Squirrel Hacker

Online polls are never legitimate. Everyone knows it. So, when the Trent Arthur’s poll recently was ’stuffed’ as they called it, the poll was taken down because it was being made more illegitimate. Can an online anonymous poll really be made more illegitimate? Apparently they thought so:

It would appear that someone has indeed resorted to stuffing the poll, namely the “No” option on the TCSA/NAMP poll, so I have taken it offline. I have no problem believing that more students are against the TCSA’s decision than are for it, that is not the issue, but instead the issues are of traffic irregularities and extreme improbabilities in voting patterns.

A poll being taken down due to improbabilities in voting patterns defeats the purpose of having a poll. Just because they expected it to turn out one way and it didn’t does not mean that the poll was stuffed. It does make sense however to remove the poll due to traffic irregularities along with the improbabilities. So now they are looking at new polling ’software’ (the ‘ ‘ is because it is not really new software, it is just an extension for their blogging site). Currently they are looking at something that will need an email filled out to vote. That should stop the. No, wait, that probably wouldn’t work if the hackers really cared to stuff the polls. It is easy to generate something@something.com and drop it into a text box. It can be done in ruby in 1 line. Not that I condone doing it.

Polls should have the same securities that posting has, and more if they are to be legitimized. They should ask for the people who are voting to solve a captchca as well as tracking votes from ip addresses. While it is not impossible to hide your ip address, and it will make the voting less confidential, it would make it easier to figure out who is stacking the vote, or to limit the number of votes from an ip address.

It will never be possible to make it impossible for spammers and vote stuffers to do so. The point is to make it difficult for spammers and vote stuffers to mess with the system.

Social bookmarking, everyone should do it, not everyone does. If one wants to get into it but cannot you cannot make up your mind as to which one you want to use, you can sign up for a while bunch. If you do that however, how will you post a site to them all at once? There is an answer to that: OnlyWire.

It probably has the most useful bookmark tool of all of them, better than just de.licio.us, or mag.nolia. This is because it doesn’t try to be anything except a site to save bookmarks of the sites that you are looking at. It does not store the links, it does not pick up the hundreds or thousands of words that you use to bookmark things, it just gives you a simple little save javascript based on what you enter for the sites that you want to use and what page you are on. The only problem is that you don’t get recommended tags. This can either be a blessing or a curse, as you don’t have to look at the ridiculous numbers of tags that others have used, but you have to think of the ones that you would use yourself. Hope you can think of descriptive names…