I wanted this to be a more focused post on the World Community Grid project, but I figured there have just been too many things going on in the computer world this week that you may want to know about. So I figured I'd make it a Computer Science Wednesday post. Just to piggy-back off of DS's popular series.
We'll start off with the big political/computer news of the week:
Diebold Voting Machines To Be Tested Next Week
External Links: Slashdot, Blackbox Voting 1, Blackbox Voting 2, Fox News (this one is old, but not to be missed), Wikipedia.
The rest below --->
The first thing I will say is this, If the main program is written in Access, it can be hacked, manipulated, and demolished in a minute or two. I have done lots of Access programs, and have seen it happen. I would never, ever use Access to store data such as this. The only thing you have to do is open the DBF file with notepad and you can see all the passwords. just search for "PWD=" and you got it.
But that article was done in 2004. I would hope that they decided to change platforms since then. In 2004, Blackbox voting also demonstrated that a monkey could hack the voting system. Yes, they actually taught a monkey how to do it. In case you missed it, here is the video (Quick Time fromat).
That was 04. And the Slashdot article was correctly filed under the too little, too late heading. But the most compelling Slashdot commentary was this:
The only way to make any election truely free, all procedures, protocols, and source code HAVE to be provided.
There is no other way. Period. So what if we look at their source? What are we going to do, take a library to use in some high school election? Any objection to a release of source code is utter lawyer bullshit.
Getting source or having the machines opened up for hacking now is no use to elections already held using these machines. We have no way of knowing what code was running at the time. This process has to be made open. Distributing the source would give hackers a leg up on hacking the machines, but that is the point! There should not be holes in the code to let the machines be hacked. And the central tabulation and auditing program should not be on A Windows/Access machine with a network connection to the internet. Unless you have some serious firewalls and make sure the user of that machine has never surfed the web, used email, or added any software that opens up your computer. Such as a Sony music CD.
But anyway, I am running on assumptions of the system based on what these articles have. A good topic to get more in depth on if anyone has better info. The point is that it is now being opened up to advocate groups for testing. Unfortunately, this step is a bit late. The testing begins Nov 30th, keep an eye out for results and conclusions.
and on to other news:
Fighting AIDS with your PC
External Links: World Community Grid, BOINC, Wikipedia,
This was diaried here and picked up attention on other blogs this week. And well worth bringing up again. The idea is to participate in disease research using your PC. Or more like lending out your PC's resources to researchers that need them.
The project is called World Community Grid. It is an open source embarrassingly parellel computing platform. A joint venture by BSD (Berkely Software Development) and IBM. I was a bit embarassed not to have picked up on this sooner having particpated in SETI several years ago. For those that don't know what embarrassingly parallel computing projects are, here is a quick primer:
These are project that can be broken up into many, mnay smaller tasks. And since the results of each task are not dependant upon the results of the previous task, all the tasks can be done at once, assuming you have enough machines to perform the seperate tasks. The tasks being taken on are huge. To the point where it is a large load for the greatest supercomputers in existance. And due to the lack of such powerful computers, or the funds to reserve one for the time needed to run these tasks, Universities and research centers that want to run them cannot.
To accomplish their goal, they are using BOINC to distribute these tasks to anyone willing to run them. SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intellegence) was a major breakthrough in harnessing the power of distributed computing. It was quite popular, and at times, would clock over 200 TeraFlops. To put that in perspective, the world's current greatest supercomputer, Blue Gene, was the first computer to register such speeds.
Now, Berkely has taken the next step and transformed their SETI code into a platform for researchers to harness that power as well. They have a joint effort with IBM to help do AIDS research. That is World Community Grid. They also have weather prediction, protien modeling, and good old alien searching available. The program is easy to download and install, safe, and non-intrusive. It just utilizes the resources your computer is not. You'll hardly notice a difference.
TheSwampDweller has already set up a Daily Kos team. The more you run the program, the more points you accumulate for the team. The points are nothing more than nerd bragging rights (like 4's on here), but that's better then a kick in the butt. Anyway, I encourage everyone to look into signing up. I hope someone will diary this again on it's own with more instructions on how to join a team.
This project not only contributes to important research, but boosts Open Source initiatives as well.
This is getting long, so I will try to shorten the next few:
Beware the FBI virus
Links: MSNBC, Symantec
Anyone with email has likely gotten a warning this week from the FBI saying that they are being monitored. No, visiting DailyKos did not alert them, and they are not watching you. Well, maybe it did and they are, but they certainly aren't sending you an email to tell you as such. This email is an extremely prolific worm. It may also take the form of a Paris Hilton pic/video offer. Delete them.
And finally, we have xbox news:
XBOX 360 Release
Xbox 360 hit shelves yesterday, and the shelves were bare shortly after. They have been selling as high as $2500 on Ebay. Many users are satisfied. However, it is starting to appear as if they were rushed unto the market. I thought Mr. Gates would have learned a lesson from Windows ME. It is not yet known if these reports are widespread. Either way, it will be tought to get your hands on one before Christmas, as most units are marked for large overseas releases.
I am hoping someone will decide to pick up a couple of these topic in better detail.
PS. Since it is no longer Wednesday here as the title suggests, I wish you all good Thanksgiving. I hope there is much to be thankful for.