Posted on 10/08/2004 8:33:14 PM PDT by Enlightiator
Kerry is winning the online polls on the debate by such a huge margin, as with the last debate, that its quite obvious that poll spamming by www.DemocratsUnderground.com isn't the cause. In the past, Freerepublic provided online poll links, DU provided online poll links, and it was usually a spirited but decent contest.
Tonights online polls, as with the last debate, indicate that there are certainly far more sophisticated techniques being used to falsely inflate the Kerry vote than DU's normal multiple voting techniques. I have watched CNN and MSNBC go dramatically into a huge (and unbelievable) lead in only minutes. Automated voting scripts are the only thing that would cause such an imbalance so quickly. Its been done before by computer hacks:
Fixing Polls: An Open Letter to MSNBC.com
Looks like Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe has the good fortune to have some real good computer support working the case for Kerry's online polls. Well, Terry did send an email request for "voters," he didn't say they had to be human.
It's up to 88% for Kerry. I just threw another Kerry vote in to make it look even worse.
*LOL*....Let 'em gourge themselves on their Kool-Aide...Gonna be some bad hangovers on the 4th of Nov!!!...Thats when I want to visit DU!...We should make it a Freeper event!!!
And half our country ~doesn't~ have the sense of a pissant.
That's the scary part.....:-|
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1238506/posts?page=4#4
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1237294/posts?page=10#10
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1236738/posts?page=3#3
But once you've got it set up, you're golden. Initiate multiple sessions and flood all the polls within minutes.
I still think it would be useful to get some media-geek to weigh in on this and demo for one of these sites (FNC?) how easy it is to spoof these polls.
Yep, I read that as well, tried to get on email distribution for it, but DemocraticUnderground threads were pulled when I went back, someone doesn't want it to get out. If they used those automated techniques to vote sparingly, like a few hundred times each person, they could convince someone. As it is, they can't control themselves, and in their overzelousness they are making the polls go to margins no one will believe for a minute.
Oh, wait, we do the same thing when we Freep a poll, right??
Most of these polls just use a cookie to record (on your computer) that you have voted. A script can easily accept, then delete the cookie. This makes the poll page think you haven't voted yet. Repeat hundreds of times per minute, and you have electronic ballot-box stuffing.
A much more sophisticated approach would be for the web server to at least record the voter's IP address when they submit their selection. This would be much more difficult for most folks to work around.
They remove their cookies & keep voting again & again & again & again!
Good links to the fraud, thanks.
So you think we should stop spamming Kerry votes?
Let them; they lost and they know it! Hope it ends up 99-1
It is incredibly easy to do. I used to load test our server farm using webbrowser objects. Takes about 5 minutes to write the code on a bad day.
It's easy enough to test the veracity of the poll. The IIS log captures the IP address of incoming votes. It's simple enough to import it into excel and count the votes for each IP address and exclude duplicates. We used to catch people messing with our web farm that way. You see 150K hits from 1 IP address in 60 minutes, you block that IP address. :)
So, what do we do about it? Do we just let the polls implode until everyone knows that they're bogus? Or do we get our own auto - bot systems up and running?
They aren't even trying to make it look like they aren't cheating.
They think everyone is a dumb as they are and they can get away with blatant cheating. I find it kind of funny! Get it out in the daylight so everyone knows what the Democratic party stands for!
Still, all it takes is to develop a routine that enters the vote and then clears whatever barrier that is sent back to the voting "person" who just entered the vote - usually a cookie.
He showed me how he was able to throttle the voting to such a pace as it would look somewhat natural and told me the owner of the site would not be that much wiser unless they compared the logs of the server to the total number of votes - which they didn't.
The best way to combat this kind of hacker-type fraud would be NOT to try to fight fire with fire and have a routine cast competing votes but to go whole hog and place an astronomical amount of votes FOR John Kerry in the polling. Render the results useless. Give the programmers at the site fits trying to prevent it from happening again (you think the people who pay these people to design the polls want their money wasted which is what essentially happens when the polls are made nuull and void by bot "fraud"?). What you end up with doesn't negate "freeping" when you broadcast the existence of the poll to a large audience BUT it will eventually make such scripting tough if not impossible.
It wouldn't work because alot of people are logging in via dynamic ip addresses through outfits like AOL and MSN. If someone ran a script through a dynamic connection and the server noted the ip address where the multiple votes were coming from and blocked it, the DU user just logs off and then back on and gets a new ip address, while the poor AOL sucker who next gets the old/bad ip address reassigned to him is now blocked from accessing that poll or maybe even the site. No business would want to block potential viewers on that basis.
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