The Purple Pinup Guru Platform

When purple things are pulsating on your mind, I'm the one whose clock you want to clean. Aiding is Sparky, the Astral Plane Zen Pup Dog from his mountain stronghold on the Northernmost Island of the Happy Ninja Island chain, this blog will also act as a journal to my wacky antics at an entertainment company and the progress of my self published comic book, The Deposit Man which only appears when I damn well feel like it. Real Soon Now.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

SPARKY: Remember that "The Puppet Boy King" really lost Ohio and Florida? Well I did tell you about it ...

Well —— only if you're a sharp-eyed critic who read the July 2004 issue of Discover Magazine —— but read this:

Devastating hack proven

“Wed. December 14, 2005: Due to contractual non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho has announced that he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. On Tuesday, the most serious “hack” demonstration to date took place in Leon County. The Diebold machines succumbed quickly to alteration of the votes. This comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, and the announcement that a stockholder's class action suit has been filed against Diebold by Scott & Scott. Further “hack” testing on additional vulnerabilities is tentatively scheduled before Christmas in the state of California.

Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, together with Black Box Voting, demonstrated that Diebold made misrepresentations to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the “memory card” (the credit-card-sized ballot box used by computerized voting machines.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked. ...”
Walden O'Dell

Walden "Wally" O'Dell was chief executive officer and chairman of the board of Diebold, a US-based security and financial products company.

He was an active fund raiser for George W. Bush's re-election campaign and once wrote that he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." His involvement with the campaign raised concerns that, as the CEO of the largest manufacturer of electronic voting equipment, he would have been in a position to manipulate the results of the presidential election of 2004. Since the voting systems of Diebold are closed source and do not provide an auditable paper record, it is impossible to establish the integrity of the counts.

See also: 2004 U.S. Election controversies and irregularities

In December 2005, O'Dell left the company following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading. [1]

External link
  • Walden O'Dell's political donations
  • State To Slam Diebold with Suit
  • Diebold Announces Management Changes - ... Walden W. O'Dell, Diebold chairman and chief
    executive officer, has resigned from the company and its board of directors, effective immediately. ...

    • Diebold

    Diebold, Incorporated NYSE: DBD is a security systems corporation which is engaged primarily in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems (such as ATMs), electronic and physical security products (including vaults and currency processing systems), and software and integrated systems for global financial and commercial markets. Diebold was incorporated under the laws of the State of Ohio in August, 1876, and is headquartered in Green, Ohio.

    Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary of Diebold, surrounded by controversy, has recently entered the business of creating electronic voting terminals and solutions for government entities.

    The term "black box voting" was coined to describe machines that, like those made by Diebold, use closed source software, do not print paper ballots, and do not use any reliable digital authentication techniques. ...

    Criticism

    Together, ES&S and Diebold Election Systems are (as of 2004) responsible for tallying approximately 80% of the votes cast in the United States. The software architecture common to both is a creation of Mr. Urosevich's company I-Mark. Some experts claim that this structure is easily compromised, in part due to its reliance on Microsoft Access databases. Britain J. Williams, responsible for certification of voting machines for the state of Georgia and a consultant to Diebold, has provided an assessment based on his accounting of potential exploits.

    In August 2003, Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans. When assailed by critics for the conflict of interest, he pointed out that the company's election machines division is run out of Texas by a registered Democrat. Nonetheless, he vowed to lower his political profile lest his personal actions harm the company. DES claims its systems provide strong immunity to ballot tampering and other vote rigging attempts. These claims have been challenged, notably by Bev Harris on her website, Blackboxvoting.org, and book by the same name. Harris and C. D. Sludge, an Internet journalist, both claim there is also evidence that the Diebold systems have been exploited to tamper with American elections — a claim Harris expands in her book Black Box Voting. Sludge further cites Votewatch for evidence that suggests a pattern of compromised voting machine exploits throughout the 1990s, and specifically involving the Diebold machines in the 2002 election. DES also has come under fire for the recent discovery that the Diebold voting machines do not and did not in 2004 meet the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) error standard.

    Current controversy

    Diebold's voting machines, which are made by its subsidiary Diebold Election Systems (DES), have caused a public uproar among some opponents, some of which are engaged in "electronic civil disobedience" against legal attempts by Diebold to stop the release and publication of a number of internal memos.

    In September 2003, a large number of internal Diebold memos, dating back to mid-2001, were posted to the Web by the website organizations Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons. Diebold's critics believe that these memos reflect badly on Diebold's voting machines and business practices. For example: "Do not to offer damaging opinions of our systems, even when their failings become obvious." (Election Support Guide; pg. 10 -- [1])

    Diebold attempted to stop the release and publication of a number of internal memos by sending cease and desist letters to sites hosting these documents demanding that they be removed in violation of the DMCA found in § 512 of the United States Copyright Act. When it turned out that some of the challenged groups would not back down, Diebold retracted their threat. In October 2004, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the District Court of Northern California ruled that Diebold knew that publishing the memos was not a violation of copyright and Diebold was found in violation of the DMCA.

    In December 2003, an internal Diebold memo was leaked to the press, sparking controversy in Maryland. Maryland officials requested that Diebold add the functionality of printing paper voting records. The leaked memo said, "As a business, I hope we're smart enough to charge them up the wazoo [for this feature]".

    In 2004, after an initial investigation into the company's practices by the California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley caused him to issue a ban on one model of Diebold voting machines California, the Attorney General of California, Bill Lockyer, sued Diebold, charging that it had given false information about the security and reliability of Diebold Election Systems machines that were sold to the state. To settle the case, Diebold agreed to pay $2.6 million and to implement certain reforms. [2]

    In June 2005, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that when given access to Diebold vote-counting computers, Bev Harris- a critic of Diebold's voting machines - was able to make 65,000 votes disappear simply by changing the memory card that stores voting results for one that had been altered. Although the machines are supposed to record changes to data stored in the system, they showed no record of tampering after the memory cards were swapped. In response, a spokesperson for the Department of State said that, "Information on a blog site is not viable or credible." [3]

    In December 2005, Diebold's CEO Wally O'Dell left the company following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading. [4]

    External links

    (Complete at WikiPedia)

    K - More in a minute -- We've got Richard Pryor, 65, American comedian and actor, heart attack and complications of multiple sclerosis as well as Stanley Tookie Williams, 51, American convicted murderer, ex-leader of the Crips - was executed for killing 4 people in California to talk about.

    And there's more politics with the Puppet Boy King ...

    posted by Coat @ 9:08 AM  

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