Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader Crack open the advent calendar, chow down on some stale chocolate and join us in celebrating the prospering of cheats with a Who, Me? featuring a reader very much on the naughty list. Readers may recall Theo's On Call antics a couple of weeks ago. It appears that worrying scanner operators may be the least of his sins as today …
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A lot better than the other guy though. God may have suggested child sacrifice, tortured Job, sent bears to eat children who disrespected his bald prophet, committed genocide. But the other guy tempted us with fruit and knowledge.
The bible doesn't say which fruit was the temptation so in Scotland we are pious enough to avoid all of them.
And I say that as an honest-to-god reverend. [Universal Life Church - never knowingly under-souled]
Yosser - I'm desperate, Father.
Priest - Call me Dan
Yosser - I'm desperate, Dan
You jest, but some students of early Middle Eastern religion think YHVH was originally a penis god. They are not that unusual. A lot of early ME statuary of VIPs and gods is rather penile in shape, as a visit to the Louvre, British Museum or Fitzwilliam will confirm.
On this model there is a hierogamy (religious marriage) between YHVH and Jerusalem, which he fertilises with his semen in the form of rain.
There's fun stuff in proper theological libraries.
"the other contestant revealed that she had paid someone to win the contest for her, and was suing the station both for the tickets and to recover costs for her cheating"
So we have a woman who wanted the tickets, but didn't have anything much to get her to win. Except her body, which she apparently had no trouble flaunting. So she - correctly - estimated that she would get attention with a lewd pic, but that was not enough, she wanted to guarantee a win. So payment to some guy for help.
She had the gumption to go through with this plan, but when it failed she didn't have the intelligence to think it through and went into a lawsuit guns blazing, but neurons not firing.
I wonder if her pic was part of the evidence ? I'm sure the judge would have considered it carefully.
Just one day, it would be nice if people decided that other people seeing their favourite artists in future was more important than themselves seeing their favourite artists now, and that actually it would be a jolly good wheeze just to let a ticket tout wake up the morning after a gig with a huge pile of worthless* pieces of paper and the kind of credit card bill that would definitely spoil your day if you found it inside your birthday card.
Sadly, it seems that "bleeding when your neighbour is cut" has become something of a forgotten art these days, so this is unlikely to happen. And when somebody in a high-enough place is sufficiently annoyed to do something about the ticket touts, it will inevitably be unnecessarily heavy-handed and end up hurting genuine music fans.
* Actually, they might potentially accrue some value in years to come, as the tickets for a concert that nobody attended .....
The ticket selling industry is so corrupt it's insane.
All they need to do is to insist on the name of the ticket users at the time of purchase, require adequate ID when using the tickets and to provide a reasonable and fair method of dealing with occasional change of ticket users... None of which is remotely difficult. Instead there have been found to be strong links between the sellers of the tickets and the touts of tickets selling for 10x or more the original price. Hmmmm. One could almost smell a conspiracy...
"If nobody bought the 10x priced tickets the whole problem would go away"
It won't happen while there is still the feverish addiction to TwitFaceGram and the like and the desperate need for users to be "first" with the pictures and reviews to prove they were "there". You just have to look at the numbers of people at live events who never actually see it except through their phone screen as they video the whole show.
You do realise the bands and their management absolutely know this ? And that, for some artists (*), they're willing to forego the extra revenue so that fans who may not have a shit-ton of spare money can come and see them ?
(*) yes, I know, many will take corporate sponsorship, exploitative "meet and greets" are a thing, and there are examples of bands management working behind the scenes with secondary ticket sellers to maximise the market price. But the point stands - some artists do it deliberately so that fans are not excluded.
Think my fave is Faster Than the Hound.
But poor Patricia was arrested and everyone detested,
The manner in which she was exposed,
And later on in court, well, everybody thought
A summer run in jail would be proposed,
But the judge said, "Patricia,
Or may I say, Delicia,
The facts of this case lie before me...
Case dismissed ... this girl was in her working clothes!!"
Patricia The Stripper: Chris De Burgh - Irish (but born in Argentina IIRC).
Not vote rigging but slightly evil.
Back before the turn of the century, I was working in a small Web design and hosting company. Another guy I knew had a company competing with one of our clients. He asked me if there was anything I could do to deter visitors to the competitors Web site.
