Gizmodo Australia » diebold

Diebold Sued for GPL Violations, Allegations of Puppy Kicking to Come

Gizmodo US Edition — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Artifex, makers of the Linux Ghostscript Postscript interpreter, is suing Diebold for breaking the fair use terms of its software. Diebold used the freely-available software, which is fine, but when they authored some changes to Ghostscript Postscript, they neglected to follow the very reasonable rules such use requires. Biggies like HP, Xerox, and IBM all use Ghostscript legally and honestly, so why can’t Diebold?

They neither publicly released the changes they’d made nor paid Artifex for the privilege to keep the changes to themselves, and in the hippie-dippie share everything world of Linux, that doesn’t fly. Luckily our new President of the Universe Barack Obama won by a large enough margin that we can’t question the results, but good god, it’s beyond time to ditch this aggressively stupid company and get an electronic balloting system that, you know, works. [LinuxDevices]

Homer Simpson Explains the Problem with Electronic Voting

Mark Wilson — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Conspiracy theorist or not, any time I’m typing information into a computer at any time of the day, I know that it can be lost at a moment’s notice, by the simple glitch of a program or power supply. There’s simply no permanence to digital information, which makes the potential alteration of such data both frightening and perfectly realistic. Apply that principle to something like a presidential election, and the prospects become downright scary. That is, unless you’re Homer Simpson. Then it’s just kind of funny. [via Wonkette - Thanks Diebold!]

Diebold Accidentally Leaks 2008 Election Results Early

Adam Frucci — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:05:00 +0000

Diebold, the company run by unscrupulous republicans that manufactures crappy, easily-hacked voting machines, has done a bang-up job of pretty much destroying many people’s confidence in the legitimacy of the democratic process. No one is better at calling out such depressing aspects of our country with biting humour like The Onion, who here tell us about how all the fun of the election this year was ruined because Diebold accidentally leaked the results ahead of time. It’s funny because it could be true! Ha… ha? [The Onion]

Uncle Sam Wants to Know How You Feel About E-Voting Machines

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:20:10 +0000

If you’re not exactly down with the state of e-voting in the US (and you really shouldn’t be), the Election Assistance Committee (a federal oversight committee that now has reign over certifying e-voting machines) wants to hear about it and what you think of their recently proposed guidelines (PDF, 600 pages).Ostensibly they’re designed to improve notoriously non-existent security, but they were drafted in part by reps from voting machine companies. One place to start, besides simply saying the machines should be more secure and add paper trails, would be to push for them to use open source code, according to some researchers. Regardless of what you think, you have 120 days to let ‘em know. And you should, even if you aren’t registered to vote (like me) so maybe at least someone else’s vote will be worthwhile. [EAC via Threat Level]

Diebold Pulls a Reverse Cingular, Rebrands Voting Machine Division

Matt Buchanan — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:11:53 +0000

Diebold takes such pride in the secure craftsmanship of its voting machines that it’s changing the name of that division to Premier Election Solutions Inc., and even giving it its own board of directors. This is after no one stepped up to take the division off of Diebold’s hands, probably because they’d feel guilty for relieving it of such a stellar asset. Wonder why they wouldn’t want their ATMs and safes associated with their voting machines? [Threat Level, Image via Flickr]