Recently going through one of the daily newspapers and stumbled upon a cartoon of which i could not but felt same feelings that must have preceeded this awesome creativity. The caricature goes thus:
Warning signs:
Man: As a result of the faulty DDC machine, the man said he, his wife and daughter couldn't register
INEC official: I'm sorry about that. So why does he want to see me?
Man: He wants to REGISTER HIS ANGER
Funny as it may sound, to me the man was right after all INEC called it voters' registration. Since the man, his wife and daughter couldn't register their biodata, they opted to register there anger of which fourier analysis would have played a major role here.
It came once more in the history of Nigeria another round of voters' registration with a projection to capture 70 Million eligible voters' biodata in two weeks in preparation for the 2011 poll. To a point i began to wonder how feasible that could be having known Nigeria of its numerous try-and-error way of accomplishing things of national importance.
I was lost in wonder land, thinking about how this can be accomplished. Wow, finally i thought for once i was closer to an answer when i took a moment's retrospection into the then Maurice Iwu's administration. Technology will do the trick! As a software developer myself i should have thought of this in the first place, well i am sorry if i disappointed you but for a minute, think it this way that i am thinking too much to be oblivion that the 84 Billion naira man once had a University school portal.
Hmmmmn... what a holy matrimony between technology and politics. But how are we so sure that Mrs. Politics would remain faithful to her her husband, Mr. Technology? Well, INEC gave it a try.
in the wake of the voters' registration, curiosity that almost killed a cat is enough to drive a software architect like myself into knowing what and how this system called DDC works and possible hacks but then i wasn't given such opportunity as i wasn't in possession of the DDC machine. However, Looking from far into the screen of the DDC shouldn't cost more for my 9 year linux user kid brother (Joshua) to figure out an Ubuntu Gnome interface. "That is cool", i must have thought. Another interesting feature is that when you boot they system it boots to the data capture interface. I must have heard one of the operators whisper it to someone "Hey, we cant minimize the form, infact we cant view desktop" but just like any secure system, the software has a bypass algorithm(backdoor) for people whose fingerprints could not be captured, a process they call "Special registration".
Another interesting feature is the DDC's system time which had already been pre-programmed and since you have no access to system terminal and all function keys had been used specially by the voter's registration form, a usually hack of using short-cut keys must have been defeated. If you have a good brain in your skull you might as well consider passing your way through the BIOS to work around the system time. A sad news might be a possible BIOS password needed to have access. How about booting the DDC with a liveCD, perhaps get hold of terminal and execute something like $sudo date +%T -s "10:33:33"? i am so sorry hacker, liveCDs were build such that it has no power to change anything on the base system. Daser would usually have a work around this, but that's by the way.
if you are such that think too much, sorry to say this Ctr + Alt + F[1-6] will each lead you to a blank screen with a blinking cursor waiting for punch card input. lol. By implication, run level 1 to 6 is blocked, you've only got run level 7 to work with. So bad as it might look for you, you can enjoy the comfort of navigating through directories perhaps steal information with a liveCD. Well am sorry if you are not schooled properly, thats all you've got.
so why the work around system time? timing is very important to the registration process and its security was needed to kiss good bye to the old days where politicians would take the machine home and have a mid-night vigil registering ghost voters. so if your voter's card reads 1:00 am or 3 am, so sorry for you, you are under arrest. I therefore score INEC 70% on system time security.
First day to the fourth day of the registration witnessed an annoyingly slow process with 95% of the blame apportioned to the scanners (finger print biometric device). On this, the INEC's software which was initially on version 1.2 was upgraded to version 1.8. This i sensed a fowl play or rather a cover-ass operation. Verification was traded for speed of finger print capture scoring INEC 55%.
However said, more and more can go to the print, but i've got to go back coding else i become the most wanted in Jega's list. hmmmmn. i no talk am oh.
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