    
John Washburn
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Johnwashburn
Post Number: 125
Registered: 04-2005
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 2 | | Posted on Friday, October 14, 2005 - 3:24 pm: | |
I love the phrase: NO EXECUTABLE PROGRAMS in the document: Letter to AZ SoS.
The statement is true, but deceptive.
It is true there are no MACHINE EXECUTABLE PROGRAMS on the memory cards. What is on the memory cards are interpreted ABASIC scripts. The ABASIC scripts are parsed into TOKENS. The BASIC tokens are then passed to a MACHINE EXECUTABLE PROGRAM called the ABASIC interpreter. The BASIC intereter then executed a series of machine level instructions at the behest of the token.
So the ABASIC script is not itself a MACHINE EXECUTABLE, but when run through the (built-in) interpreter, the script can do nearly any function a MACHINE EXECUTABLE could.
This is equivalent to saying Microsoft macros in Excel or MS word are safe because the macros are not MACHINE EXECUTABLES. This is preposterous. I can write a MS Excel macro which will instruct the macro interpreter (VBA, Visual Basic for Applications) to delete files at the behest of the text in the macro script.
As I said the statement is true, but deceptive. Bill Clinton would love this guy's use of the English language.
In Liberty,
John Washburn
|
