Some thoughts on Anon and hacking and all that (as well as the culture)

[jeff47]

26. You need to do a lot more thinking

Hackers, by their very nature, are not very trusting of officer friendly. There are good reasons. They break the law regularly. So, if ANON indeed do this, they will not go out and call officer friendly and tell him, or her. look, we got the goods on Rove, as long as you promise, cross your heart NOT to prosecute us... not even with a lawyer present.

Because it would be beyond their skills to send an anonymous email with their evidence, which could provide enough information to launch an investigation and lead to warrants even without their testimony.

So we've got master hackers that can't manage to set up a fake gmail account.

And said super-hackers are also incapable of posting the actual information anywhere on the Internet. They're able to upload video, but no actual proof.

Their letter is tantalizing assuming it is Anon, since it has plausible events on it, that MATCH what we know from actual MEDIA coverage, read Ars Technica and other geeky sites.

No, their letter consists of technical terms strung together. It doesn't actually make any sense. Saying "habeus corpus" doesn't make my post MATCH what is in Yale Law Review.

What we know is that Orca was a badly designed app, using Microsoft for part of it's architecture (sloppy).

Microsoft products, in and of themselves, are not terrible. They are frequently deployed in a terrible manner by poorly trained Microsoft "certified" personnel.

Access is particularly bad, a product like this, I am assuming will need a Dbase app, and Access happen to be a Dbase app.

This statement is especially face-palm inducing. First, the relevant Microsoft product is SQL Server. Second, Access can't do what Ars describes. Third, how exactly does using Access MATCH what is in Ars?

We also know is that the afternoon of the election the ISP for the campaign did shut down inbound traffic temporarily thinking they were undergoing a Denial of Service Attack. This could be sloppy programing, it could be an actual attack, or both. I don't think we'll ever know.

Ok, you've now exceeded your previous levels of facepalm-induction from the previous paragraph.

The people behind Orca never told their ISP what they were doing, as it says in Ars. On election day, Orca got flooded with traffic. A denial of service attack is a flood of traffic. There is nothing particularly special that says "denial of service". Just lots and lots and lots of attempts to use the server. (There are DoS attacks such as ping flood that look more DoS-ey, but that wasn't the case here.)

We also know the Users of the system were having all kinds of issues signing to the site, getting credentials and all that... we know some credential were issued that should not. That is suggestive of hacking.

No, it's suggestive of a product that was not properly tested. Which is what everyone, including Ars, is claiming.

We also know two machines were taken off service in PA after they were recorded actually flipping the votes... CNN ran that tape, later on MSNBC. I am going to assume that this never really happen and it was the FX department at CNN...

Funny thing about touch screens. The sensor doesn't always line up. On some older designs, which they probably used because it's cheaper and more reliable, dirt causes problems so that a click appears in two places and it's up to the software to pick one or report an error.

Since I can't tear apart PA's machines and see what they did, I can't say if it was something innocuous like dirt.

But there's one thing I can say:
If you were stealing the election, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DISPLAY THAT ON THE SCREEN?!?!?!

You steal the election by displaying a vote for Obama and recording it as a vote for Romney. There is absolutely no reason in hardware or software that they would have to display the vote actually being switched.

To claim there was something nefarious here is claiming that the people stealing the election are geniuses and morons at the same time.

Just as much as you really cannot prove it did not happen.

Actually, it's very easy to prove it did not happen. 1) Orca didn't work the way they claimed in the letter. 2) Their description of the network layout makes utterly no sense. It's strung-together buzzwords.

Given that the people claiming to be master hackers can't get networking 101 right, why exactly should we elevate their claims?

Here is a hint, yes, I have actually talked with a few hackers over the years... they are good enough these days that they will leave code behind that will errase their presence.

That's nice. I am one. I am paid very nicely for my "hacking" - one doesn't have to be a black-hat to be good at it. This letter was written by script kiddies.

(It was part of a response, but damn it, here is a full fledge response... suffice it to say, I am not going to scream and insist that Anon saved the US from itself, but will not deny the possibility exists, like some folks are doing)

So, you want to shit on all the people who actually did bust their ass working for Obama's campaign so that you can have a rich fantasy life? Saying "Anon saved the day!!" means all their effort was for naught.