If I wrote a program to run in Windows, say, would you also go through the Windows code line by line to see if what you thought was happening was actually happening?
I just looked on my PC and it has around 200 processes running. Ideally, they should all be checked line by line to be safe.
OK, but there is a problem. If I gave you a book in English and a thumb drive full of Chinese characters and told you they were the same, how would you check?
The source code would be text but the compiled and linked executable file would just be binary. Even worse, some of the binary that would run would not be in the source code anyway. It would be part of the operating system or drivers.
Well, I was saying the programs in the US for our voting systems, should be transparent, and subject to audit by reading line by line the source code. [When I was a software systems project manager, EVERY program before it was put online was subject not only to tests, but to a review of the code by several team members going through the code together. Every instruction, every conditional, every potential outcome of the code. There was no hidden code or time bombs in the code my project released. It is doable!]
If the code is as you describe, it needs to be THROWN OUT!!
SHEESH we can't have our voting system software INCOMPREHENSIBLE!
You are correct. In a full test, you read the code itself, comparing it to the specs of that the program was supposed to do.
Yes and no!
If I wrote a program to run in Windows, say, would you also go through the Windows code line by line to see if what you thought was happening was actually happening?
I just looked on my PC and it has around 200 processes running. Ideally, they should all be checked line by line to be safe.
The source code for the program you are auditing, yes.
OK, but there is a problem. If I gave you a book in English and a thumb drive full of Chinese characters and told you they were the same, how would you check?
The source code would be text but the compiled and linked executable file would just be binary. Even worse, some of the binary that would run would not be in the source code anyway. It would be part of the operating system or drivers.
Well, I was saying the programs in the US for our voting systems, should be transparent, and subject to audit by reading line by line the source code. [When I was a software systems project manager, EVERY program before it was put online was subject not only to tests, but to a review of the code by several team members going through the code together. Every instruction, every conditional, every potential outcome of the code. There was no hidden code or time bombs in the code my project released. It is doable!]
If the code is as you describe, it needs to be THROWN OUT!!
SHEESH we can't have our voting system software INCOMPREHENSIBLE!