Voting Machine Madness
I've been closely following the voting machine revelations. The systems have:
- A graphical administrative back-end, which lets admins visually drag and drop data around.
- An audit table in the underlying database. But given my experience of the public sector, there's no doubt in my mind that everyone logs in with the same user, probably "admin" and "abc" for username and password, respectively.
- The chief security and strategy fellow for Dominion revealed a few years ago that the underlying database can easily be accessed directly. That would mean direct SQL statement or document execution, including a deletion or modification of any audit or voting data.
- The system has some kind of scheduling system, perhaps "cron" or some equivalent, where batch jobs can be executed to modify the data.
- Scripts can be dropped onto the machines either remotely via a network, or locally via a USB thumb drive or some other approximation. Meanwhile, the physical lock mechanism guarding the USB port on the machines can be opened without a key using just a cleverly folded piece of cardboard.
But the most hilarious aspect came compliments of this article: "Watkins said that to report the final vote counts, the machine operator would copy and paste the 'Results' folder from the machine onto a USB drive."
Any of this writer's fellow IT professionals will find this highly amusing. One can imagine the poll worker training clearly, conducted by a morbidly obese woman wearing a Face Diaper: "you just drag and drop the folder onto the thumb drive!" Apparently the subsequent step was for the workers to then manually plug the thumb drives-- it's difficult to even type this with a straight face, it's so absurd-- into the server, and drag the "results folder" onto that system's storage for final tabulation.
Apparently there have been thumb drives found in multiple states just sitting around, where they never got plugged back into the servers! Others were undoubtedly fed in multiple times: for anyone who knows the public sector, the combination of corruptness and total ineptitude undoubtedly going on at these places when expecting low-paid or even volunteer non-technical people to be hurriedly following an elaborate manual process like this can not be overstated.
ICANN Prediction
Mark Dice has proven pretty prescient over the years, and the new prediction he makes in this video will almost certainly come to pass: at some juncture, even ICANN will probably become captured, and start denying domain name registrations for persona non grata entities.
Right-leaning people-- which at this point includes anyone to the Right of Chairman Mao-- not only need their own parallel search engines, encyclopedias, dictionaries, news sites, video hosting platforms, and means of communication, but probably also their own DNS equivalent, for Pete's sake. If Lefties had a way to stop Ethernet cables from selectively transmitting packets over copper at the molecular level they'd make use of that as well.
Levity
And now on to something less serious and more fun: a quick peek at a brand new game running on the previous generation video game systems really illustrates what a leap in power they are, however incremental it might be compared to console releases in the past: even the Series S rendition is significantly better looking than the title running on the One X.
And remember, that last comparison is not even an intended-by-Microsoft upgrade path: their intentions are "One S -> Series S" and "One X -> Series X": but remove the "next gen" features like ray traced reflections, and these new titles look like Nintendo Switch games by contrast, even when the somewhat meager Series S is used as the comparison basis.