“We’re obviously not trying hard enough to cheat,” lamented a dismayed blogger.
STRAW POLL SPAMMER FREE
(“We’re at a disadvantage, because we’ve got finals now and presumably no one has the free time to write a Cornell spamming script.”) The Cornell alumni office had early-on taken an above-board interest, alerting alums to the situation and urging them to vote, but this effort did not bring Cornellians to the poll in numbers sufficient for Big Red to catch up. By the time a handful of indy hackers made their run at the Straw Poll, the ballot box was adequately unstuffable.Ĭornell blogage shows that students there were watching the fray (“Me thinks the site is being bombarded by a script war between Troy and Cambridge…”), but a higher, or more urgent, course was taken. The Rensselaer effort was less successful - still, several hundred thousand votes bounced off our servers. As campus blog entries indicate, token reservations were overcome (“It would be entirely unethical of me to stuff a ballot box, or suggest any others use the same, with command lines such as…”) and a curl was disseminated, intended to accomplish pretty what the MIT script had done using Flash. Meanwhile Rennselaer had also stepped up to the plate - or rather made their own attempt to move it. Besides, we had to take his thoughtfulness into account: “Please,” he cautioned on the updated version of his hack site, “only keep one instance of the program running at a time so we don’t kill the server again.” freshman from New York - it’s amazing what you can find out about a person online), but as he left a clear trail and probably didn’t expect the hack to be as successful as it was, it seemed enough to deny the MIT network access to our servers. The idea of outing the main culprit was briefly considered (a 5’8″, 115-lb.
STRAW POLL SPAMMER CRACK
“We’re all running cgi hack scripts” lol’d one MIT blogger, “I’ve voted 3 or 4 thousand times!” Fortunately the prophylactic measures swiftly implemented by the DTH’s crack tech crew kept most of the votes from making it into the poll. An MIT student put up “Doonesbury Voting Hack”, a web site (adorned with art borrowed from the Town Hall) which enabled would-be-ballot-stuffers to spew out over a million votes in a single night. Wait, let us rephrase that: Voting was insane, rampant, ingenious, and impressively ruthless. The previous Straw Poll invited readers to choose among three academic futures for Alex Doonesbury: Should she go to Rennselaer, Cornell, or MIT? Voting was brisk. I’ve received this link multiple times today (thanks Kevin and Susan), so I might as well post it before I go see Fanaa…