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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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in the hullabaloo it would have been easy for someone to stick a USB in

If that was possible, then the issue is not a BIOS password, it's unsecured USB ports and no one keeping an eye on them. Someone could stick in a keylogger or rubber ducky and cause all sorts of issues, without any BIOS password.

I'm not making the case that voting machines are secure; from my understanding they're very much not. Just that the situations in which having the BIOS password enables someone to do something nefarious overlap almost perfectly with the situations in which someone could do similar harm without the BIOS password. Replacing the OS with a tampered version is not a drive-by attack even with the BIOS password any worker can do in a couple of minutes with the machine. They need physical access to the machine for a length of time that is in the same ballpark as the time they would need to bypass a BIOS password.

How would you feel about the scenario, "My biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy."

Pretty much the same as if no one had my BIOS password and dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy. BIOS passwords are a paper thin security feature, they're more to keep nosy kids and clueless employees from creating issues for IT to solve than protect the integrity of the data on the machines.