Sheila Lennon: Diebold ATMs (and voting machines?) play music

March 19, 2004

By SHEILA LENNON / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

Diebold ATMs (and voting machines?) play music: Diebold, the voting machine company, also makes ATMs. (See, they can give paper receipts.)

My colleague Tim Barmann . Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University:

From: Carla Geisser <cgeisser@******.cmu.edu>

Subject: For your amusement: Broken ATM

A Diebold ATM in Baker hall just crashed, and ped to a Windows XP desktop.

Several intrepid students started Windows Media player, and it was playing a variety of music with a nice visualizer.

So much for security...

Photos: http://www.coed.org/photodb/folder.tcl?folder_id=3334

Movies (with audio): http://yogi.pdl.cmu.edu/~cgeisser/photos/

- Carla

Tim added, "The phrase 'Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' comes to mind."

The underlying Windows software also popped up on 40 percent of the Diebold voting machines in San Diego during the March 2 primary election. According to the San Jose Mercury News,

Poll workers were trained to expect their computer screens to show a page from the voting-system software. Instead, 40 percent of the 1,611 devices initially displayed a screen from the Windows operating system, according to the report by the county's Chief Administrative Office. ...

Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, is trying to determine the cause. The county's report blamed an unexpected discharge from an internal battery that caused the computers to reset themselves and display the Windows screen.

"We just don't know yet why there would have been a low battery or power-source issue," Diebold spokesman David Bear said. "We are certainly looking at it."

The county said Diebold is expected to deliver its own report on the problem in about two weeks.