“The findings in this study indicate that the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process,” said Brunner. “To put it in everyday terms, the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as … using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.”

A Treo and a magnet? That’s all you’d need to compromise Ohio’s electronic voting systems? All of them? Yes. “It was worse than I anticipated,” Brunner told the New York Times. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

So what’s the solution? Brunner recommends Ohio’s electronic voting systems be replaced with optical-scan paper ballot machines. But that’s expensive, and, some say, unecessary. “Certainly this report … will just absolutely throw Ohio into a complete tailspin going into the presidential election,” said Hamilton County Board of Elections Director John Williams. “I don’t think there has ever been a documented case of that happening. There certainly has never been a prosecution. … If you gave me the keys to the bank and combination of the safe, do you think I could break in? I could. Those again are not real-world scenarios under which we operate.”

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears below.

1. As inevitable as death and taxes: YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video site, will begin placing ads in its videos, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reports. The animated advertising will appear no earlier than 15 seconds into a video, overlaid on the bottom fifth of the screen. Citing viewer revulsion, a YouTube product manager told NewTeeVee the site will not use the dreaded preroll or postroll.
2. Apple, leveraging its deal-brokering with AT&T stateside, has signed up European partners for iPhone sales and service. A report in the Financial Times notes that three telecoms–T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France and O2 in the United Kingdom–will fork over 10% of the revenues made from iPhone calls and data transfers.



3. Stargazing earthlings will get a new perspective today, as Google unveils Sky, its view of the heavens from Earth. The New York Times reports that users will be able to zoom around to view millions of stars and galaxies, much as they do on a smaller scale with Google Earth.
4. Henri Richard, the very visible top sales officer of Advanced Micro Devices, is leaving the troubled chip maker. Confirming an earlier report on Hexus.net, Tom Krazit of CNET describes the executive vice president’s departure as a “significant development in what has been a disastrous year for AMD,” precipitated by its postponement of Barcelona, its quad-core server chip.
5. Regrouping years after the dot-com implosion, the online-trading business is in for some consolidation now that TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and E*Trade Financial Corp. are holding merger talks. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the potential union could create a single dominant force in what has been seen as a highly fragmented industry, with many small companies in the competitive fray.
6. Spotting potential in the social-networking trend, U.S. spy agencies plan to develop an information-sharing portal based on MySpace and Facebook. According to the Register, taxpayers, rather than advertisers, will foot the bill for the spook Web site.
7. Darkening the cloud of suspicion hanging over electronic-voting machines, California’s secretary of state has accused Election Systems & Software of selling about 1,000 uncertified electronic-voting machines to five California counties in 2006, according to IDG News Service. The state has instituted new security standards for all electronic-voting machines after a review sharply criticized the technology.
8. Reconsidering the upswing in PC gaming, Microsoft is bringing back its SideWinder line of peripheral equipment, starting in October with a new mouse, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The device will cost $79.95 and includes a wider scroll wheel, special buttons and other doodads for gameheads.
9. Joining the competition for the thinnest TV screen, Sharp is unveiling a 2-centimeter thick LCD screen. PC World reports that the prototype TV will get its signals via a high-speed wireless link, eliminating the need for a cable.



10. Talk about a cybervirus. Epidemiologists have found that studying an imaginary epidemic in an online game world could provide valuable clues to coping with the real thing. Writing about research published in the September issue of Lancet Infectious Diseases, ABC News reported that researchers from Tufts and the University of North Carolina are serious in applying the lessons of online epidemics (in particular, the “corrupted blood” that spread on World of Warcraft in 2005) to disease-control efforts worldwide.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan

“Diebold and its financial consultants have been actively engaged with a number of strategic companies and private investors with the intent to divest the Diebold Election Systems subsidiary,” the company said in a pair of press releases. “These efforts to sell this company, however, have proven unsuccessful due in part to the rapidly evolving political uncertainties and controversies surrounding state and jurisdiction purchases of electronic-voting systems. Given this changing business environment and the recent downturn in the capital markets, Diebold has postponed its efforts to divest the company and instead is realigning the election-systems subsidiary to allow it to operate as a more independent entity. … Diebold Elections Systems is changing its name to Premier Election Solutions. The change to Premier signifies a new beginning for the company.”

