repurpose them as educational systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Reprogram them so they can go to work in schools as touchscreen systems for pre-k to 6th graders. They were built to take a beating so a bunch of kids could not put much of a hurt on them, right?
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Pacman IS educational
This is terrible news (Score:5, Funny)
We don't need people in government going around chasing ghosts.
We need to do something about the threat from space invaders.
Close but not quite (Score:5, Funny)
Actually I think we are in more danger from Asteroids than from Space Invaders.
In other news... (Score:1)
I, for one, welcome our new pill eating ghost avoiding presidential candidate overlord!
Instead of pills (Score:1)
This Reminds Me (Score:2)
... got their hands on a machine called the Sequoia AVC Edge ... they reprogrammed it to run Pac-Man
April First is a long way off...
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However, November 2nd is coming up!
At some point (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm guessing that the moniker of "Researcher" gives them a tiny bit of protection for being charged with tampering with a voting machine.
Re:At some point (Score:5, Funny)
Pac Man(ia) (Score:1)
Pleading the 24th for free games? (Score:2)
gotta use your own quarter though.
But wouldn't a coin slot on a voting machine on U.S. soil violate the 24th Amendment [wikipedia.org]?
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I suppose they could add a lever and pictures of fruit to finally admit what it's been for years anyway...
"insecure electronic voting" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is terribly biased.
Brazil has been using electronic voting country-wide for more than a decade and no party complains about its security - everyone considers them much more secure than the old and easy-to-tamper-with paper ballots.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
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This is more obvious to the "nerd community" than to ordinary people.
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Simple counting algorithm? I'm sure it is, but it is probably buried in many 3GL abstraction layers and replicated in many different places in the code. The various wrappers around the algorithm used by the different suppliers is probably patented due to IP production requirements forced upon the software developers in an effort to justify too many layers of management.
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The problem is, that you can't proof the result is correct.
They tried to use election machines in Germany for their cost-effectedness and in order to get the results faster.
The experts of the CCC (www.ccc.org) could show how easy it is to tamper with it.
The High Court used their expertise to state that while electronic voting machines are not per se forbidden, the only way they would be allowed is by making them as easy to proof as an old fashioned ballot box.
E.g. providing a print out so the voter could pr
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www.ccc.de
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club [wikipedia.org]
Not ccc.org
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I'm not sure how it works everywhere else, but in Brazil voting is anonymous.
This means that on each paper-ballot there wasn't any sort of identifiable information associating the vote with the voter. So, a recount is moot, as you could just replace the original paper-ballots with whatever votes you want. The paper-ballot method is much more vulnerable to this kind of voting fraud, which used to happen in Brazil.
Now, what we have here is that each one of the voting machines produces a paper-trail at the end
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Use a pencil (Score:2)
I agree that you can design a fancy computerised voting system, probably involving cryptographic technologies, that is at the same time anonymous, secure, auditable, and efficient. I even find the ideas behind such designs appeal to my hackers instincts.
But I oppose electronic voting, because the number of people who can audit such a system is so small. Placing the sanctity of democracy in the hands of a limited priesthood of technical experts is not democratic. You want a system that the maximum number of
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You're counting on observers from the different parties watching the ballots go in to the secured boxes and verifying the seals on those boxes from end to end. No matter who wins, some observer who either prefers another outcome or has no vested interest in the outcome has the opportunity to protest if anything improper took place.
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Pretty sure GP is referring to Clint Curtis accusing U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) of asking him to create vote rigging software. It's all a bit nebulous. According to Seminole Chronicle he gave "sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio".
Seminole Chronicle story:
http://www.seminolechronicle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/16/41c2fdb042ea1 [seminolechronicle.com]
St. Pete Times coverage:
http://ww [stpetersburgtimes.com]
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Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Paper-ballot voting can also be verified by anyone, skilled or not. That is one of the most important parts of an election: that virtually anyone can check on the process.
There are also no chances of accidental errors with paper-ballot voting, while bugs in electronic voting machines [blackboxvoting.org] are known to have caused votes to be lost in the past.
Furthermore, you're talking as if paper ballot voting is without any protection at all. At least in Belgium,
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Thank you.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
We are biased because we are painfully aware how easy it is to manipulate digital electronic information systems. There is no "record of electrons" - it is always possible to alter information without a trace.
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These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throu
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These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
Actually, about half of Belgium has voted electronically during the past elections. The process I described was for the part that still votes on paper, but there are plans to switch everyone to electronic voting.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
According to the related Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page it indeed seems to have helped in Brazil, and I indeed assumed a properly working system of checks by society during the election process.
Anyway, I was just explaining why "there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd
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Actually, they're even considering eliminating or restricting access to the end-of-day paper trail here for the sake of anonimity. Each voter here goes to a predetermined voting location (so you can't go to any voting location as you please).
In city elections in small towns, some minor roles will require maybe a couple hundred votes to be elected. Let's say a politician has "bought" the votes of 50 people from one given voting location but he only gets 10 votes in that location. Or worse, let's say it's a s
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Excuse me sir, I have the 2000 Florida Presidential Election holding for you on line two.
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I didn't claim it's impossible to commit fraud with paper ballots. But every single person having the capability to verify the process surely is better than only a chose few having that capability.
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I'm not sure there's a great solution.
One of my college professors used to work (as a volunteer) Chicago elections. He claimed that sometimes, whole trucks full of paper ballots would mysteriously vanish.
(Cue Chicago-bashing.)
