Computers Are programmed By People, Not Magic

[kster]

Bitbucket Kylewelsh. Com

Published in March 27th, 2008 Posted by Timothy Lee

Ben Adida has a great post discussing the misplaced faith people often have in the machines in their lives, and the way that faith often spills over to e-voting. He mentions a scene in the 2006 HBO documentary on e-voting where an election official breaks down in tears when someone shows her how her voting machines could be hacked. For computer programmers, who are intimately familiar with what goes on under the hood, the idea that we should automatically trust anything a machine tells us is a little bit ridiculous. We're aware that computers are extremely complex devices that can go wrong in any number of ways, that they're designed by fallible human beings, and that it requires a lot of very careful engineering to make sure they're secure and reliable. We recognize, in particular, that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to have problems, and so the more skeptical we should be of its results. It's not a coincidence that $5 pocket calculators tend to work flawlessly, while complex systems like Excel and the Pentium chip sometimes make basic arithmetic errors: the greater complexity increases the number of ways things can go wrong.

But a lot of non-technical folks seem to view things the other way around. Last week, for example, I noted a Chicago law professor who thinks that "the future is surely with the touch-screen or some other form of online voting." The problem with this statement is that if our goal is security and reliability, which it should be, the added complexity of computers and touchscreens is a big disadvantage. But this isn't obvious if you've never looked under the hood to appreciate all the things that could go wrong. Computers are not magical boxes that always produce the correct answer, but unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think that they are.

http://bitbucket.kylewelsh.com/2008/03/27/computers-are-programmed-by-people-not-magic/

[mac2]

1. Madam will read the cards and decide who is the winner.

Computer voting machines are used because they can be manipulated. DA@!

"Last week, for example, I noted a Chicago law professor who thinks that "the future is surely with the touch-screen or some other form of online voting."

Obviously this lawyer professor has been hired to lie by the Cons. I'm not "touched" by any machine to count my votes.

[kster]

2. Only a hand full of people can see how the vote/counting machine counts

OUR ballots, then they will allow us to Hand Count a small % of randomly selected votes/ballots.

Screw them, we will Hand Count ALL of our Paper Ballots in our poling place, if we so choose, we will not be denied and they will need to get over that fact, and NO! we will not allow PAPERLESS Levers or DRE'S.

Their vote count SCAM game is OVER!!

Thats how we Roll! :)

[mac2]

7. I agree.

[lligrd]

3. Lately It Is More By Magic And Cheap Labor

The magic is that anything works at all.

[mac2]

8. Profit for the Bush cronies.

All those voting machine companies and intelligence gathering corporations are Bush profiteers.

[DCKit]

4. My PC used to crash or drop the internets whenever I wrote anything...

with "Bill Gates", "Microsoft", "Windoze" or "Vista". Now that I've switched to Linux, I think it's possessed by the librul media. All three.

[AdHocSolver]

5. To err is human -- To really f*ck up you need a computer.

A computer allows a single person to make thousands of mistakes in a fraction of a second.

A single computer allows a cracker to shift tens of thousands of votes in dozens of computers in a few seconds.

I programmed computers for several years and was always amazed, but after a while, no longer surprised, at how most of the software was riddled with so many bugs. In fact, most of the time I worked in software maintenance, not writing new programs, but merely hunting down and fixing bugs in existing software.

Programs can run from a few thousand lines of code to millions of lines of code. Software written in-house for corporations is often written and modified over a period of years by many different programmers. The person who said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee would be overwhelmed by the software that runs the companies that they do business with. A lot of software is so badly written that it is often abandoned because it cannot be fixed sufficiently to put it into production.

There are reasons why certain programs crash so frequently, or why some software is so prone to viruses and worms.
And now you know the dirty little secret.

[Peace Patriot]

6. It reminds me of automobiles, no seatbelts and high speed limits.

The automobile profiteers (including gas and rubber profiteers) lied, for years and years, about the carnage from auto wrecks. They should have included seatbelts from the beginning, and cautioned states and cities to control driving speeds. But no. They did none of these things. And that is not to mention the damage to public health and quality of life from automobile exhaust. They covered it all up. And it took decades for the public to catch up with the truth, connect the dots, and start requiring safety measures.

The cost to people and to our public treasuries was enormous--and included, for instance, engineering roads for higher and higher speeds.* The same thing has happened with electronic voting--foisted upon us hastily, in a frenzy of easy profits from the public coffers--and with the added bonus of being able to keep people like George Bush, Dick Cheney and Orrin Hatch in office.

Now our Democratic leaders come out with their lame proposals for a "paper trail." And do this ugly dance with the rightwing Bushite corporations who are 'counting' all our votes with "trade secret" code, of the corps objecting and lobbying for continued secrecy, and the Dems pretending to be for transparency. But the corps will "settle" for a "paper trail" as long as nobody pays it any mind, and nobody actually counts the paper evidence--and as long as they profit in billions of dollars for more voting machines, printers, 'maintenance,' paper, and more secret codes, with better undetectability as to fraud. It's so like the seatbelt fight! And the 55 mph speed limit fight! And the smog fight! Lower the speed limit? Okay. So we'll manufacture gas-guzzling SUVs, that flip over on a dime, to keep gas corps and the insurance corps in gravy--and we'll sell this as "safer"!

"Paper trails" are probably less safe because they promote the illusion that somebody is counting the votes, when nobody is. The actual votes (ballots) go into a box and are never seen again. A machine, programmed by a private corp tech, is 'counting' electrons! Teensy little balls of energy easily manipulated by lines of code installed in the computer. This is not a vote. It is a bet, on bad odds, that the 'count' will be accurate and correctly reflect the will of the people.

A lot of people have died because of corporate lies about seatbelts, speed and smog. A lot of people have died because of e-voting--1.2 million slaughtered in Iraq (and counting). The poor dead black citizens floating in New Orleans, abandoned by a murderous government. And countless others. Corporate lies are lethal. How they got into our vote counting system is a question we need to ask of our Democratic office holders, who supported it as a way of (s)electing warmongers, in a peace-minded country (56% opposed to the Iraq War at the beginning of it, Feb 03--grown to a whopping 70% today), and are still supporting it.

-------

*(If you ride the Pasadena freeway--the first freeway in California--you know that it has right-angle off ramps from the freeway that cannot be taken at more than 5 mph, without killing yourself. Now we have slick on/off ramps that promote speed, speed, speed, and five, six lanes of traffic going 60 to 70 mph, so that you take your life in your hands just trying to enter the traffic stream, and one tiny mistake and you and yours, and others, are maimed and/or dead. And half the population doesn't use seatbelts because they are uncomfortable and inhuman. (Humans like to--and need to--wiggle around.) The whole traffic thing is inhuman--like ants on an anthill. Designed of, by and for corporate profits. E-voting is the same. Speed kills.)

[sinkingfeeling]

9. Yes. I've been in the programming business since the late 1960's. I cannot tell you the

number of times I have argued with 'customer service' people over billing errors. Some were so obvious that I could explain what the coding errors were. One was with a water bill, where the programmer neglected credit amounts (negative numbers). I have even volunteered my services to a few, but none ever took me up on it.

[tbyg52]

10. Old joke: According to a Pentium, what is 2+2?

3.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999