What's So Precious About Bad Software?
,----[ Quote ]
| What's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment.
|
| [...]
|
| Exhibit A: Windows itself. Which proves it takes more than throwing billions
| of dollars and thousands of programmers at a software project to build
| something that is actually good.
|
| Diebold, Champion of Ugly Bad Code
|
| There is a good ugly code and there is bad ugly code. Good ugly code is
| not "elegant", whatever that means, but it works well and isn't full of
| holes. Diebold is the poster child for bad ugly code, which they have fought
| mightily to conceal under the tattered "trade secrets" excuse. As if- they
| were shipping shoddy code, and they knew it. I wonder where they got the idea
| that no one would notice, because hiding the code doesn't hide what it does.
`----
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netos/article.php/3696296
Related:
Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack
,----[ Quote ]
| An analysis of Diebold's source code shows that a hacker with access to a
| single voting machine could use a virus to affect an election.
|
| [...]
|
| The delayed release of the source-code review meant that David Wagner, an
| associate professor of computer science at the University of California at
| Berkeley and an author of the report, was not able to present his findings at
| a public hearing held on July 30 to discuss the results of the voting system
| review.
`----
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,135461/printable.html#
Most vote machines lose test to hackers
,----[ Quote ]
| "The vendors appeared to have designed systems that were not high assurance
| (of security)," said Bishop, a recognized expert on computer security. "The
| security seems like it was added on.''
`----
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/28/VOTING.TMP&tsp=1
,----[ Quote ]
| "Nineteen machines had 21 screen freezes or system crashes, producing a
| blue screen and messages about an "illegal operation" or a "fatal
| exception error."
|
| "Especially with this blue-screen problem, you don't know whether it's
| the printer drivers, you don't know whether it's Diebold's own code or
| whether it's Windows,"
`----
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6257
,----[ Quote ]
| Problems found in an audit of Diebold tabulation records from an Ohio
| November 2006 election raise questions about whether the database got
| corrupted during the tabulation of election results...
|
| The database is built from Microsoft's Jet database engine. The
| engine, according to Microsoft, is vulnerable to corruption when a lot
| of concurrent activity is happening with the database, such as what
| occurs on an election night [and Microsoft advises againt using Jet in
| a complex environment]...
|
| The report mentions that election staff had trouble with the server
| crashing and freezing on election night....
|
| The report notes that with punch card machines election officials used
| to be able to determine definitively if all ballots had been counted
| in the results....
`----
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/04/diebold_vote_da.html
Diebold Can't Sell E-Voting Subsidiary
,----[ Quote ]
| Diebold fails to sell its electronic voting business, changes the
| subsidiary's name to Premier Election Solutions.
`----
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136044-c,companynews/article.html
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