[Salamander]

FoxNews is over 70% kerry.

What kind of "scripts" do this and why don't websites block them, anyway?

[Nat2004]

But where is THE PLAN?

[vbmoneyspender]

you run a program like wget or lynx within a looping script and you can saturate the vote count.

[Dawgreg]

I just saw that.........70 to 30. Anyone with the sense of a pissant could see something stinks to high heaven.

[JulieRNR21]

They remove their cookies & keep voting again & again & again & again!

[snooker]

You need direct connect to the Internet. That way you can spoof your originating IP. All you need then is a bash script. It's pretty simple to do actually. The direct connect, not through an ISV, is what makes it work right. Colleges usually have such a connection. You don't need a powerful server to run the scripts.

[StJacques]

Salamander wrote:

"What kind of "scripts" do this and why don't websites block them, anyway?"

The "scripts" could actually be compiled code and are usually referred to as "spiders" or "robots" or even "automatons." Microsoft.NET and Visual Basic software developers create them using the Microsoft Internet Transfer Control, other development platforms use different code components.
,br> The way the code components work is that they send out a "page request" ping to the address of the server page that offers a vote and, whenever the server responds, they send a second "page request" ping to the "server response" page address which, under most circumstances, should enter the ping as a vote. Search engines use this kind of technology a lot, polling other search engines for their responses to search keywords for example.

When you ask why web sites don't block them, actually they try, but only to a limited degree. Most of these online polls store a cookie in the folder of the requesting machine to try to stop multiple voting. But you can write code to delete cookies as soon as they are stored. Some of these web sites may even check for the sender's IP address, but even that can be worked around by using a clustered server setup. When you get right down to it, it's not worth the investment on the part of the web sites conducting the online polls to guarantee their fairness.

[Robert_Paulson2]

can't be blocked.
each time they visit the site, it comes from a different phony IP, browser type and the cookie is dumped for a new one.

not really that hard to do.
It should not surprise anyone that it is being done.

It's like a random denial of service attack that simply casts a vote, broadcasts a phony ip, and erases the old cookie.

voila.
And very likely the webmaster who is looking at the logs, KNOWS it is happening...

to get a real vote, you would have to send a password to an existing email account, then require the user to use that password to access the voting interface.... and back up the results password hash in a database lookup table. Would the script work on it? No, not as written, and writing a new one and going through the email process manually over and over again would get to be a drag...

unless you set up a php mail() script that tripped a trigger every time a new password arrived... and reran itself.

and yes, there people who do NOTHING but think of that kind of stuff, and lots worse even... all day and all night 24/7/366.

[boycottliberalhollywood.com]

FoxNews is over 70% kerry. What kind of "scripts" do this and why don't websites block them, anyway?

Why don't websites block them?

• The developers don't know how to block them (unlikely)
• Somebody wants folks to spam the results (ding ding ding, I think we have a winner)

[mentor2k]

What are scripts?