Sequoia Voting Systems, a company that manufactures electronic voting machines, sent an e-mail message last week to two computer scientists at Princeton University, warning them against dissecting Sequoia machines and software. The scientists, Edward W. Felten and Andrew Appel, are well known for exposing security flaws in electronic voting machines and warning the public against trusting them.
The scientists received the message because New Jersey election officials announced plans to send the men Sequoia e-voting machines for analysis. A Sequoia vice president, Edwin Smith, wrote that the plan would violate Sequoia’s contract for use of its machines. “Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any noncompliant analysis,” the message read. Mr. Smith added that the company would “take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software.”
Last year Mr. Appel publicized weaknesses in Sequoia machines. In 2006 Mr. Felten helped to expose vulnerabilities in a Diebold voting machine. And in 2001 he received a threatening letter from the recording industry about a speech he planned to deliver on unscrambling encrypted digital music. —Andrea L. Foster
6 Responses to E-Voting Vendor Threatens Princeton Computer Scientists With Legal Action
gasstationwithoutpumps - October 17, 2011 at 7:45 am
Unless the embezzler was unusually tricky, he likely broke the payments roughly equally. Looking for a solution near equal division could result in getting lucky very quickly. A few other probable human splits of the amount (round numbers plus one with remainders) would also be worth looking for.
Edward Aboufadel - October 17, 2011 at 6:03 pm
@openid-28365:disqus, that’s not a bad way to think about it — find five deposits of a bit over $30 million, six deposits of about $25 million, etc. How many deposits did they have to sort through, though?
11185500 - October 17, 2011 at 7:40 pm
But wait, you are treating this as if only one solution existed. In fact there could be a large number of solutions; the number of solutions are a function both of the number of deposits and the size of each deposit (the number of solutions will increase more with small deposits). And since we don’t know the values of the deposits by the investment firm, we really can only state that theirs is but one of the total number of possible solutions. The likelihood of their guilt decreases with the number of total solutions to the problem. But that range of probability could range from 1 to 0.?
Babagranny - October 17, 2011 at 8:43 pm
They only needed as much time as the writers gave them because it is FICTION. Nevertheless, your clarification is interesting. NUM3ERS actually tried to make its math more realistic. I miss that show.
riosalado - October 18, 2011 at 8:47 am
Depending on the number of deposits in the sample space, it might have been useful to focus on deposits whose sum equalled the last two or three digits first. It is no guarantee but it might reduce the size of the haystack.
Edward Aboufadel - October 19, 2011 at 10:50 am
111… that’s a good point about SubsetSum — there is no requirement that there is a unique solution. Now that would have been funny if the lawyers presented the embezzler with a solution that wasn’t the way he split up the deposits.