What is Digg?39 Comments
- mrutan, on 11/05/2008, -1/+57Diebold, or Premier Election Systems, or whatever the brand name is this week, should be held accountable for violating the agreement. They have nothing at heart. Being a corporation, Diebold has no heart. What they do have is a bottom line... and the means to rebrand in a pathetic attempt to hide whenever their mischief is exposed.
In a related thought, one thing that is worse than a thief is a coward. - heystoopid, on 11/05/2008, -1/+46That explains much about the questionable non disclosure clause in the voting equipment and the chairman of die idiots was obviously more interested in his assorted back door low taxable bonuses rather then full compliance of all legal laws.
What a cheap bunch of asinine crooks in that company , for the irony is the license fee involved would have been peanuts relative to the profits made per machine , both the CFO and the companies legal adviser are total morons and weak sycophants . - jimmarch1, on 11/05/2008, -0/+42I'm the Jim March noted in the article.
Here's what happened.
Ghostscript is used by Diebold at the "Central Tabulator" station, which does several things:
1) It's where county employees (or too often contractors) create the ballot layouts. That's what GS is used for.
2) It creates the data for the precinct machines.
3) It takes the voting data back in from the precincts and tallies the vote.
This isn't a dedicated voting system box, it's usually a Dell file server-class PC.
Diebold ships the WHOLE system from their HQ to the county customer, getting the hardware from Dell and others and doing the system integration in their facility. This includes loading the operating system, drivers for funky hardware like the Digiboxes (serial-to-Ethernet stuff), their own Diebold-written apps and along the way, Ghostscript.
GS is free for non-commercial use (under GPL2 I think?) and NOT free for commercial use.
While examining a voting system in Pima County AZ, I obtained directory listings for the central tabulator by having them do:
dir c: /s /h > c:dirlist.txt
In Windows command-line-speak, that does a directory listing with subdirectories and hidden files and routes output to a text file, which is a public record. (In terms of public records law, the "public record" is the file allocation table, this command just makes it reproducable).
There was an election in May of 2006 that looked screwy as hell. So we studied it in detail. We looked for files created during the key period of 5/16/06 (election day) and a couple weeks prior. We found GS language files with timestamps right smack in that period.
So we asked Artifex what those files were about, by EMail, listing their names, filesizes and date/time stamps.
The files turned out to be legit and dated from a system update Diebold had done onsite in the summer of '06. But them Artifex asked "wait a sec, this is on a commercial voting system?"
Ooops.
The comical part was that Diebold tried to claim that Pima County had loaded GS, not them. Pima County IT said otherwise (trust me, loading stuff on a certified voting system is a major no-no). I suggested that Artifex needed to look for GS in other Diebold customer counties and gave them the names of a few elections officials who were likely to obey Artifex public records inquiries. I'm assuming from the lawsuit being filed that that panned out.
The other oddity is that GS doesn't appear to have been named by Diebold as part of their certified voting system, which would be a problem under the Federal voting system test process.
NOTE: in Arizona, only political parties have a strong right to election oversight. So while I'm still a member in good standing of BlackBoxVoting.org's board of directors, in Arizona I "take that hat off" and operate in cooperation with either the Libertarian or Democratic parties (and sometimes both at once as they cooperate well on election integrity in Arizona, esp. Pima).
So this whole thing wasn't a "Black Box Voting" (501(c)3) project...
Jim March - UselessTrivia, on 11/05/2008, -0/+27The printing is good, but they didn't need to break the law to add it. They have plenty of government money...no need to abuse opensource software.
- LastDitchHero, on 11/05/2008, -0/+16The question is if Diebold is more willing to release the source or pay the piper (Artifex). Ghostscript is dual licensed so this should be an interesting case for breaking the license on dual licensed software.
- CalcProgrammer1, on 11/05/2008, -0/+14But did they make said source code available? If they did, then not violating, but most likely they didn't, and that is the issue.
- darkened, on 11/05/2008, -0/+14Hopefully enough lawsuits that it becomes clear it absolutely does protect them from their work being stolen for commercial profit.
- darkened, on 11/05/2008, -1/+14These people are real criminals and our government wants us to entrust them with engineering systems to determine our elections??
- ORBIT, on 11/05/2008, -1/+13Tempted to mod you down, wish you had put in a /sarcasm
- pagno, on 11/05/2008, -0/+12Maybe just /s. That works, too.
- EricAnderton, on 11/05/2008, -0/+11Jim, thank you for that informative write-up. This was a better read than the article over on ARS.
- pintomp3, on 11/05/2008, -2/+12how about just make it open source? i know digg is very pro-business and pro-privatization, but our elections should not be private property.
- MWeather, on 11/05/2008, -0/+9If the GPL is ineffective against intellectual property theft it could only be because copyright is ineffective against intellectual property theft.
I think even RMS would agree with you on that. - jimmarch1, on 11/05/2008, -0/+9SIGH - typo...it was:
dir c: /s /a:h > c:dirlist.txt
Hey, it was a year ago... - kingbyu, on 11/05/2008, -0/+8Since when can't you include GPL software in a proprietary commercial product? I thought the main thing the GPL requires from Diebold is to make available the source code, including modifications, of any GPL software they used.
