Published at LXer:

In response to the growing concerns regarding H.R. 811, particularly with regard to the inspection of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) voting system components, I wanted to provide this article, previously published in the November 2006 issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. It is especially important to understand that COTS software products can include both open source (such as Red Hat Linux) and closed (or trade secret) source (such as Microsoft Windows [TM]), and that neither paradigm necessarily guarantees security. Indeed, the examination of source code for "correctness" is well known in the computer industry to be intractable (i.e. not fully solvable in reasonable time), but that does not mean that it should not be inspectable.

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