...and even more Diebold

Via Rey, some information on the physical security of Diebold voting machines:

...a technical staff member asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine. This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Every scientist's nightmare

Owie. (Involves animal testing.)

But there are a lot of people out there who'd just have buried their heads in the sand and hoped nobody would realise they'd made a mistake. I give them credit for doing the honourable thing.

(Back when I was doing my PhD project, for a while there I had an error in my calculations that made some of my data twice what they should be, and for various reasons it wasn't immediately obvious that they were too large. I even presented a graph based on this data at a conference, although most of the attendees were watching the WTC burn rather than my presentation. I was NOT a happy camper when I found the mistake. Very fortunately for me, the data was still in correct proportions, and due to commercial-in-confidence considerations, the presentation version of the graph hadn't actually shown units. So there was nothing to correct except in my own data files that hadn't seen the light of day - a narrow escape.)