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Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

Is hacking voting machines really that much of a thing?
 
JMaximus said:
Is hacking voting machines really that much of a thing?
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We don't know, actually. That's the problem. They are black boxes and there is zero transparency about the machines or the software running them. And we also know that there have been many attempts to penetrate our voting systems, and it's prudent not to wait until we KNOW it's happened.
 
HumblePi said:
Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines[/h]The tech giant says it has tracked more than 700 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries against U.S. political organizations so far this election cycle.

ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.

The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.

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More than ever before, people have to be careful of what they read and fact check everything. The 2020 election is going to be dreadful to say the least and if the Russians or Chinese are fully engaged in interfering with our election, they will do a lot of harm. But if people read something or see an advertisement that doesn't seem quite right, no matter what your politics are, we all need to be vigilant and expect many stories or theories are generated by adversaries.
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If it's anything like Microsoft's Windows, we're ****ed.
 
Sounds like something republicans will resist. After all who needs secure elections anyway? I'm sure trump doesn't want it so he can claim the election was rigged, again, after he loses this time around.
 
Lord of Planar said:
Oh Great.

Now we have to worry if the CEO's on Microsoft will rig the elections.
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Bill Gates would certainly be better than a blatant racist like Trump. He's made you and your country the laughing stocks of the world.
 
Mycroft said:
If the voting machines are not connected to the internet, they are immune from cyber attacks.
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Yikes... This guy doesn't see the problem with an unmonitored system being left alone with thousands of people for 5-7 minutes... Okay.



Sent from the Oval Office using Putin's MacBook, and Barr's Wi-Fi password.
 
dobieg said:
So we're suppose to rely on Silicone Valley coders to keep our election safe? The same ones who work at Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc,. who use super secret algorithms no one knows about that just by chance happen to show an extreme bias towards conservatives?

Yeah, don't think I'm on board with trusting them even a little bit.
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Extreme bias... Being that they remove folks like Stormfront when they get rowdy? ... Are they biased because they grab Alex Jones by the balls from time to time? Isn't it weird how the folks being silenced aren't the most odious?

Sent from the Oval Office using Putin's MacBook, and Barr's Wi-Fi password.
 
HumblePi said:
Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines[/h]The tech giant says it has tracked more than 700 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries against U.S. political organizations so far this election cycle.

ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.

The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
More than ever before, people have to be careful of what they read and fact check everything. The 2020 election is going to be dreadful to say the least and if the Russians or Chinese are fully engaged in interfering with our election, they will do a lot of harm. But if people read something or see an advertisement that doesn't seem quite right, no matter what your politics are, we all need to be vigilant and expect many stories or theories are generated by adversaries.
Click to expand...

Republican government in action
 
HumblePi said:
Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines[/h]The tech giant says it has tracked more than 700 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries against U.S. political organizations so far this election cycle.

ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.

The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
More than ever before, people have to be careful of what they read and fact check everything. The 2020 election is going to be dreadful to say the least and if the Russians or Chinese are fully engaged in interfering with our election, they will do a lot of harm. But if people read something or see an advertisement that doesn't seem quite right, no matter what your politics are, we all need to be vigilant and expect many stories or theories are generated by adversaries.
Click to expand...

Microsoft doing its part to protect or elections from people who’d vote the wrong way.
 
Lord of Planar said:
Oh Great.

Now we have to worry if the CEO's on Microsoft will rig the elections.
Click to expand...

Why? Because it just might keep Russia from interfering again on his behalf again? Which he has not done not even a single about? Trump better keep his knee-pads on then.
 
Mycroft said:
If the voting machines are not connected to the internet, they are immune from cyber attacks.
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Not true.

If it has a USB port or serial port or a communication port of some kind, then it is hackable. And you need those to load firmware updates and get info off the machines.

Sent from my Honor 8X using Tapatalk
 
AmNat said:
Microsoft doing its part to protect or elections from people who’d vote the wrong way.
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No different than many of the current companies...many of who's owners openly support the GOP

And it is funny how these machines in from these companies have so many "calibration errors" and no paper trail to double check votes...

Sent from my Honor 8X using Tapatalk
 
HumblePi said:
Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines

Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines[/h]The tech giant says it has tracked more than 700 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries against U.S. political organizations so far this election cycle.

ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.