After a little thought, I knocked up a little Web page that auto loaded after a few seconds on the homepage. Within my page was java script that moved the browser window violently around the screen, culminating in an auto load of a full screen window containing my best bsod fake, warning of a virus infestation and an exhortation to reboot.
A simple alt-tab or ctrl-w or F11 would reveal the ruse to slightly literate users, but that wasn't the target audience.
Anyway, after about 10 minutes of my page being on the site, I received a frantic phone call from my friend saying "take it off, take it off, that's too much!, they're freaking out."
I of course complied immediately.
Happy days....
It's both evil and unprofessional. And I don't even understand why you did it. A mate asks you to deliberately damage a customer of yours, and you go ahead and do it? What incentive could this person have provided to get you to do that? From your comment, it didn't even sound like there was one. Did you have some reason to dislike the customer, making the move no less unprofessional but at least I'd understand your feeling? Please, I just don't get it. Why?
One was a mate, one was a customer. Customers come and go and often have no loyalty to a supplier but your mates are your mates...
That said, a business lives and dies by the quality and reliability of its services so deliberately sabotaging a customer - unless you can be sure there is absolutely no way it can ever, EVER be traced back to you - is not much better than walking along the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef wearing concrete overshoes, dragging 50 kilos of sharkbait and carrying a sign saying 'bite me'...
Not long ago I was in a pub in Plymouth (blighty side of the Atlantic) and they were selling a literal green beer to celebrate the above mentioned festival. It tasted foul but the photo reminded me though the photo seems to be confusing two festivals - on green and one in southern Germany.
Obvious icon.
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Yellow lager + shot of Bols Blue Curacao makes a lovely green pint. Actually, 1 shot is enough to make 2/3 pints green, but your average bartender in the UK won't sell spirits by the slug*, so get three pints and 1 shot and self mix it.
* After writing this, I wondered if a slug is an official measurement, and it turns out it is - its the mass that is accelerated by 1 ft/s² when a force of 1lbf is applied to it, or 14.59kg in metric - and barmaids DEFINITELY won't sell blue bols in that size.
Regarding the slug: Anyone who has taken Fluid Mechanics or Thermodynnamics (at least in the US) is very familiar with the unit. By your third test you're praying for the majority of the questions to be in SI units (engineering classes tend to have to use both, that really messes with your head).
Some years ago, I was the bass player in a band playing at a beer festival.
While one of the guitarists was setting up, he (slightly less deferentially than perhaps he should) sent his partner to fetch a beer for him.
She came back through the crowd with two glasses - one of which contained something green.
Punter (pointing to the green beer): "You're not going to drink that are you?"
Partner (with an evil grin and gesturing to the guitarist): "No - he is...".
[If you're interested, it was Bunce's "Sign Of Spring", brewed with a Scandinavian influence and some herbs - a few of us tried it, and all said "It smells green, but tastes brown (i.e. like proper beer)"]
On a more seasonal theme a friend (since purged from my life for obvious reasons) came over for dinner last Christmas. Bringing some pre-dinner snacks. Namely Walkers Brussel Sprout flavoured crisps.
Have you ever eaten green crisps? Well don't. Not that I objected to the colour, just the taste. I like sprouts, but these things tasted of something that's been boiled in Satan's used sock for three weeks.
Being served green scrambled eggs is pretty off-putting too. Some people think they already look a bit vomit-y, but it's much worse when they're bright green.
@ArrZarr - "A litter tray is basically a buffet to a dog."
I've been told that connoisseurs of dog meat say it tastes better if the dog has been fed baby poo.
One more reason not to eat dog meat, and further confirmation that the phrase, "You must try this, it's a local delicacy!" are the cue for: icon
Stoneshop,
I didn't actually mind my green scrambled eggs (others couldn't understand how I could eat them). Some friends in the kitchen were playing silly buggers - so someone else's came out blue. Which reminded me of Ford Prefect eating the food on the Vogon ship.
You can change the tastes that we notice in foods by playing with colour though.
But obviously not all green things are bad. Salads can be lovely - I like brocoli (especially served with toasted almonds and sea salt). I'm not sure nori is actually nice though - so much as wrapped round things that are. It's not hugely tasty. Wasabi is also delicious. Key lime pie. Nice blue foods are rarer.
