ES&S Sues Former Workers Over Taking Buggy, Vulnerability-Filled Code
from the why-would-they-bother? dept
Michael Scott alerts us to the news that e-voting firm ES&S has sued two former employees, claiming copyright infringement over code they took with them from ES&S, along with additional trade secrets. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but all I can ask is "why?" As has been documented time and time again, ES&S's e-voting code has a ton of problems. Remember, these are the machines that have been found to have serious security vulnerabilities, with some serious bugs, such as adding votes to the wrong election, calibration problems that lead to people voting for the wrong candidate, and bugs that resulted in phantom votes. And ES&S is the company that knew about some of these bugs, and let them be used in elections anyway. So if you were going to go off and start your own e-voting company (and it's not clear these individuals did that), wouldn't you be better off starting from scratch?![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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Filed Under: copyright, e-voting, software, trade secrets
Companies: es&s
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Good Point!
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Re: Good Point!
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However, even if they consider it "complete" and use it as is, then why shouldn't they? If ES&S can use it as is, why couldn't a competitor? More importantly, if these guys are taking code and trade secrets from their former employee, do you really think they would let integrity stand in the way of profit? Keep in mind that they did come from this shady company in the first place.
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sure if you intend to use the code to build products from.
if you just want to sell it to competitors or to people interested in rigging elections, then the bugs (0dayz) contained in the code are worth more than the completed code.
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Not Surprised
However, even if they consider it "complete" and use it as is, then why shouldn't they? If ES&S can use it as is, why couldn't a competitor? More importantly, if these guys are taking code and trade secrets from their former employee, do you really think they would let integrity stand in the way of profit? Keep in mind that they did come from this shady company in the first place.
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Question:
Are we so far gone as a "free" nation that we are no longer all that concerned when the machinations of VOTING are so flawed as to render the whole process meaningless?
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All this stuff about "calibrating" votes is 100% bullshit. Its a simple matter of "if button A is pressed then candidate A's votes=candidate A's votes+1.
I've never been sure why these companies claim that their software is so difficult to fix and make sure votes are correct. the only "difficulty" involved is making sure the software has a reasonable level of security (a basic web-connected interface with 2 buttons that sends info on the button pressed (encrypted) would be sufficient...and virtually hack-proof as theres nothing to actually exploit in there.
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No, but if you have a touch screen display (like most voting machines), you have to calibrate it to make sure that when you hit the A on the screen it types A instead of the S beside it. That's still something that should be insanely easy and should be a one time thing.
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everybody i know has used a mouse before and even if you haven't it is pretty intuitive, and even if you still have problems poll workers can help you out.
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Not the point
Now if they want to start from scratch and write their own evoting code, they are free to do so.
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The problem is not
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Start from scratch? This isn't the 70s, Mike.
Better yet, why not take what's broken and fix it, as this would be faster than starting from scratch and get the business up and running much faster.
I would speculate these employees may know exactly what's wrong with the code in order to take it to begin with.
That alone should make one wonder about it. But hell, what do I care.
Corporate America owns every damn politician anyway, so it doesn't matter who gets "voted" in.
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I'm with Miles
I would go a step farther and say that perhaps these two are the ones who were 'encouraged' to break the code in the specified manner in order to get it to do what ES&S wanted it to do (Dropped votes, misplaced votes, phantom votes.... these sound like designed 'features' to me). Nothing pisses off a programmer more than taking the excellent work they did and asking them to 'break' it in specific ways. Perhaps these two got tired of all the crap and decided to take their code so they could clean it up to do what it was intended to do, not what ES&S Twisted it into.
What better way to shut them up then to drop them and file suit against them. If they did stand up and say ES&S made us write 'buggy' code on purpose, who would believe them now?
Or perhaps my tinfoil hat is just a little tight today....
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so why isnt the screen simply split into large chunks, where calibration wouldn't be needed.
You press for your candidate..it comes up with "you have chosen....NAME.....are you sure?" with big yes/no buttons underneath.
Then shows a final third screen "you voted for NAME...vote recorded"...no fancy interface just plain text...
That way if the vote suddenly "accidentally" goes to the wrong candidate we'd have 100% proof that the election was rigged and whoever created the voting machine could be charged with treason.
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