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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Tuesday, November 2, 2004
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USA votes Posted by Mikko @ 08:11 GMT

Diebold Accuvote-TS, image Copyright � Diebold, Incorporated 1994-2004. All rights reserved.
USA votes for their next president today.

For the first time in history, a major part of this voting is done on voting machines running on top of a general-purpose operating system.

The three largest manufacturers of voting systems (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia) all run closed-source systems on top of Windows. You would think that voting machines would be a prime example of systems that should be open source, so anybody could verify what exactly happens and how. And there is a long list of known failures so far.

We might also remember that Diebold is one of the largest manufacturers of Windows-based ATMs...and that RPC and LSASS -based network worms have managed to infect such cash machines in several occasions over the last year and a half.

So it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.