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With electronic voting you have to trust a black box. Would you accept to vote with paper ballots in a box that is opaque, that is not shown to be empty beforehand and that destroys its ballot after counting ? No ? Then you don't trust electronic voting.
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"I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much."
Because we can't mod candidates we like and hate as Insightful or Flamebait. There's only this silly little "Yes" or "No" option.
Poor Security (Score:1)
The issue is poor security in electronic voting machines produced by the major US manufacturers. I don't think many Slashdotters are inherently opposed to voting machines. The problem is many of the voting machines used in US elections are poorly designed and don't take even basic security precautions.
Let's take Diebold for example. They ended up having to rename their voting machine subsidiary to Premier Election Solutions because it was tarnishing the name of their company and was making their ATM bu
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Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all.
You've got that backwards.
Tampering with paper ballot voting on a small scale is easy, but tampering on a small scale won't generally change election results. Tampering with paper ballots on a sufficiently large scale to control the outcome of an election -- and not getting caught! -- is much, much harder. Doing it on a large scale basically requires involving lots of people and the more people who know a secret the harder it is to keep.
Tampering with electronic voting is harder to do at all, but once
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Large scale manipulation will be clearly detected in any sort of remotely democratic society - even in the US, you still have two parties (and several parties in the case of Brazil). If all parties agree that e-voting is a secure alternative, it's very likely it is indeed secure (they may hold stupid views and opinions but they're usually well-versed in political trickery).
Also, the biggest problem really is the small scale tampering and election fraud. In small cities, with maybe as few as a thousand voter
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Large scale manipulation will be clearly detected in any sort of remotely democratic society
What does it mean if you can detect it but not prove it? There have been several examples of electronically-counted US elections over the last decade whose results differed so greatly from pre-election polls and even election-day exit polls that it's almost certain that the vote was manipulated. But there is no way to prove it.
So what does the losing party do? Nothing. Complaining in the press would just make them look like whiners and wouldn't change a thing.
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My district (in the United States) has been using partially electronic voting machines for a long time. The ballot is a big sheet of somewhat stiff paper. You vote by marking it (with simple lines) using a black felt tip pen. When you're done, you feed the ballot into a machine that scans it. If it finds any errors, then it beeps and pushes the ballot back out. At that point, you have the option of reviewing your ballot and correcting it, getting a new ballot, or pushing an override button to accept the bal
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I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
Relatively speaking: It's easy to keep an eye on physical pieces of paper. It's tough to keep an eye on bits.
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Insecure electronic voting machines with no paper trail cut out a whole lot of middlemen. They don't mak
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The security for paper ballots is that you have volunteers from different political organizations keep eyes on everything that happens at the polls. Ballots are deposited by the voter into a locked box where it remains until the count, when there are literally dozens of eyes of different political interests observing the hand count. I'm pretty happy with that.
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Not from Chicago, are you? :-)
Or Downstate Illinois, for that matter, where the Republicans used to do enough voter fraud to balance out the Democrats in the north, which was supposedly why Richard Nixon didn't challenge the Illinois vote in 1960.
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The security on a voting slip is that you can physically inspect the ballot box before voting begins to make sure it’s empty, watch it as people deposit the ballots to make sure nobody tampers with it or votes multiple times, and then keep watching it until it is unlocked and the ballots are counted. You can, furthermore, be relatively certain after you have done all of that that the number of ballots you will count will be identical to the number of ballots that were actually cast.
In the upcoming election (Score:2)
PAC-Man for President! (Score:1)
Sign me up! (Score:2)
So, how would one obtain a voting machine that's en route to the landfill?
Anyone with any experience know what sorts of departments to contact?
I would love a huge legal-sized touchscreen to play with.
Shocking news! (Score:2)
I trust all the major tech news sites will be carrying this shocking information that threatens the very foundations of democracy!
No? Oh wait, that's because you put tamper proof seals on ballot boxes just like you should put tamper proof seals on the cases for voting machines. Physical access to the voting computer innards/IO is basically the same as phys
Finally, voting machines can do something useful. (Score:2)
All voting machines should be reprogrammed like this!
Can they program it to play Tetris too? at least then I wouldn’t have to pick the lesser of two evils when I go to the polling places.
Tetris 2 (kaboom) (Score:2)
Can they program it to play Tetris too?
Tetris too? Only if you want the voting machine to explode [youtube.com]. But seriously, given that The Tetris Company can be just as litigious as Pac-Man owner Namco...
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Sorry! I meant “a falling blocks game with Tetris-like gameplay,” of course.
It has a cut down 486 as the cpu? (Score:2)
It has a cut down 486 as the cpu?
stupid from start to finish (Score:1)
Voter turn-out (Score:2)
Not there yet (Score:2)
Re-programming voting machines ? Call me back when they have worked out how to re-program the politicians :-)
Vote verification (Score:2)
I'd like to be able to verify my vote after the fact in either paper or electronic systems.
You give me my ballot and it has a unique number on it. I can use that number later to verify that the vote linked to it is what I voted.
Obviously there are issues with that, such as a man-in-the-middle exploit feeding me bogus results, or your anonymity being put at risk when you attempt to verify your vote. But I'd still like to have the option.
As far as anonymity goes, I have no issue with people knowing how I woul
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Well, DUH (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
It was just a quick comment in TFA, but they were able to do this WITHOUT damaging the seals on the device.
With any luck, this and similar efforts will give the things enough resale value that only 95% of the taxpayer's money will end up flushed down the toilet.