A new beginning? For the company that designed its widely criticized electronic-voting machines to be opened with a hotel minibar key? Perhaps in the same way that the donning of a wig and novelty Groucho glasses signifies a new beginning for the amateur comedian.

The California Secretary of State has finally released the source-code review portion of its two-month “top-to-bottom” examination of electronic voting systems certified for use in California, and it’s not pretty. “The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes,” the report concludes. “An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive–malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers.”

And it gets worse. Princeton professor Ed Felten read through the Diebold report, as well as those of Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems, and found that some of the problems it identifies are the same ones Diebold claimed to have fixed years ago. “Diebold claimed (p. 11) in 2003 that its use of hard-coded passwords was ‘resolved in subsequent versions of the software,’ ” Felten notes. “Yet the current version still uses at least two hard-coded passwords–one is “diebold” (report, p. 46) and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (report, p. 45).”

Now, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″ is an improvement over “11111,” Diebold’s last hard-coded security key, in that it employs eight numbers instead of just one. But surely it can’t be among those that inspired California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to recertify Diebold’s machines for use in the 2008 elections. Presumably, “come up with a less laughable password” was a condition of recertification.

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine–the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus–can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet. The exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes and hotel minibars.”

–Princeton professor Ed Felten

With the presidential primary approaching, Diebold Election Systems is finally developing a voter-verified paper trail–of bad press. Earlier this week, the company made headlines when a team of investigators found fundamental security vulnerabilities in its touchscreen voting machines (as well as those of rivals Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic).

Now it’s back in the news again, thanks to another government-ordered study that found its optical-scanning machines to be flawed as well. According to a report released by Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning, Diebold’s AccuVote OS optical-scan voting devices could compromise the upcoming presidential primary elections in which they’re to be used. The machine’s “memory card can be preprogrammed to redistribute votes cast for selected candidates on that terminal, including swapping the votes for two candidates,” the report explains. “The attack can be carried out with low probability of detection, assuming that audit with paper ballots are infrequent and that programmed cards are not detected before use.”

An unsettling revelation for anyone concerned about this whole idea of “election integrity.” But never fear, Diebold has vowed to patch the vulnerabilities identified in the report by the Aug. 17 deadline given it by the state. If it doesn’t, it risks decertification, which some would argue might not be a bad idea at this point. Remember, Diebold is the company that designed its widely criticized electronic-voting systems, to be opened with a hotel minibar key and then posted a detailed photograph of that key to its online store.

It’s the company that can’t seem to safeguard its source code. It’s the company that evaded election transparency laws in North Carolina. And it’s the company that modified its machines without notifying election officials. Twice.

Pretty much says it all, no? “What surprised me was not that we found things; what surprised me is the number of issues that we found,” Bishop said later in an interview with the Daily Democrat. “The problems covered the spectrum from physical locks all the way into software.”

Apparently, if one set out to design a voting system that prevents checks and balances, it would be hard to outdo the one used in California these days. Of course, the manufacturers of those systems would disagree with that assessment. As they have with Bowen’s review and the innumerable studies that preceded it. “While this evaluation was an interesting and helpful theoretical exercise, it did not represent a security-risk analysis and as such does not measure the severity of the actual threats in any meaningful way,” Sequoia said in a statement. “This was not a security-risk evaluation but an unrealistic worst-case scenario evaluation limited to malicious tests, studies and analysis performed in a laboratory environment by computer-security experts with unfettered access to the machines and software over several weeks.”

OK, so all electronic-voting systems are vulnerable in a laboratory environment. But have we forgotten that they’re also beset with problems in real-world environments as well? Remember the November 2006 elections? Not exactly smooth sailing, now was it? “Here’s the bottom line–no one trusts those machines anymore,” Markos “Kos” Moulitsas wrote at the time. “And not only do they damage the integrity of our democracy, but they give losing campaigns an excuse to grandstand and further erode faith in our system.”