Sequoia To Publish Source Code For Voting Machines 102
cecille writes "Voting machine maker Sequoia announced on Tuesday that they plan to release the source code for their new optical-scan voting machine. The source code will be released in November for public review. The company claims the announcement is unrelated to the recent release of the source code for a prototype voting machine by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. According to a VP quoted in the press release, 'Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security.'"
Re:Tag story "noshit". (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think they are releasing it as open source, or under any open license. Rather, they are planning to publish their proprietary code for all to see.
Spokeswoman Michelle Shafer [...] said the firmware on the company’s new Frontier optical-scan machines is written in C# programming language and runs on Linux. The election management software - which sits on a computer at the election office and is used to create ballots and tabulate votes - runs on Microsoft Windows XP and uses a Microsoft SQL database.
Looks like they use a combination of open and closed source for their OSes. I wonder why they went with C# on Linux?
Re:I'd be more interested in this post (Score:3, Informative)
How about they release the source code for their old voting machines.
You know, the ones that aren't "optical-scan".
Last I checked, the touchscreen ones are the voting machines that have caused so much grief.
The touchscreens are just the tip of the iceberg for problems with electronic voting. It may be the most advertised problem of voting but it certainly isn't the worst problem.
Central tabulation of votes, memory cards, chain of custody of those cards, manipulation of the tabulation database and virtually every part of electronic voting has been a huge problem.
Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org gained a copy of the GEMS database software and showed how it could easily manipulate votes without much chance of being caught.