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I’m just gonna say it: Everything about everyone involved in this administration screams people who are hired for their loyalty, not their skillsets.
The theory that they used Uninterruptible Power Supplies to modify the vote, and that they had enough people involved to pull this off, yet everyone kept their mouth shut, is not the level of competency I have seen from anyone in Trump’s orbit.
As someone with a background in tech, I find it hard to believe. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They can make up all the stories about they want in their own heads, until there’s some proof of it, it’s just as bullshit as Trump’s claims of election fraud.
So yeah, we’re gonna have to have a hell of a lot more to go on than “could have” here. Also I’m skeptical on the claim that Windows automatically trusts any connected UPS and skeptical about the “root level access” claim (including the fact that it is called administrator access on Windows, Windows doesn’t have “root” accounts).
Part of the reason I’m skeptical on the root-level access claim regarding a UPS. If you could do this with any old UPS, this would make any and every UPS in existence a major attack vector to every computer and computer network in existence. I find it hard to believe that cybersecurity experts would have somehow missed this in the last 20 years that commercial level UPS’s have been in use. That it was just somehow conveniently overlooked that you could override server administration with a UPS. I don’t buy that.
EDIT: All this being said, I think a court case to reveal any evidence that is there is important. It’s highly improbable but not impossible and so I hope the court case moves forward quickly.
I’ve been listening to a great podcast series about Titanic. (This will come around, bear with me.)
One of the things mentioned in the latest episode is that it didn’t take long for conspiracy theories to develop about the sinking, that it had to have been done on purpose. Because there are a lot of people who didn’t want to believe the truth: that it was possible for the largest luxury liner ever built could go to the bottom of the north Atlantic in two and a half hours on its maiden voyage on accident.
The uncomfortable truth about this last election is that, yes, enough people willfully voted for fascism to put this administration in place. The United States is much further away from the ideal we’d all been led to believe it has strived to be, so far that it’s clear that it’s not even striving for that ideal anymore. That truth is so unconscionable to some people that accepting a conspiracy theory is more palatable.
It’s really hurtful to the mind of a kind-hearted person. It says a lot of dark things about humanity in general that this nation was so easily steered into this. It’s valid to want to reject it, but I’d rather live in the dark reality and face it than do like the MAGAts and retreat to the safety of fantasy and fiction that it just has to be a conspiracy to explain how so many people are so terrible. Nope, humans are really that fucked.
Much like the night sky, humanity is largely a dark thing, speckled with occasional bright spots.
Humanity is Banana Joe from the Amazing World of Gumball:
The messed up part is that the people who voted for this think they’re doing good. There are a few moral monsters of course, but most of the people who participate in historic crimes think they’re helping.
Agreed. There’s enough true conspiracies, we don’t need to make fake ones
Not really an accident persay but rather a combination of hubris and bad choices made or of hubris.
It’s actually NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM access, but that’s being pedantic
Except for Trump letting slip that without musk and those voting machines he would have lost and during the Twitter fight between the 2 musk said Trump wouldn’t be president without him.
Circumstantial evidence is not evidence. Further, this story is about Tripp Lite, which last I checked, isn’t owned by Musk. It’s owned by Eaton. Gonna have to jump through a lot of mental hoops to connect Eaton and Musk.
Have you ever considered that they would say they were going to win even if they weren’t? That part of how fascism and fascists work is by projecting power by never admitting weakness? Saying you’re the winner, even after you’ve lost, is common for both Trump and Musk.
It is according to common law, and can even be used to convict.
The problem is is that Trump cheating is more than plausible. You’re right that real evidence is absolutely required.
And they did cheat. They cut millions from voter rolls. They spent more time questioning whether signatures on mail-in voters were valid. They did more gerrymandering. They, in general, did their damnedest to make it harder for people vote. They used disinformation campaigns and foreign actors to influence social media. The thing about it is, they do a lot more of it out in the open than people want to admit. Just like how they weren’t hiding Project 2025. Why would they suddenly have the ability to be so tight lipped about just this issue?
Because all the things you mentioned are par for the course and easily digestible by common folks. Actual “cheating” at the polls would do a lot more damage to the country than just Trump being caught being a felon again.
They said that about finding out that Bush signed off on torture. Surprise, the evidence changed nothing. The country slumped on, unbothered by war crimes.
Did the Snowden leaks change anything about the surveillance state? No.
What makes you think this would be any different?
To be clear, I’m not trying to be defeatist, I’m trying to be realistic. As far back as the Snowden leaks philosopher Slajov Žižek wrote about this phenomenon and he, even back then, was convinced that in the modern era, with so much information bombarding us, that evidence no longer mattered. He used the Bush torture leaks and the Snowden leaks as his evidence. I’m certainly not the first person to have noticed this pattern in the modern internet era.
No you make good points. I suppose I’m a bit delusional when it comes to still having a sliver of belief in people and systems.
Circumstantial evidence is evidence.
It’s just not enough. It can be useful for finding the actual evidence though.