> Weissbeer coloured green with Waldmeister (as served in Berlin)
That's not "Weissbeer", it's called "Berliner Weisse" and it is something quite different. Without anything added its taste is quite sour, the Waldmeister (sirup!) is really for the taste. Berliner Weisse also just has 2.5 percent alcohol so more of a refreshment than other types of beer.
I once ordered Berliner Weisse in Bavaria and got Weissbeer with sirup, NOT good!
There's a blue beer from Japan, tastes good.
I was an apprentice to a good guy who was a Rangers FC cultist. His round when I was 18, I asked for a Blue Bols and fresh orange. He remarked, "My two favourite colours."
Blue Bols and fresh orange turns a bright Celtic green. It doesn't taste great but the look on his face was delicious.
I once entered a competition on a website for something, obviously I automated submitting the form. I got a reply a few hours later saying "please stop emailing me! my inbox is full".
I didn't win, so I can only assume that they cheated in some way ( ignored my entries? it wasn't a real competition? ). It wasn't anything worth arguing over, as I remember. Maybe a crate of beer or something.
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In 2011 I worked for a main sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics and they had an in-house competition to carry the Olympic torch.
I have performed many charity and public service roles outside of work for the past 30 years. Many of my colleagues entered my name into the competition for the particular role they were familiar with and some for my work.
I wasn't a successful candidate, but then received 6 "you were nominated for" certificates. It turns out that the judges thought that the disparate roles could not be the same person so they counted them separately! And 3 of them were in the top 5!
I did get to hold the torch of someone who organised a single football match between underprivileged kids and the local Police Officers!
Anonymous because I do not have a common name and was the only person on the global pay role with that name!
Buy a local knock-off cola, one of them will have a sticker getting the winner free tickets to a football match.
Sounds good?
Sounds better when you look in the machine and realise it can only hold five bottles, so spend a fiver and buy all the bottles (because we all know the sticker will be on the last bottle) and gain the tickets.
I suggested this logic to a friend (as I don't care for football). All bottles bought, and predictably the sticker was on the last bottle.
Well, nothing said (or could justifiably prevent) somebody buying all the bottles a few minutes after the machine had been refilled. The company running the promotion just didn't think it through...
a famous "sugar flavored water" company entered the internet era with a code on the inside of their labels.
Some of these codes entitled the "winner" to download a free music track from the new iTunes, (there might have been some sort of ultimate prize. other than insulin resistance, but the kids just wished for music to populate all 4GB of their iPod minis)
I think it took a single pack of 500ml bottles, and about three minutes with an excel spreadsheet, to predict all the winning numbers, from just the first six samples. The sequence had about two winning numbers in a row, then a gap of around three, to stop simple experimentation, but it was fun to see the release of a totally 'not ready for the real world' project - and to notice that the next year's similar competition had a much better RNG. (ahem...)
disclaimer: it never happened, at least not from any IPv4 associated with me, and any sums involved remained around a fiver as it was still much simpler to use napster/kazaa P2P for the music than to type in the many codes on the sugary website, then fight with iTunes to redeem the 99p vouchers.
I hence do not trust most online voting, opinion polls etc - but in passing I did notice that "someone" used the article described vote-rigging automatic script voting to cleverly vote FOR a pop-music video on YouTube in 2014 in order to get it banned, real cyber-attack stuff! un-noticed by most.
the context here was that a northern state was having a vote about going-it alone, and a rag-tag group of musicians put together a wee catchy tune, with some guid lyrics. It had the potential to go viral, and that might just have 'nudged' a vote one way. the southern realm did all the usual normal stuff to get the vote to narrowly go their way - but a bunch of mathemagicians in a sweet ring-shaped fried cake took this you-tube song and massively upvoted the "views" counter to an impossible several million in the short hours after the clip launched. result: YT 'temporarily' banned the patriotic video "due to irregularities" (and they YT suggested that after two weeks of analysis, it would then be free to be viewed again) northern popular vote took place just a few days later, unmolested by viral media. well done chaps, or молодцы товарищи if it was the other lot instead, sowing confusion!
Anon for obvious reasons .
Many moons ago I was in an email chat group (how quaint) with some WebDev acquaintances.
Electronics Boutique (remember them?) were running a daily give away, basically a handful of whatever the day's item was if you could find the link. PS/GameBoy/Gameboy Advance Games etc. (that ages it somewhat)
Yep, one of those acquaintances managed to script a search for the daily booty and as it obligatory, forwarded it in.
