OH YES

And when I finally DO make myself start working on this damn piece I've been avoiding all week, what happens? Just as I'm starting to get a decent state of flow on it, fucking Flash 8 fucking stops responding to toolbar shortcuts. Again. Every other keystroke still works. But no amount of changing focus will make the toolbar shortcuts work, none of the tricks I've picked up will do it... I end up flailing helplessly at the keyboard screaming.

How the hell can someone ship a piece of software with this fundamental a bug in it? Do all the testers at Macromedia only select tools by dragging their mouse to the toolbar, clicking on the tool, and then going back into the work area? What the fuck is with this fucking thing?

( rant cut )

v0t3

Thesis: The US election system is horribly compromised, due to our voting kiosks being designed to make it terribly easy to put the fix in.

There have been incidents of voting machine code getting out. There have been incidents of them simply vanishing. Various analyses of what code has leaked suggest that it's got a lot of back doors.

Thesis: People with the skill to discover and use back doors tend to be... well, there's a strong strain of intellectual right-wing Libertarianism, but even those tend to be opposed to a government that looks like something out of Orwell.

Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.

- this story - probably exaggerating.

So: If the vote is being hacked to the corporate warmonger party from above, and it's this riddled with holes... How long before someone hacks the other way, from below?

Of course, the hacker mindset would be as likely to result for a landslide for Bart Simpson or Zippy the Pinhead as to actually pull in a direction opposite the official miscounting. And it'd be damn risky, and whoever did it would probably have to remain absolutely quiet about it for a few years. How long could anyone remain quiet about a killer hack like that? I doubt I could.

There's probably a decent short story in it, at least.