OK, this XKCD really hits the mark.

[unixronin]

Comments

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I know! When I heard the antivirus thing, I thought, wtf. They're making a KIOSK, this thing should have just enough brains to press a button and report results to a central host.

Someone, somewhere, is incompetent or fraudulent.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Sudden thought: I'll bet DJ Delorie, if he put his mind to it, could design a better and more secure electronic voting machine than Diebold. Not least because it most likely wouldn't be some repurposed kiosk PC running Windows, it'd be the minimal hardware necessary to do the job, probably running on a microcontroller or an FPGA. If it was anything like the streaming-MP3 alarm clock he built (which is basically a microcontroller, an OLED display, an 8K EEPROM, an Ethernet PHY, two D/A converters and a half dozen microswitches), it'd probably take half a second to boot and self-configure.