The Digital Signage Insider

Just a quick note to all those following the Diebold voting kiosk saga: a new article in Wired illustrates yet another flaw in the Diebold voting kiosk system, this one allowing people to arbitrarily change votes from a central collection area.  Obviously the repercussions for something like this could be catastrophic.  At this point I'm so disgusted by this debacle that I'm not sure of who is more to blame: Diebold, for doing a half-assed job of writing software, or the government, for doing a half-assed job of testing it.  To be fair, the decision of whether to use e-voting or not was something largely left up to state and local governments (mine included), but even so, this issues should have been addressed long ago... and if there wasn't hope of an immediate solution, the systems should have been taken out of use until they were fixed properly, even if that meant going back to paper ballots for another year or two.

The damage that this sort of news does to the interactive kiosk industry is very difficult to repair.  All of the major hardware and software players have devoted huge amounts of resources to the issues of security and reliability (WireSpring alone has logged thousands of hours working on security and stability for FireCast kiosk and digital signage software), however much of that is overshadowed due to the huge amount of press "noise" generated from the Diebold problems.  Ironically, even blog articles like this one contribute to that noise, (in some tiny, probably immesurable way), but I feel that it's more important to point out these problem deployments as mistakes that the rest of us can learn from.