Diebold and PES Sued for Stealing...

... Code?

A California software company has filed a lawsuit against Diebold and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, claiming that PES' electronic voting machines violate its copyrights.

Artifex Software, of San Rafael, Calif., claims that PES systems infringe on its copyrighted Ghostscript PDF interpretation and printing software. Artifex claims PES is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES "have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works," Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in U.S. District Court for Northern California.

Why is this important?

Obtaining GNU Ghostscript

GNU Ghostscript is a copyrighted work; it is distributed under the GNU General Public License. You can get the current version of GNU Ghostscript by Internet FTP from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript from any of the GNU distribution sites; likely, alpha versions may be available on alpha.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript.

As (h/t) lambert at Corrente pointed out, under GNU General Public Licensing, if Diebold and PES used Ghostscript to create their product they may be legally bound to make their product's code open for our inspection, as well.

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to. This is in distinction to permissive free software licences, of which the BSD licences are the standard examples.

Heck! We may be legally able take and modify Diebold code if it is true.

Ghostscript is a copyrighted work whose copyright is owned by Artifex Software, Inc. Some versions of Ghostscript are distributed freely under the name GPL Ghostscript or (for older versions) GNU Ghostscript; these versions are distributed with a license called the GNU General Public License (also known as the "GNU License", the "GPL", or "copyleft"), which allows gratis and commercial distribution under certain conditions, most particularly, source complete source disclosure.

Versions of Ghostscript between version 4.03 and 8.54 were also distributed under a more restrictive license disallowing commercial redistribution entirely. These versions were labelled "AFPL Ghostsript" or just "Ghostscript", and were governed by the Aladdin Free Public License.

The full GPL is included under the name COPYING in the GPL Ghostscript fileset, and can also be obtained directly from the Free Software Foundation:

Free Software Foundation, Inc. (FSF)
59 Temple Place, Suite 330
Boston, MA 02111-1307 U.S.A.
+1-617-542-5942 telephone
+1-617-542-2652 fax (including Japan):
gnu@gnu.org
http://www.gnu.org/

The GPL gotten directly from the FSF or the contents of the COPYING file are authoritative, but for those unfamiliar with the GPL, we now summarize its provisions.

Read More on Artifex Software, Inc. licensing of Ghostscript. What licensing rules apply may depend on the version that Diebold and PES allegedly stole.

Diebold voting machine key copied from pic on Diebold site

Via BradBlog, (and h/t Buzzflash) anyone can have their very own Diebold voting machine master key now:

Good lord in heaven. How dumb are these guys at Diebold?! Can you believe the United States has actually entrusted them to build a security system for the original U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?!

After everything else... now comes this.

It was revealed in the course of last summer's landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company uses the same key to open every machine. It's also an easy key to buy at any office supply store since it's used for filing cabinets and hotel mini-bars! That is, if you're not a poll worker who already has one from the last time you worked on an election (anybody listening down there in San Diego?).

snip

This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website's online store! (Screenshot [up ^^^ there])

Of course, they'll only sell such keys to "Diebold account holders" apparently --- or so they claim --- but that's hardly a problem.

C'mon Connecticut! Do you still trust your vote to these Diebold morons?

[update] While on the topic of voting issues, Real Hartford is trying to figure out if this is irregular:

If there is anyone else from Hartford who voted for Kucinich, please comment or contact me privately. The Courant is reporting only ONE person in all of Hartford voted for him, and while that could be the case, I sort of doubt it. There are towns of only about 10,000 people recorded as having 7 or 8 people vote for him, so I’m a little suspicious about the single voter in Hartford stat.

NH Recount - 5th Ward Way Off After Hand Count

As the hand recount begins at Dennis Kucinich's request, The Brad Blog was going through recount results as they were coming in:

As mentioned earlier today, NH SoS Bill Gardner told WMUR in NH that "We did nine of the 12 wards in Manchester, and a lot of the votes were exactly the same...Some went up by a vote or two." He didn't, of course, note that a lot of the vote counts (most of them) were off by 5 or more.

And now, the rest of the numbers from the rest of the Manchester wards are coming on. And get a load of Ward 5:

	Diebold Result	Hand Count
CLINTON	683	619
EDWARDS	255	217
OBAMA	404	365

All of the other candidates seem to have lost votes as well. No clue who received them instead...

From another of his posts, and after media reports that "a lot of the votes were exactly the same":

But many more vote counts were not at all the same, ranging anywhere from 5 to 8 votes off in regular cases, across almost all candidates.

And before you say that's no big deal, we'll remind you that in 2004, had just 6 votes per precinct been registered in Ohio for John Kerry instead of George W. Bush, we'd have a different person sitting in the White House right now.

So far, this is not looking very pretty. Not in retrospect, nor in looking forward...