Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Remember last year when a bunch of us were being very vocal about electronic voting machines, complaining about the lack of an audit trail (on some models) and really stupid security mistakes? Remember how some of us pointed out that these problems were known to be solvable, because they'd been solved for bank automatic teller machines (ATMs)?

Perhaps we spoke too soon. Here's a story about a Diebold ATM that crashed, rebooted, exposed the WinXP interface, and became a toy for CMU students. So if you ever wondered whether an ATM can run Windows Media Player, the answer is that some do.

And as was pointed out on That Mailing List recently,the newest ATMs installed by Wells Fargo will be "web-enabled" as well as running Windows. (It's not clear from the article whether "web-enabled" means "use HTTP and a variant of XML but are connected only to a private network" or really does mean "communicate over the Internet". The way it's written strongly suggests the latter, but there's room for ambiguity.)