Diebold admits election machines aren't properly audited

One of the most important parts of the systems I have worked on in the past are the audit logs. These logs track user and system activities, and often provide the ONLY reliable window into the true inner workings of your system. When something goes wrong, there is NOTHING better than being able to go back to the logs and see every step, in order, and see where it went wrong.

Unfortunately, Diebold's electronic election machines do not record everything. Adding to the long history of concerns about reliability, researchers have discovered that it is possible to delete votes from an election on a Diebold machine and nothing shows in the audit log. This means even if electoral fraud/manipulation were suspected, it could never be proven/detected by the system.

It is time for a truly open-source approach to this problem. The saying is "light disinfects". The more eyes on a piece of software, the harder it becomes to hide bugs like this.

An Excellent Analysis of the Zune 30 GB Leap Year Bug

It is unlikely that any of our regular readers is a Zune owner, but I have found the revelation and analysis of the bug in Zune 30 GB players that locked it up for all of New Years Eve to be fascinating. If you missed the original analysis, basically there was a bug in the year calculation function that runs just before the end of the boot cycle which ended up in an infinite loop on the last day of a leap year.

This article is a great read on the bug, and illustrates why QA is so important and how even now Software Engineering is an art. There are many solutions, but few which are both bug-free and elegant.

WV Vote-Flipping Explained

Finally, we have an expert who can explain the charges of vote flipping (you vote for Obama, it shows as assigned to McCain) in West Virginia and elsewhere. The good news: it appears there is no conspiracy, but rather a technical glitch related to calibrating the touchscreen. The bad news: It looks like this is a very easy problem to have occur, which probably means we'll be hearing about a lot of reports of vote flipping in the days to come.

Vote Switching in West Virgnia

Between these charges and the widespread allegations of voter fraud by ACORN, I am expecting we are in for a rash of after-election lawsuits about the results.

Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.

This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for "Barack Obama" kept flipping to "John McCain".

In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. Both county clerks said the problem is isolated.

They also blamed voters for not being more careful.

"People make mistakes more than machines," said Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright.

I am betting on of the first things the next President/Congress will have to tackle is a way to restore faith in our electoral system. That may require abandoning the electronic machines that they mandated only a few years ago.

What's That Bug?

I found bugs that looked beetle-ish to me, but didn't know for sure that it was a beetle or why I was seeing them. I tried typing in descriptions and thought at first it was a carpet beetle only to have the exterminator say it was a type of weevil. For some reason, calling it a weevil just didn't satisfy me. I did some more searching and found BugGuide. They have pictures of MANY insects and spiders and even have a way that you can upload pictures and ask for the bug to be identified. They tell me that it's a darkling beetle. Still not sure how to get rid of them, but perhaps a second visit from the exterminator will make them go away.

iPhones knock out Duke Wifi?

Among the various iPhone bugs reported out there this one must be the most troubling. It appears that under some conditions, iPhones can flood a Wifi network and end up taking out wireless routers altogether. This has ONLY been reported at Duke, so far, but one must wonder how long until we see something similar.

The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C. school’s pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

Of course, the beauty of a software-focussed device like the iPhone is that bugs like this can usually be fixed by a software or firmware update. On a more "normal" phone, it might take a recall to repair.