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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   34222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Lots of people from random officials and polling site volunteers, to the voting public themselves are going to have unsupervised physical access to these machines.

Because that's the very point point, a BIOS password is hardly any protection against someone who knows what they're doing having unsupervised access to the hardware, AND it requires having unsupervised physical access to the machine to exploit a leaked password anyway. At best it saves them a bit of time. The usefulness of a BIOS password is protecting against people who don't know what they're doing accidentally changing BIOS settings, or very unsophisticated malicious actors (kids, disgruntled employees wanting to break something).

Lots of people are going to have physical access to these machines who shouldn't have access to things like system settings.

Is it really so difficult for you to understand why that presents a problem? Or are you also in the habit of arguing that people should leave thier doors unlocked because a determined thief will just pick the lock or break a window to get in anyway?

Lots of people are going to have physical access to these machines who shouldn't have access to things like system settings.

And they all have access to the BIOS settings, with or without the BIOS password. Unsupervised physical access to a machine makes completely irrelevant a BIOS password.

Or are you also in the habit of arguing that people should leave thier doors unlocked because a determined thief will just pick the lock or break a window to get in anyway?

I'm not saying they SHOULD give out the BIOS password. I'm saying that for these machines to be trustworthy, the BIOS password does basically nothing if untrusted people have access to them unsupervised for significant amounts of time.

I'm saying it makes no difference if the door is locked or not if someone is given a couple of hours unsupervised access to your house; they have more than enough time to get in with or without a locked door.

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