05th Oct 2006
Diebold touch screen machines work if you don’t touch the touch screen.
The Baltimore Sun reports on Diebold “e-poll books,” devices to keep track of voter rolls. Apparently they have network problems requiring the use of a mouse in MD:
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
During yesterday’s test inside the Marriott’s banquet hall, the mouses were in use. But one poll worker did not heed the warning to operate the equipment using only the mouse, causing the machine to lose contact with the five others it was linked to. It took less than 30 seconds to reboot the machine.
This reminds me of the early days of e-commerce, when it was typical for online stores to warn, “don’t double-click the ‘buy’ button or we’ll place two orders.” Because why, exactly? Well, because of incredibly bad programming. There is no excuse, no reason to have a system that misbehaves so dramatically under such a common wrong input. That’s a bug, and a “don’t do this” warning is not a bug patch.
Here you have a touch-screen device. People are going to touch the screen. You’re not going to prevent this unless you put it behind glass, or disable the thing.
The Baltimore Sun reports on Diebold “e-poll books,” devices to keep track of voter rolls. Apparently they have network problems requiring the use of a mouse in MD:
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
During yesterday’s test inside the Marriott’s banquet hall, the mouses were in use. But one poll worker did not heed the warning to operate the equipment using only the mouse, causing the machine to lose contact with the five others it was linked to. It took less than 30 seconds to reboot the machine.
This reminds me of the early days of e-commerce, when it was typical for online stores to warn, “don’t double-click the ‘buy’ button or we’ll place two orders.” Because why, exactly? Well, because of incredibly bad programming. There is no excuse, no reason to have a system that misbehaves so dramatically under such a common wrong input. That’s a bug, and a “don’t do this” warning is not a bug patch.
Here you have a touch-screen device. People are going to touch the screen. You’re not going to prevent this unless you put it behind glass, or disable the thing.
Posted in Crypto and policy | Comments Off