Oops, I voted for Rick Astley 961 times 02:51 PM PT, Oct 6 2008 Wasting no time in getting their man elected "Best Act Ever," the large and mostly anonymous under-culture of Rick Astley fans has already deployed a device to defraud the voting on MTV Europe's website. The "RickVoter" is a very basic utility that simply navigates to MTV's voting page and votes for Astley...over and over and over. MTV mostly likely didn't bother to build a big security wall to defend against this kind of ballot stuffing, but it seems clear that having left the contest open to being tinkered with, they essentially guaranteed a win for Astley. Why do I say this? Consider the following anecdote. I loaded the RickVoter to test it out, curious if it actually did what it said it would. But after looking at it for a couple of minutes, I got distracted by a few phone calls and e-mails. By the time I got back to my experiment a half-hour later, I saw that it had been busily voting the entire time, and I had registered my support for Astley 961 votes. Er, my bad? I would beg for MTV's forgiveness for contributing to the fixing of this election, but there's no real point. If even a few dozen people have left the RickVoter on all night long, then Astley no doubt has hundreds of thousands, or millions, of votes, and 961 is barely a drop in the pond. The question now is whether MTV will consider the results valid or if they'll throw them out because of the irregularities here. One could easily argue that they invited this kind of mischief by putting Astley on the ballot in the first place and that pleading ignorance to the perils of malwebolence should not be a defense in this case. But I still think that if they're smart they'll just declare Astley the winner, get him on the show, and take a shower in the ratings windfall that would follow. ADDED: From Digg commenter Nat3r: "i had about 100 tabs of bestactever.com open when this first happened, with 5 votes every two second... meaning every two seconds i would vote 500 times...i left it on for 17 hours." You do the math... — David Sarno .Source site found here
I could easily write something up to talk about the uselessness of this so-called online voting system, but I'll let this book explain it for you. It goes on and on, but basically, if you bother texting or calling your 'support' for your favorite contestant, you're only paying the producers for the privilege. As the book later states: Reality TV shows are a business, and business is about minimizing risks for maximum financial return. If computer hackers really want to affect the evolution of a reality show, the best way isn't to manipulate the votes; it's to stop everyone from voting in the first place and expose the deception of the reality show producers when they publicize the so-called results. If you can prevent 100% of online votes from even being cast, anything the producers say occurred can be revealed as the lie it really is. (But even then, the reality show producers are one step ahead of you. They grant themselves the right to ignore online voting due to "technical difficulties.")
Oops, my bad. But really, I feel for the people who bother leaving a spam bot running on their system to inundate the servers of this voting website with requests to verify their 'votes' for hours and hours and hours.
It basically says that online voting almost certianly counts for **** all, because the producers have the final word behind any decisions affecting the show, and that there is almost no way to stop them from having the final word. Simpler? Internet voting ≠ anything
You should add a poll to see if anyone cares about what nemi is talking about... and then a mod can disregard or alter the results however they feel.
Yea, but your post goes into fricking mind blowing technological terms that make no sense to the less intelligent kind.
I have to admit something, Forgehub... I've rickrolled myself before to hear the song. Please, don't throw stones at me.
It wasn't mind blowing at all really. I know jack **** about computers (read: anything), but I can still understand it.
lol that rick voter thing i heard my friend talking about in school earlier today. he said he had downloaded it and the program froze at 3,000 votes. lol