If they have stored procedures in their DB, then that’s one thing, but it doesn’t appear that the person who leaked this code knows the difference between DDL and a stored procedure.

Story about the machines that effect the leaders of our government… 5 posts.

And we wonder why these things are allowed to happen? No one really seems to care!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-13-2006/the-question-mark

and avoid headlines that need question marks. ;-)

News is a living, breathing thing. I can think of several times lately where further evidence in the case you are mentioning with a very bold headline has surfaced and made that headline factually false.

I know you’re too busy a person to carefully redact and edit every post that infers things that turn out to be wrong… so perhaps just be more careful with hyperbole?

Genuinely outraging news is easy to water down when it comes from a source who has a problem with attaching emphatics and outrage and hyperbole to things which turn out to be quite benign. That’s the sort of road that leads to tabloid-style writing.

Fox News jumps to conclusions and asks leading questions, not BoingBoing. Report on what is known and leave the rest to the discussion.

Personally, with the birthers, truthers, and anti-vaxxers, I’ve grown extremely weary of conspiracy thinking. I don’t want to see more of it at this wonderful website.

The studysequoia page is simply saying that some of the voting logic appears to be implemented by stored procedures in the database, in contravention of laws designed to minimize opportunity for changing code in the field.

This strikes me as a very real concern. But how you got from that to “election-rigging code” is beyond me.

I’m sorry, but what. the. fuck.

Every minutae of the process should be wide open to public scrutiny. It should be put into law that any machine that is directly used to determine our president should not have an ounce of closed source code in it.

As to whether stored procedures in SQL count as “interpreted code” is a whole other problem.

http://www.codersrevolution.com/index.cfm/2009/10/21/Sequoia-Voting-System-Witch-Hunt-err-Study-Project

This guy pointed out to studysequoia that the files weren’t vandalized, and open fine. There’s evidence of stored procs and other code that has been dropped from the database, which can be recovered because the DB wasn’t compacted; these are the strings they saw. Studysequoia have a correction up on their website.

As some of the /. commenters who saw this pointed out, its not clear that this code was removed as part of the redaction, or was ever live on a site, since it doesn’t appear to be the vote-tallying code itself. Its possible this was code that was run to set up the db, and was then dropped to comply with the federal requirement that it shouldn’t be there.

(for the record: I’ve no sympathy for sequoia – I don’t think any of e-voting vendor should be allowed to claim that the mechanisms of democracy are a trade secret. I just don’t think this is quite the smoking gun its being presented as)

“Voting machine source-code leak shows election-rigging subroutines”?

Yes their code sucks, but its a long way from the yellow journalism screed of “election rigging subroutines”.

/rant

It wouldn’t really be reasonable to call others out for using question marks to justify specious headlines, or spend years criticizing the printing of potentially misleading information, and then expect it that doing it oneself is perfectly fine and shouldn’t be criticized.

I seriously doubt Cory intends to mislead people, after all. He does often make corrections when prompted by new information. It doesn’t hurt to suggest maybe lighting fewer fires with one’s writing, so there are fewer to put out with redactions.