Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
In his WebLog New Yorkers for Verified Voting’s Bo Lipari relates:
The 800 pound gorilla of software development has moved forcefully into New York State, supported by voting machine vendors using Microsoft Windows in their touch screen voting machines and other systems. Over the last two months Microsoft and a cadre of high paid lobbyists have been working a full-court press in Albany in an attempt to bring about a serious weakening of New York State election law. This back door effort by private corporations to weaken public protections is about to bear fruit.
These are the same lobbyists who left a closed door meeting with Senator Feinstein with a satisfied smile on their faces just before her corporate protecting election legislation, S-1487, was completed and filed.
That, and other voting news stories from today all linked below…
Push to change the law pits need to prevent fraud against desire to protect proprietary software rights LINK
Software giant moves to weaken NY Election law LINK
**”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**
Someone scared MicroSoft into thinking their operating system software would be viewed by all.
Fear is the coin of the realm.
MicroSoft need not be concerned because they are not the only dog and pony show in town. Last time I checked there are other, less fat, less expensive, and even better operating systems out there.
MicroSoft operating systems don’t run Mars Rovers, missle systems, or other devices that can’t afford the blue screen.
That weak OS should not run electronic voting machines either, but what should be is increasingly irrelevant.
But the corporate shills keep trying to make our government M$ only, Dredd, and our government keeps trying to make Windoze their preferred OS whenever they think they can get away with it… and thus we have a missile cruiser drifting helpless for two days due to a “Blue Screen Of Death” in an engineering server. Fortunately no one was shooting at them when their systems crashed…
And BTW… the BSOD is an increasingly common sight at NASA nowadays as well… and insiders regard it as a only a matter of time until a BSOD causes a mission kill. Hopefully “a mission” will be the only thing killed when that happens.
Oh, you mean this Feinstein?
Senator Feinstein, another traitor against democracy. How sad. Guess the war-profiteering money of her hubby marinated her outlook.
This may be the first instance of MS pushing closed-source voting directly. They’ve been operating through cutouts and “software industry lobbyists” for years.
Microsoft is in trouble. Big trouble, and they’re getting desperate. Linux is making big inroads in servers and web infrastructure, and is starting to threaten the desktop. I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux for almost a year and recently managed to get Diebold’s GEMS running under it, sorta – see also:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums.../72/47504.html
Microsoft doesn’t want a high-profile, high-security function like voting switched over to an open-source base. They see voting as a skirmish in a bigger war for dominance in the worldwide computer business, while we see it as being about Democracy. It sounds almost silly to compare the two but there’s a lot of billions of bucks involved.
Heads up, folks. We’re now at war with Bill Gates.
Jim
#3, What a Finestain on our (joke) Democracy
If you have any spare time at all, read about our fearless ancestors.
Link
If you have more time read the next page after that too.
The pages I was reading on my above link read like whats going on today with our elections, only that was the FIRST one.