Volkswagens and Voting Machines: The Dangers of Proprietary Software

[thesquanderer]

From Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet

"The breadth of the Volkswagen scandal should not obscure the broader question of how vulnerable we are to software code that is out of sight and beyond oversight."

“Software is in everything,” he said, citing airplanes, medical devices and cars, much of it proprietary and thus invisible. “We shouldn’t use it for purposes that could conceivably cause harm"

“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,...You can’t inspect it...If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.”

It is too easy for coders to make machines behave the way they want. If the code cannot be independently inspected, there is virtually no risk to code manipulation... it wasn't even easy to catch VW, and even then it was only possible because the results of the fraud could be easily repeated and confirmed, something that isn't necessarily possible in other kinds of manipulations. The only other risk is that of a whistle-blower, and we know how well that usually works out.

With virtually no risk to voting machine manipulation, and such enormous power (and money) at stake, it's almost hard to imagine that it's NOT being attempted. People talk about the need for transparency in government... it needs to start with the elections themselves.

Certain things should not be privatized. Social Security. Prisons. Ballot counting.