- secrity, on 11/05/2008, -0/+8It is no different from any other copyright and licenses; bad or stupid people violate copyright laws and licenses. The copyright holders have a chat with the stupid people and sue the bad people.
The biggest difference is that in the case of GNU/GPL/Creative Commons licenses, it would be very unusual for individuals to be violating the copyright and license. These licenses expressly allow the types of use that individuals are likely to be doing. - kingmanic, on 11/05/2008, -0/+6Or at least abide by the license of the software they use. To purchase a license for GD is pittance compared to paying lawyers and fending off a suit.
- secrity, on 11/05/2008, -0/+4For Ghostscript, the GPL license does not apply when used for commercial use unless the entire product is GPL'ed. In this case, Ghostscript is used on the "Central Tabulator" station, which sounds like a Windows application suite; it is not actually used on the voting machine itself.
- MonkCanatella, on 11/06/2008, -0/+4I caught on to the sarcasm when he said, "...and have all our best interests at heart."
- dieboldcracy, on 11/05/2008, -3/+7diebold is where it starts. knock them out and everything else will fall into place
- Lunarbunny, on 11/05/2008, -0/+4As opposed to illegal laws?
- secrity, on 11/05/2008, -0/+4Ghostscript is dual licensed, and commercial use does not fall under the GPL unless the whole product is GPL'ed:
"VERSIONS OF GHOSTSCRIPT ARE LICENSED UNDER TWO TYPES OF LICENSES.....
1. Artifex Ghostscript. Artifex Ghostscript is any version of Ghostscript licensed for commercial use and distribution under an Artifex Commercial License. Artifex is the exclusive commercial licensing agent for Ghostscript software.
2. GPL Ghostscript. GPL Ghostscript can be licensed under the GNU General Public License (the "GNU GPL").
IF YOUR ENTIRE APPLICATION IS LICENSED TO THE PUBLIC UNDER THE GNU GPL, YOU CAN DISTRIBUTE GNU GHOSTSCRIPT WITH YOUR APPLICATION WITHOUT A COMMERCIAL LICENSE . . .
If your application, including all of its source code, is licensed to the public under the GNU GPL, you are authorized to ship GPL Ghostscript with your application under the terms of the GPL license agreement. You do not need a commercial license from Artifex. The terms of the GNU GPL include the requirement that your application be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties. Moreover, the entire application must be licensed to the public under the GNU GPL.
IF YOUR APPLICATION IS NOT LICENSED TO THE PUBLIC UNDER THE GNU GPL AND YOU PLAN TO DISTRIBUTE GHOSTSCRIPT SOFTWARE. . .
See the rest at http://artifex.com/indexlicense.htm - jimmarch1, on 11/05/2008, -1/+4Not EVEN true. All they did was rename the elections division from "Diebold Election Systems Inc." to "Premier Election Systems" to avoid having the corporate parent name shat on any more.
They've been TRYING to sell the elections division for years now, with no buyers. - mofw, on 11/05/2008, -1/+4Nice to see the voting irregularities issue from Pima county might actually come to some good use.
- Lunarbunny, on 11/05/2008, -0/+3If I remember correctly, the GPL requires works using GPL libraries and APIs to be released under the GPL as well. The LGPL on the other hand allows works using GPL libraries and APIs to stay closed source while the modifications to the LGPL software itself must be released under the same license.
EDIT: it seems that linked works being derivative is something of a conundrum still: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_Li ... - FeloniusMonkey, on 11/05/2008, -0/+2Didn't Diebold get "knocked da fugg-out" last "Friday"?
- dieboldcracy, on 11/05/2008, -1/+3this is like Al Capone doin all the Sh$t he did and getting busted on tax fraud
- thoughtless, on 11/05/2008, -0/+2lol... I thought it wasn't necessary...
- dbradman56, on 02/19/2009, -0/+1this is crazy :)
Tian
http://talismanclick.com - kirado4, on 11/05/2008, -0/+1What's that you say? A big company infringes copyright law? 3 strikes and your out..?
- PrintScrn12, on 11/06/2008, -1/+2Open source does not automatically mean public property, nor does closed source mean pro business.
- Knowltey, on 11/05/2008, -0/+1You're mixing up your open source licenses buddy.
- OpCzar, on 11/06/2008, -0/+1"dir c: /s /a:h > c:dirlist.txt"
Did you mean
dir c: /s /a:h > c:/dirlist.txt - PopcornDave, on 11/05/2008, -1/+1Better the criminals you can haul in to court than the ones you can't though isn't it?
- tgc1, on 11/05/2008, -2/+2Diebold et al = DIAF
- jnisme, on 11/05/2008, -2/+2Diebold sold off it's voting system over a year ago. They may still be liable, but they no longer have direct control over it.
- mdude85, on 11/05/2008, -8/+1I'm not trying to stick up for Diebold, but I do wonder how many lawsuits and infringements is it going to take before open source developers and other content creators realize that the GNU/GPL/Creative Commons licenses are merely a veil of security and are really not effective at all in reducing or protecting against intellectual property theft?
- thoughtless, on 11/05/2008, -49/+6You people are never satisfied. First Diebold puts out a voting machine that doesn't print voting records and you cry foul... and now that they add printing in and use GhostScript you want them sued? Let Diebold be. I'm sure they know what they're doing and have all our best interests at heart.
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