Dismiss any evidence at your own risk.
I feel like Trump is kinda the type of guy who would say shit just to stir the pot. Plus, fascist love for the public to think they are more competent than they really are, especially if it makes them seem like they are the underdog pulling one over on the establishment. Same thing works for musk.
This, they will always say they are going to win even if they’re not, they will always say they’ve won even if they haven’t.
See: Musk v. Zuckerberg. Musk acts like he won even though he’s a pudgy fat shit and never even stepped into the ring with Zuckerberg. It’s projection of power, and people are giving them power by believing it.
Musk and Trump would have said they were winning no matter what. They would have said they won no matter what. If they lost they would say the “mainstream media” lied.
Ups software probably installed as system so that it can perform script execution and shutdown properly. That software communicates with the UPS directly. UPS vendors wouldn’t be at the top of my list of security-minded companies.
The execution path isn’t impossible.
I mean, the article focuses more on how the UPSes have SNMP enabled network cards.
SNMP is Simple Network Management Protocol, which is for, well, simple network management, not computer administration, which are different things.
SNMP can definitely be an attack vector, so it’s generally considered good practice to disable it on any ports it’s not absolutely needed. Further, it’s mostly able to be abused for DDOS, although there are some possibilities for network penetration. Network, not computer, once again. Controlling the router isn’t the same as controlling the Server., although it can help you move towards controlling the Server. Still a lot of hoops to jump through from network to server.
Every election is run on a local level, and this would mean that in enough swing states, one of two things was happening: either the election cybersecurity team in all the states affected was technically incompetent or they were somehow in on it and all kept their mouths shut. Both of those are highly unlikely when it comes to the frequency at which this happened all over the country.
While you generally have a good point about script execution via a UPS, once again, does that mean every single cybersecurity team in every state affected was foolish enough to be giving a UPS administrator script execution capabilities? Because just executing a script doesn’t mean the user executing the script has admin rights. Once again, either every team was inept or somehow the famously loose-lipped Trump team was sitting on a zero-day exploit to gain admin access and somehow kept it quiet.
I don’t consider snmp to be a big issue, unless someone set up “public” with write access.
The ups software running on the windows machine would be running as system and would be able to execute whatever it wanted. Usually it’s connecting to the ups through some method (IP, usb serial) to figure out what state it’s in, how much runtime is remaining, and if it needs to execute any stored scripts.
How do you get a compromised UPS to upload scripts to the windows machine? That I’m not too sure about. I don’t think I’ve seen an ups management system that has that capability.
I understand where you’re coming from with this angle, but you’re wrong. Very few people need to be involved to get this done. Also, just like with other conspiracy theories that are still publicly frowned upon but highly probably true: I wouldn’t count on internal US people to do the ground work either.
It is very likely the machines were fixed early to mid 2024. I agree that the UPS theory or starlink is ridiculous.
I’ve written more here if you want to understand the broader angle. https://lemmy.world/post/27126084
These two ladies are worth a listen too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk1A-tLIaXY
Let’s also remember the Russians first hacked in 2016. They had years to map and plan down to the voting center and they had the cooperation of Palantir and Musk.
This is a beautifully simple way to do it. There should be instructions for setting up polling stations with a specific step for the UPS. It’s not a smoking gun but should be findable
That the big thing we have going for us. They’re fascists, but they’re also grossly incompetent at operations. Although they are amazing at the propaganda .
To play devils advocate, I watched children do this back in 2017.
I remember that, too. And I remember hackers getting physical access to Diebold machines with a Sharpie pen in 2004.
It still comes back to the fact that the article this stems from is literally nothing but speculation.
Children? That’s a weird way to describe people at defcon, but ok.
I think it’s also a great risk and a shot-in-the-dark kind of attack. They wouldn’t have “live” access to the machines so they would’ve needed a complicated algorithm to alter results in a believable way. If 100% of votes for Harris get swapped to Trump that’s very suspicious. If it’s only 10% of votes then you risk having no affect. And if the attack is successful on every machine in a deep blue county or precinct that makes the amount you could reasonably swap even less. In other words it’s extremely difficult to be effective AND be subtle.
The Starlink theory sounds a bit more plausible but that also sounds like a stretch assuming the transmissions were encrypted (and God help us if they thought that wasn’t necessary).
You’re misunderstanding the setup in a couple ways. First most UPS setups don’t plugin to USB but in this weird use case that may have been standard. 2nd and this is the more important part, Fancy Bear(Russia) and Palantir would have done the hard work, not the idiots you see in the news. The dumbest people in the know are Trump and Elon who have both let it slip. Next are the Eatons and some guy at Tripp lite. The plan as I understand it is way easier than what I originally thought the Russians spent their years of recon on. It seems like the method differed a bit state to state so some states may have evidence. Specifically the ones using machines that create paper backups though with root I’m not sure there would be evidence this many months later.
Right, is amazing as this would be to feel this vindicated, we are acting just like them if we fall into this kind of shit without evidence