The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
More than ever before, people have to be careful of what they read and fact check everything. The 2020 election is going to be dreadful to say the least and if the Russians or Chinese are fully engaged in interfering with our election, they will do a lot of harm. But if people read something or see an advertisement that doesn't seem quite right, no matter what your politics are, we all need to be vigilant and expect many stories or theories are generated by adversaries.
Click to expand...

If voting machines record votes in accordance with computer programs then we need to find a way to insure those programs are not crookedly designed by partisan political activists in our own country.
 
marke said:
If voting machines record votes in accordance with computer programs then we need to find a way to insure those programs are not crookedly designed by partisan political activists in our own country.
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I am not sure what you mean by "crookedly designed" but if you read the OP, you will see that the program is open source, so anybody can examine the code. If Microsoft offers such open access, then the Russians can double check the code to make sure that the IT liberals will not steal the election.

Now on a more serious note, I assume (and as a middle aged man my programming knowledge is limited) that it is easier for a company which designed a certain type of software to hack it or even have ready some form of secret malware that can exploit a vulnerability.
 
HumblePi said:
ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far.
Click to expand...

If I believed that secure electronic voting could feasibly be combined with secret ballots, I would say that software uniformity and open source would be steps in the right direction.
The reason paper ballots are reasonably secure (not the individual ballot, but the overall results) is that the process requires a high amount of people and effort to subvert. OTOH a thousand voting machines can be hacked by a single neckbeard from his mom's basement. The only way to guarantee electronic voting results would be to match votes with individuals, and experience has proven over and over again that those in power cannot be trusted with such knowledge, which is why we have secret ballots in the first place.

I don't mind that we attempt to mature the electronic voting process, as technology paradigms continually shift, but for the time being I would contain it to local elections, where the stakes and motives for subversion are lower, rather than state or federal.
 
HK.227 said:
If I believed that secure electronic voting could feasibly be combined with secret ballots, I would say that software uniformity and open source would be steps in the right direction.
The reason paper ballots are reasonably secure (not the individual ballot, but the overall results) is that the process requires a high amount of people and effort to subvert. OTOH a thousand voting machines can be hacked by a single neckbeard from his mom's basement. The only way to guarantee electronic voting results would be to match votes with individuals, and experience has proven over and over again that those in power cannot be trusted with such knowledge, which is why we have secret ballots in the first place.

I don't mind that we attempt to mature the electronic voting process, as technology paradigms continually shift, but for the time being I would contain it to local elections, where the stakes and motives for subversion are lower, rather than state or federal.
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I think it should be mandatory that all ballots are the paper type, which are less easily tampered with.

Just how do you do a recount on a machine?
 
Common Sense 1 said:
Not good! If man designs it man can hack it.

We need to go back to the paper ballot! It has the best
paper trail if needed.

Electronic voting is not secure!


"A number of independent research efforts have demonstrated the ease with which individual electronic voting stations can be compromised by simply using the paltry resources available to university research teams," the report said. "Hostile foreign governments would be able to deploy orders of magnitude more resources to this task."
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Two words, “hanging chads”
 
MTAtech said:
Two words, “hanging chads”
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Then blame the counties for their failure to upkeep the voting machines.

These places had recounts. I say such counties should have been required to fix all damaged machines, and severely penalized if it happened again.
 
Lord of Planar said:
I think it should be mandatory that all ballots are the paper type, which are less easily tampered with.

Just how do you do a recount on a machine?
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Just gonna commisserate on this a bit.

When you do recounts of ballots, you are not verifying that a certain individual voted a certain way, you are only verifying that the ballot count wasn't tampered with. It is in other words a verification of process rather than outcome. Process verification is not a problem with machines, as you can record everything they do.

The problem is that an electronic vote has a hell of alot more processes than a paper vote, and where verification of only a few processes implies a reasonable guarantee of outcome verification with paper ballots, that is partly because so many people and resources would have to be involved. Each of these people and ballots offer independent verification of the outcome, so you in effect have a very large but simple silo structure. With electronic voting you have many more processes that can be tampered with, but you do not get as many silos. This means a lower number of compromised entities are needed to skew a process and thus the voting results, and these compromised entities will in the main not be people whom the bad guy trying to skew the elction will have to figure on getting drunk and bragging to their friends, getting a case of remorse and confess to their spouses or priests, or trying to blackmail them later.

