In 2009 a NJ judge banned hooking up voting machines to the internet, but that's exactly how ES&S's "airgapped" machines work

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/22/verizon-autonomous-system.html

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mBoBiQu

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Airgapped

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I mean there’s air all around the voting machine right?? /s

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I think we need to focus on the positives here! Now that the tyranny of ‘net neutrality’ has been abolished the smart IoT voting machines of the future are poised to provide a host of exciting nee capabilities: can your boring legacy solution deliver paid prioritization to votes cast for your sponsor party? Can they deliver relevant sponsored content for a recurring revenue stream and a more informed* electorate?

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Adama on network security. He had a point.

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It’s using cell phones, wireless, that’s airgapped, right?

Puny security!

https://media.giphy.com/media/eHo3671Qix8Y0/giphy.gif(image larger than 3072KB)

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IF best practices for end-to-end authentication and encryption are followed, there’s nothing wrong with sending sensitive data over an untrustworty network, whether it’s cell modems or the Internet or a bunch of gossiping middle-schoolers.

But what are the chances they actually followed those best practices?

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That was going to be my comment. I think the big problem is the unknown backdoors and zero days that we haven’t heard of yet. For example, things that the NSA has developed and could on the hands of others even without NSA’s knowledge.

I wish we could make electronic vote work. That would be the end of Congress and third-party representatives that we elect now because it is impossible to vote on everything all the time. That would be true democracy, for good or bad.

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I can’t see a good electronic voting system (meaning one that lets you vote over the internet from the comfort of home, not just a computerized voting machine) ever coming out of the typical government pattern of outsourcing technological projects to the lowest-bidding (and/or highest-campaign-contributing) contractor who then delivers a black box proprietary “solution”, which seems to be how these voting machines got made.

It would need to be a public, transparent effort resulting in an open standard for electronic voting with an open-source software implementation, subject to lots of public and expert scrutiny. Then I might trust it.

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I think you broke my BS meter, and it was on the lowest sensitivity setting. :slight_smile:

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