[ale] [OT] Insight into the Diebold Mess

[Jeff Hubbs]

I was looking over some of the leaked Diebold e-mails at
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/scdc/s/lists/announce.w3archive/200110/msg00002.html and I saw something that, to me, serves as a perfect example of why you don't want to use closed-source software...well, period!

Quoting from the e-mail exchange:

"I believe that Jeff sees support so we should see a response shortly. 
Can anyone other than Jeff give an update on this?  Any idea when CE
will be available.  This will be a certification issue.  We must get to
a point where software is stable and not undergoing these constant
changes if we ever expect to have products certified."

"Windows CE 2.12 has a  bug where it always reports the Main Backup
Battery as a 'Low' Status.  This is apparently corrected in Windows CE
3.0."

"A PIC microcontroller is used to control battery charging/discharging
and power distribution.  The PIC monitors the battery and reports a
percentage of the battery's charge capacity to WinCE, but at this time,
the BallotStation software doesn't use the Battery Charge Capacity
Percentage, only the status word (i.e., good, low, very low.)  And WinCE
2.12 is stuck on "low".  I don't know the outlook for implementing WinCE
3.0.  Jeff Dean would be the person to make an inquiry to on that
matter."

Isn't that interesting?  Note how a voting machine certification issue
has its root cause buried inside WinCE, which, to them, is untouchable. 
This puts Microsoft in the driver's seat (it could be any vendor and my
point would still be made, yes, but that it's
twice-convicted-illegal-monopolist Microsoft just makes it worse). 
They're dependent on an if-when bug-fix situation and, to the extent
that WinCE 3.0 is a legitimate unit version release (as opposed to a
point release), that's an awful lot of new/changed code to incorporate
just to get a fix of a single bug.

Make it all Open Source and you can have your own hackers find and fix
individual bugs.  



-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>