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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

bought its voting equipment in 2002

Who the hell was buying new systems in 2002 that relied on Zip disks? Have them taken out back and shot. If they're dead, dig them up, kill them again. By 2002, most of us had figured out the unreliability of Zip disks, and the industry had pretty much moved on by then. Except the people selling voting systems, apparently.

(For the youngsters, I'd guess that the use of Zip disks took a pretty good nose dive around the end of the 90s. By 2002, the only users left should have been those with an existing investment in Iomega's removable disk system.)

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The Help America Vote Act of 2002 basically required states to buy electronic voting machines in a relatively short time frame and gave them federal dollars to help. It was a response to the "hanging chads" of the 2000 election.

There was not previously a huge market for voting machines and the three or four existing vendors sucked. The law had strict requirements about making the machines available to people with disabilities, but not so much to say about security or reliability or robustness of the platform.

In fact, the disks themselves are surprisingly reliable, the totally unreliable part of the system are the drives, with the quite unfortunate fact that broken drive can create disk that breaks other drives.

He also could be confusing Zip disks with the Jazz disks, which were only slightly better than writing your data to /dev/null.

Writing to /dev/null had the advantage of being far faster, and far more predictable.

You could say that about literally any storage mechanism. Writing to /dev/null will always be faster and more predictable, no matter what the alternative is.

but Jazz disks didn't have any better data retention than writing to /dev/null, whereas most alternatives do.

Bingo.

Cheaper, too.

GRC still has a utility for click of death.

https://www.grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm

The Click-of-Death was the first hardware virus. No software was required to transmit it, nor could it be transmitted by software.

Really? I wasn't aware of that problem in the system, any reference or article about that? I am just curios about the technical details why this was happening.

Can confirm, was a youngster in my teens at high school during that time. I actually remember a friend getting a Zip disk drive, and immediately regretting it when someone else showed off their new CD burner. Heady days...

I think I was using mine around '98, on my second PC, which had about 10gb of storage.

I think it was quickly obsoleted by CD-Rs and CD-RWs, though during its short lifespan on my desk, I feel like I enjoyed using it (then again I was a young teenager, so I definitely didn't push the technology into revealing its faults at all)

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