>From reading the posts here and responses on one Mac users' website, and
from a fruitful conversation with the technician at my internet provider, I
have concluded that there is nothing wrong with the hyperlinks that I am
sending.  The problem must be with the email programs of certain recipients.
But, I'm not positive.

I am sending this message in HTML, and copying a formatted article and a
hyperlink.  If any of you find that the hyperlink is not active or the
message and article are in plain text, would you please let me know?  If
more than a few replies appear on the digest, I will begin to think that I
do have a problem  Thanks.

Oh, I'm not sure if the formatted article will be sent through the list's
server, but I know that hyperlinks do come to me as blue, underlined and
active.

David Dudine



http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT1.html
TODAY'S EDITORIALS 

How to Hack an Election

Published: January 31, 2004


Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology
being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is
proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its
new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes
and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study
shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting,
starting with voter-verified paper trails.

When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was
considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines,
which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote
theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which
computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere
with an election.

They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported,
to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They
were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote
count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able
to change votes from a remote location.

Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but
this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad
to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two
sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The
security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware
stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the
lock in "approximately 10 seconds."

Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-congratulatory
press release with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold
Election Systems Equipment for March Primary." The study's authors were
shocked to see their findings spun so positively. Their report said that if
flaws they identified were fixed, the machines could be used in Maryland's
March 2 primary. But in the long run, they said, an extensive overhaul of
the machines and at least a limited paper trail are necessary.

The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are
rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Ind., last
fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an electronic
system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer
than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said. Given the
growing body of evidence, it is clear that electronic voting machines cannot
be trusted until more safeguards are in place.

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