[SGVLUG] Vote stealing

[Chris Smith]

On 9/19/06, Zack, James <JZack at unex.ucla.edu> wrote:
> What about the concept of these machines running on Windows XP Embed?  I
> would think a custom written OS would be far more secure than using
> anything out there currently, particularly Windows and it's myriad of
> hacks available.

Yes, one of the advantages of using a custom OS is that instead of the
numerous well known exploits in other OS's, you have numerous unknown
exploits. ;-)

> These machines are single purpose machines, they do
> vote collecting and nothing else.  Does it really need the other stuff
> you get with windows (or even Linux)?

Windows Embedded can pretty much be as stripped down as you need it to
be. Same with Linux and most other OS's targetted for embedded
markets.

> How much work would it really be
> to develop something totally custom (given the budgets these guys get to
> work with).

Take the highest estimate anyone on this list provides (including this
one here), and multiple it by 20...

> It almost begs another question... Have we become to
> reliant on the obscuring layers OSes provide us to make programming life
> easier?  (is my old school assembly language side showing too much
> here?)

Nah, you can still code in assembly and in the embedded space there
are lots of very low-level interfaces to the hardware available.

-- 
Chris