All was going well until the Head of IT questioned the above average excitement in the Office and why everyone had deliveries on their desks.
We were guilted into selling them and donating the proceeds to charity since they were obtained using company equipment but the satisfaction stood :)
These days you could do this on your phone but Nokia's were not that clever back then.
More recently, a chain of sushi outfits in London had a virtual loyalty card, whereby once you purchase your item you scanned a QR stuck on the till and you got a stamp on your loyalty card, and a completed card got you a free sushi box.
Nice idea, with a fatal flaw. Some barcode scanners keep a history of scanned barcodes and will allow you to revisit a previously scanned link. Yay, free stamp. The only restriction was one stamp per day. I can't possibly imagine why that QR disappeared after a while.
Must have been around 15 years ago now. While enjoying a bottle of wine I thought I would peruse their website, and they were running a competition to win half a dozen bottles. On attempting to enter the competition, I found that the script wasn't working, so I went through the source code and figured out how to submit my entry.
A few weeks later I found out that I had won the competition, and duly received my free wine. And it was only then at that point that I realised I could have entered multiple times from multiple email addresses (and with multiple physical address locations as well, e.g. parents, work, etc) and therefore won multiple prizes. I may have been the only person to enter the competition unless someone else had also figured out the submission issue...
Many years ago (early 2000’s) there was a competition run by the local paper to find the “face” of the town which would then be used in various advertisements. One of our directors entered. A couple of the developers (eg, not me!) on a Friday afternoon decided to knock up a quick script to add votes for her (and a lesser number for another participant we knew to hopefully make it less obvious) and left it running over the weekend. From memory the site didn’t have any protections from multiple votes at all. Unsurprisingly she “won” by a landslide, with our other beneficiary coming in second. In the coming months we got to see her face plastered on posters all round the city.
The killer blow though was when she was told HOW she’d won, followed by the devs creating a fake version of the local paper’s website to look like the bogus votes had been discovered and it was a massive scandal. She was eventually told the truth and her bogus win was safe.
Summer 2003 I was asked by a friend "to lend a hand with a goose competition". A pond in a park near her housed a number of geese, and her favourite goose was a bit of an, ehm, underdog. So when a contest was launched for the Popularest Goose she found that UnderGoose deserved to win.
This was easily achieved by voting once for each goose, chucking the logged HTML into an expect script, massaging it a little and running that with a random delay, voting for UnderGoose four or five times against once or twice for each of the other two contestants.
Of course UnderGoose won, with a comfortable but still plausible lead.
Years n years ago (1988) Batman had acquired a second sidekick styled "Robin" after the first had got old and moved on to heroing on his own. Said sidekick was NOT popular with fans, who feared change then as now. A storyline was put together giving the audience the chance to influence the storyline of the comic. The kid was beaten and left for dead by the Joker, and that issue of the comic gave two premium rate phone numbers - one to kill the kid, one to have him live.
He died.
The TOTAL vote was only 10,614, and the "winning" margin was 72 votes. It later emerged that one dude rigged his computer to dial the "kill him" number every couple of minutes for eight hours. That one bloke killed Robin. Probably got him a hefty phone bill, but in 1988 if you were the sort of person who could afford a computer that could make phone calls automatically, you could afford the phone bill. Plus, he's got a good story for life, even if it only impresses nerds.
American Idol Season 2, Semi-Final. Three contestants. The phone lines to vote were open for 2 hours, and there were ~6m votes counted in total, and the three totals were all fairly close to 2m - at least not statistically significantly different. The next week, for the finals, just two contestants, but phone lines were open for 3 hours, and there were ~6m votes in total, both totals were fairly close to 3m and did not seem statistically significantly different. It seemed quite obvious that the voting system was bottlenecked.
I have to wonder if the winner was decided by a minor difference in the systems designed to count the votes - a better rack location, shorter cable runs, better cooling, less fragmentation on the filesystem...
There's at least one very popular forum I used to frequent which allowed only small inline images in your signature. This points to an image on my own webserver. If the IP fetching it is that of the forum's Webster, that gets one small image. Otherwise you get whichever image I really want to show.
It's only a small change to, for instance, (and within certain date bounds,) send say 5%, of requests a 301 Redirect to whatever resource is fetched to register a vote for whatever is taking my fancy at the time. Users just get the occasional broken image, and the "votes" all come from different IP addresses, none of which are mine..
