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Surprises

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Nov 25th 2003 4:00pm





Diebold's Change Of Heart

from the gee,-I-wonder-why... dept

According to Larry Lessig, Diebold has actually backed away from their threats to sue students who were posting memos suggesting their electronic voting machines had problems. Considering the public relations storm that has been brewing around this case, it's not a huge surprise. However, what will be interesting now is whether or not the EFF's case against Diebold will still be allowed to move forward. This is reminiscent of the "chilling effects" Ed Felten case, where a big company starts slapping people around with the DMCA until they protest loudly enough. If there are no consequences to letting these companies threaten anyone they want with the DMCA (even if the threat isn't valid) they're just going to keep doing it.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    No Subject Given

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    anon, Nov 25th, 2003 @ 4:38pm

    Diebold is a real menace...we need reform in this area FAST. There should be paper audit trails for all votes, its freaking simple to do. Diebold's security is proven to be a joke based on whats leaked to the net, Access databases and no security best practices at all.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: No Subject Given

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    Mike (profile), Nov 25th, 2003 @ 4:50pm

    Well, the good news is that California appears to be leading the way on this front. Hopefully it will work.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Diabold? Diabold who?

    identicon
    LittleW0lf, Nov 25th, 2003 @ 5:09pm

    What is really funny about all this is that if Diabold hadn't managed to screw things up so badly, they would have stayed under the radar for most of us. I knew nothing about Diabold or what they did until they threatened to sue over release of email, and now I really believe I know more about the company than I ever wanted to. And of course, I am really thinking they should have a place on my top 5 evil companies list, but there just isn't enough room since SCO got added a while back.

    Apparently I am not alone, as others have now become more aware of bad security at Diabold, since 2 of their ATMs got the Welchia worm, and they tried to PR the exposure to death, only causing security experts to look into the issue more. I think Diabold has proven that PR and the legal system doesn't fix problems, hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and move on.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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