it is long past due time for inappropriate levels of utterly misplaced triumphalism...,
2006-11-01 13:52:09
| Main |
grasping at carp...,
2006-11-03 15:02:53
the WaPo technology revue:
what part about 'hacking' does the WaPo not understand?
"Hacking Democracy" doesn't actually show democracy's corruption. The documentary merely suggests the possibilities and tallies the suspicions
Uh huh. And the gaping security holes. Unless you're in the State Department and think discrepancies between exit polls and election results are strong enough evidence to declare a flawed election the problem is there's no way to verify the integrity of electronic results that lack voter-verified paper trails. The machines are - as the documentary demonstrates multiple times - insecure, and there's no way to determine whether they've been compromised. Hello, whole point of movie.
Surely, there was more going on in Ohio in 2004 worth raising questions about.
Yeah, in a movie about Ohio. See title.
Indeed, "Hacking" finds a few things amiss, such as a random selection of ballots for the recount that might not have been so randomly selected. And?
Ha ha. Iraq might not actually have WMD. And? No no, everybody knows they do! Score one for the producers for having such savvy. Usually this works on the WaPo. If only they'd had their Foreign Affairs Bureau do the review.
a TV documentary about one of the least telegenic subjects imaginable: software security flaws
Makes it easy to hack up a negative review that misses whole, obvious point, certainly.
Harris comes across as a zealot, imbued with the spirit of the righteous crusader, which is a nice way of saying she's a little hard to take.
Oh dear, a private citizen that hasn't been groomed and prepped properly for teevee. I think she does well enough, even next to Howard Dean's emaculate makeup prep. Perhaps Paul Farhi can hire her a consultant so she can compete in the real world.
diving in Dumpsters
The 7337 term is trashing. When humint is necessary, trash the place first. You can tell it's not just some slapdash movie for hardcore blackhats when they dumb down the jargon for the layman like that.
Normally the necessity of trashing speaks to the integrity of corporate password security. I'm almost pacified that it was necessary. Then again they based the whole software suite on systems with numerous gaping security holes. Oh well.
They find signed poll tapes in the Dumpsters, by the way. In different dumpsters in different states. Brilliant.
Diebold claims [everything is just perfectly secure]
And with every release of a new Windows OS, Microsoft claims it's more secure than ever. We rest our case.
Paul began by pointing out:
No doubt, voting and vote-counting can be messy, complicated and subject to potentially outcome-shifting flaws.
That's exactly what this technology was supposed to solve. The problem was handed off to a bunch of politically connected firms with no expertise and less transparency. I may very well have that backwards, now that I think about it.
The primary failure of the movie was to not stress that enough and the obvious solution - say two little words. It could be done for free, those fucking libertarian techies love to point out other people's insecurities.
I say watch it. The worst that could possibly happen is people demand, god forbid, reasonably secure and credible elections. We don't have them.
