“When I met with the media as our season ended, I identified one person at the very top of my managerial list,” general manager Ken Williams said in a statement. “I wanted someone who met very specific criteria centered around his leadership abilities. Robin Ventura was that man. His baseball knowledge and expertise, his professionalism, his familiarity with the White Sox and Chicago and his outstanding character make him absolutely the right person to lead our clubhouse and this organization into the seasons ahead.”
Ventura replaces Ozzie Guillen, who left the Sox for the Florida Marlins.
“When I rejoined the White Sox this June, I said this was my baseball home and that part of me never left the White Sox organization,” Ventura said in a statement. “My family and I are thrilled to be returning to Chicago. Managing a Major League Baseball team is a tremendous honor. It’s also an opportunity and a challenge.
I’ve checked Ventura’s bio and this appears to be his first ever coaching job.
Discuss.
…Adding… He may be a rookie manager, but he does have some fire in his belly. Trouble is, he ain’t much of a fighter. Remember this one?…
* My wife was in an auto accident a little over a month ago. Nobody was hurt, but our car was crunched but good. She picked up the car today in Chicago and said it looked brand new, which is good since it’s not even a year old. She loves that car and she’s ecstatic right now, so this one’s for Wasan…
Honey, it ain’t your money
Baby, I got plenty of that
* When the Argonne National Laboratory says there’s a real problem, I tend to pay attention…
It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
“We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines,” said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team “We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine.” […]
Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2012, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year’s election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab. […]
“This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks],” says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. “There’s a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed.”
The team’s video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a “bad guy” virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away. […]
This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as “correct” the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be “a high probability of being detected.” But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine “sleepovers” when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are unguarded.
Johnston said the machine is “incredibly easy to tamper with” because all the crucial electronic components are accessible and can be easily modified. The Accuvote TS’ enclosure isn’t tamper resistant so hjackers can work on the machine without leaving visible signs, he added.
“All we had to do was find out what the machine was doing in terms of communication,” Johnston said. “We just had to understand the various components and how the data was being sent. We needed to understand what signal had to be sent to fool the machine into thinking the voter had touched the screen at a particular location.”
The experiment shows that e-voting systems are susceptible to more than just cyberattacks, which get the most attention but are harder to pull off as the perpetrators must have some knowledge of the machine’s software, hardware and firmware.
The so-called man-in-the-middle attacks don’t require knowledge of the voting machine’s proprietary software or hardware, Johnston said. “All you need to do is understand the communication between the different parts of the system. Then you just sit there and listen and do whatever mischief you want to.”.
Although it wouldn’t take a nation-state to pull of a successful attack, he said. Someone with limited computer science knowledge and electronic parts costing about $25 could do it, without needing to even solder anything and leaving no trace behind, according to the researchers.
E-voting systems have been plagued by criticism about security issues, so much so that elections officials in various states have abandoned touch-screen systems over security and fraud concerns.
Dominion Voting Systems, which now owns Diebold and Sequoia, did not respond to a phone call and e-mail seeking comment from CNET this afternoon. E-voting system vendors in general have argued that security problems identified are either overly theoretical or have been fixed with hardware and software updates.
Previous demonstrations of e-voting hacks involved cyber attacks where knowledge of the operating system and hardware were required, according to Johnston. However, that was not the case in these demonstrations, he said.
“It would be pretty easy to pull off,” Johnston said. “The bigger concern is that this attack is so straightforward. It suggests that there hasn’t been much thinking about security in these voting systems.”
While it would be relatively easy to make this type of attack more difficult to do by making modifications to the voting machine, stopping the attack cold would require more effort and a “careful examination of the security protocols used,” he said.
