On 29 May, 2006, at 11:30, David O'Callaghan wrote:
Hi,
On 28.05.06 17:21, Paul O'Malley wrote:
It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a waste of resources. This should be rectified. They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they could run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
I think the voting stations themselves are fairly low-end machines with a Motorola 68000-series processor, so roughly comparable to an original Palm Pilot.
This is correct. They are actually pretty nifty pieces of hardware. Very simple, custom embedded OS, very little layering and complexity, etc.
There are a some so-called "hardened" PCs for doing the counting. One per constituency, I suppose. These would be more powerful and there must be around a hundred of these. In theory, these would be installed in some standard configuration with a reliable supply of spare parts, and maintained for some well-defined period into the future, but I suspect that they might get chucked out or replaced with other PCs or repurposed in local county council offices...
Actually, from what I recall of my brief direct and lengthy indirect involvement in electronic voting in Ireland (having been invited to two panels then "uninvited" when they find out what level of access is necessary to perform the security and correctness reviews that they were asking me to do), I do not recall any hardening guidelines for the vote setup and tally machines. They were just PCs with a minimal config. The big problem here is not so much the PC, but the fact that the associated software is tens of thousands of lines of semi-undocumented Delphi code....
...
- Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
scientific research.
<plug> http://grid.ie/ </plug> :)
Joe --- Joseph Kiniry School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin http://secure.ucd.ie/ http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/