Back in the day (around 2002 or so) I was setting up shop as a web developer. I was approached by someone who thought e-directories might just be the next Big Idea. He needed a CMS/database solution for ads that he could charge for by the number of views.
After developing the site and implementing the various counters and statistics I quickly noticed that most of the views came from a single source: my client.
Being new in the business and not sure how to broach the subject of what seemed to be ad-view rigging I decided to set a cookie if a user logged into their account. Visits by users with the cookie were not added to the tally of ad-views.
The number of ad-views leveled off nicely (OK - they plummeted) and my client never asked me about it... Problem solved.
OK - one more from 2019.
There was this Project Manager who was going to prioritize our projects based on votes. In order to do this he set up a conference call and told us to update his spreadsheet real-time. "Just add "+1" next to the project you thought should be done first.", he said.
There were three categories, and we all could vote once in each category. Then somebody asked if he could just use all his votes on a single item. "Sure - why not?". Okay...
Before long, "+3" started appearing next to specific items. And again. And again. And again. And then +6.
To our astonishment the PM just started adding up all the numbers and indeed prioritized based on the tally. Somebody even mentioned that the total number far exceed the number of team members (times three) and thus possible votes, but he either didn't understand or just went ahead for the sake of it.
We're now busy working on the +1+1+3+3+5+3+3+3+6+1+5+1+3 project...
Is it vote-rigging if it's this blatant?
Years and years ago, when "hi-speed internet" was a rare commodity, I lived in an extremely small town in deepest, darkest Tennessee, just over the state line from Kentucky, Internet there was ONLY dialup, unless you were a crazy kook like me that sprung for an ISDN line.
The local telco, BellSouth, stood up a website to gauge interest by region in Hi-speed - specifically DSL in this case.
A simple web page would let you pluck in your phone number and register your interest in the new hot DSL connection when it would become available. They claimed this would help BellSouth prioritize the rollout areas.
Of course, I went right to the page, typed in my number and "Submitted". After I did, I tried to enter a friends number as well, but was prevented as "MY IP address had already entered". However, by breaking and reestablishing a DHCP lease, I was able to enter my friends phone number as well. Interesting...
With a little scripting app (PerfectKeyboard IIRC) I doped out a macro that would establish a DHCP lease, go to the website, enter a phone number with our little town's prefix (615-325-xxxx) , then go to a different page, break the lease, poll a IP address, navigate back to the Bellsouth page, increment the phone number by one, register interest, and so on.
As all phone numbers in the town had the same prefix, I just had the script start at 0000 and run through all 9999 possible combinations. If I recall, it took about a day to run.
It was all just a little FU to Bellsouth who would never, ever extend their benevolence to our little town, as Cable internet was not even remotely available and therefore no competition to provide anything better....However...
When the DSL rollout actually happened a few months later, guess what small town got DSL before Nashville did? Someone at Bellsouth missed the fact that nearly 10,000 inquiries came from a town of less than 300 people.
As a bonus, the DSLAM ended up being located about 100M from my house.
Back in the 1990s, a certain bus company in a large city ran a "lucky ticket number" promotion. If your ticket had the right serial number, it could be exchanged at any Travelcard agent (and there was one such in almost every one of those little parades of shops, all the way around the ring road) for a £10 cash prize.
This was during a time when I happened to have the wherewithal to print reasonably convincing (well, they convinced the drivers, and the inspectors .....) fake bus tickets; and with the help of my then-flatmate, a crazy plan was formulated.
This involved printing a large supply of tickets with recent dates and the winning serial number, and a couple of Daysavers with that day's date; then one of us catching the 11C and riding clockwise around the A4040, the other catching the 11A and going anticlockwise, getting off at every Travelcard agent along the way and exchanging one of our forged tickets for a real tenner, and ultimately meeting up at a rendezvous point 180 degrees away from the starting point to decide whether we should try the same stunt again, or just head for home, perhaps in time to see our exploits on Central News. We reckoned that this would be enough time to grab a fair number of tenners, but not quite enough time for them to twig that something was amiss.
Every time we discussed it, though, we found a new and terrible way for it to go wrong. If I didn't scare him off with my objections, he scared me off with his. And eventually the promotion came to an end, before we could summon up the courage to go through with our plan.
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