Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Being one who delves into the conspiracy corners of the Internet I got to thinking on a theory about all this. I am just spitballing here, but what if the bad guys who put all the bugs in these voting machines at one Intelligence Agency are in a hacker war with the good guys at some other Intelligence Agency on election night and the vote total is just the final score of the hacker battle. Neither side wants to call the other side out, because they don't want to air all their dirty laundry in public.

View on HN

You're being worried about the wrong things. The problem is companies that make these products care about making money, not making safe votes. As long as their marketing is good enough, they can hire sub-par programmers to do a shoddy job. No conspiracy is necessary to end up in the situation at hand.

Consider seeking out a medical professional to help with your delusions.

I said I'm spitballing[1] which means purely speculating for fun and not saying that I'm sure that that's the truth. It's really weird how these days you can't even throw out ideas for fun without some guy bringing out the heavy duty personal attacks.

Anyway, if you looked at Wikileaks vault 7 leak, the CIA stockpiles zero days that they use to remote hack all kinds of different platforms. Other intelligence agencies do the same. One of the voting machine companies had pcanywhere installed on their machines which is even known to be full of holes[2]. Whether this is negligence or malice is really up to a jury to look into, but certainly the possibility is there.

[1]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spitballing

[2]https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb4ezy/top-voting...

Let's be clear, your theory is that "bad guys" put the security holes in the voting machines (not incompetent underpaid workers) and that they are having a hacker fight with the good guys. Watch less tv, and stop reading those conspiracy theories sites. You are losing your grip on reality.

Security bugs are real. Hacking is real. What you are talking about is not spitballing. That's just fantasy.

Wow, I must have hit a nerve cause this kind of ad hominem arguing that you're doing is unusual for HN.

People saying the NSA was working with hardware vendors to purposefully insert backdoors in routers were called crazy too before the Snowden leaks. I guess you haven't been keeping up with the news or do you think the Snowden leaks qualify as baseless conspiracy theories?

"A 2012 TAO budget document claims that these companies, on TAO's behest, "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks and endpoint communications devices used by targets".[1]

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations

Reply on news.ycombinator.com