For instance.
- Someone can manufacture fake paper ballots and substitute them for the real ones, but it is unlikely that they can manufacture and replace 100 million of them. With electronic ballots, only one ballot needs to be compromised.
- Someone can bribe a hundred paper ballot counters, but it is unlikely that they can bribe 10,000. With electronic ballots they only need to bribe one person with access to the counting software and the guy who can eliminate the evidence that tampering has taken place.
- Someone can bribe the driver who moves the paper ballots from A to B, but it is unlikely that they can bribe all the drivers. Only one person is needed to falsify network traffic, and one more to falsify the anti-tampering log.
- A conspiracy of evil Democrats/Republicans can subvert voting for a distrcit, but it is unlikely that all the districts will have conspiracies (and if they do, we're screwed anyway). Only a single conspiracy needs to exist to compromise the electronic voting servers.
- Even if you set up the ultimate silo system with two entirely separate voting systems with no contact whatsoever, and require the voter to affirm their vote by pressing a button on both machines, you still need a much smaller number of people to compromise the election than with paper ballots.

I have to figure there has to be many more instances of cheating probably taking place with paper ballots, but they each have much smaller potential to cause harm, and are much more easily exposed.
And as previously mentioned, once we reach the point where noone cares about the cheating, we are screwed anyway, so why worry.
 
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pamak said:
I am not sure what you mean by "crookedly designed" but if you read the OP, you will see that the program is open source, so anybody can examine the code. If Microsoft offers such open access, then the Russians can double check the code to make sure that the IT liberals will not steal the election.

Now on a more serious note, I assume (and as a middle aged man my programming knowledge is limited) that it is easier for a company which designed a certain type of software to hack it or even have ready some form of secret malware that can exploit a vulnerability.
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There is evidence that Americans may have stolen votes through illegal manipulation of voting machines, but I haven't heard that Russians tampered with votes through manipulation of voting machines.
 
HK.227 said:
Just gonna commisserate on this a bit.

When you do recounts of ballots, you are not verifying that a certain individual voted a certain way, you are only verifying that the ballot count wasn't tampered with. It is in other words a verification of process rather than outcome. Process verification is not a problem with machines, as you can record everything they do.
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The problem is not all machines are equal. If they were tampered with they could have tampered with that record too.
 
HK.227 said:
For instance.
- Someone can manufacture fake paper ballots and substitute them for the real ones, but it is unlikely that they can manufacture and replace 100 million of them. With electronic ballots, only one ballot needs to be compromised.
- Someone can bribe a hundred paper ballot counters, but it is unlikely that they can bribe 10,000. With electronic ballots they only need to bribe one person with access to the counting software and the guy who can eliminate the evidence that tampering has taken place.
- Someone can bribe the driver who moves the paper ballots from A to B, but it is unlikely that they can bribe all the drivers. Only one person is needed to falsify network traffic, and one more to falsify the anti-tampering log.
- A conspiracy of evil Democrats/Republicans can subvert voting for a distrcit, but it is unlikely that all the districts will have conspiracies (and if they do, we're screwed anyway). Only a single conspiracy needs to exist to compromise the electronic voting servers.
- Even if you set up the ultimate silo system with two entirely separate voting systems with no contact whatsoever, and require the voter to affirm their vote by pressing a button on both machines, you still need a much smaller number of people to compromise the election than with paper ballots.

I have to figure there has to be many more instances of cheating probably taking place with paper ballots, but they each have much smaller potential to cause harm, and are much more easily exposed.
And as previously mentioned, once we reach the point where noone cares about the cheating, we are screwed anyway, so why worry.
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This becomes more cumbersome with too many people in the know. Far less chance to get away with such a thing, than reprogramming a ballot machine, of which a single person can implement.
 
Hatuey said:
Extreme bias... Being that they remove folks like Stormfront when they get rowdy? ... Are they biased because they grab Alex Jones by the balls from time to time? Isn't it weird how the folks being silenced aren't the most odious?

Sent from the Oval Office using Putin's MacBook, and Barr's Wi-Fi password.
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Perhaps if I was a dumbass liberal that would be what I was referring to

Of course you know better so I'm not why you want to pretend everyday conservatives aren't being silenced by Silicone Valley because they're a bunch of repressive liberals who can't stand the thought of letting opposing viewpoints be heard.
 
Or wait for it, just do purely paper ballots.
 
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