Subject:
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Re: Town contest voting temporarily closed
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.town
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Date:
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Fri, 23 Feb 2001 04:32:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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968 times
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On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 17:10:43 GMT, "Kevin Wilson"
<kwilson_tccs@compuserve.com> wrote:
> I need to think about the best way to handle the voting so no-one can cheat.
> It will be simple and it will limit the people who can vote - I'll post
> again as soon as I have it sorted out, and we'll start over.
The honor system is not dead.
If you are willing to declare *any* social system a total failure
because one person (and this may only be the work of one person) is
cheating the system, then you'd pretty much have to kiss civilization
goodbye.
We have a similar problem on Ham radio whereby a tiny, small-minded
minority of people get their hands on transmitter (often illegally)
and proceed to harass people on a local repeater. You can't go tossing
your radio in the garbage, or re-assigning repeater licenses because
of it. To do so would simply be unfair to vast majority of honest,
well-intentioned people. It has to be remembered that the people who
do these sorts of things are generally looking for some combination
of: a) attention, b) a cheap thrill, c) a means of relieving bordom,
or d) showing off to friends.
Within the Ham radio community, there is a simple rule we all live by:
NEVER ACKNOWLEDGE THE PROBLEM PUBLICLY
This makes things very unfulfilling for the offenders since; no one
pays attention to them; they don't appear to get under anyone's skin;
they reach new depths of bordom sitting at a radio and getting 0
reponse; and their friends tend to think they don't have much of a
life sitting at a radio getting 0 response.
This doesn't mean sticking your head in the sand. There are people
("foxhunters") who are experts at RDF (radio direction finding) and
they find less conspicuous means of communicating with one another
(read: telephone) to gang up on the offenders. It sometimes takes a
few weeks or months, depending on the frequency and duration of the
disruptions, but these people have an amazing track record and
Industry Canada (FCC in the U.S.) are always happy to wield their
sledgehammer (1), especially when 90% the investigative work has been
done for them.
How does this apply to you and the contests?
Well, for those who do this for the attention or thrill of getting
your goat, you've certainly let them know they've succeeded. If that
was their motivation, you can bet they'll be back. For those showing
off, you can bet it get's boring after a while. They'll go away on
their own.
I would recommend the following: if you have the skills to track
source addresses, use it; if not telephone a friend who does and go on
a "foxhunt". Do it quietly.
I would also recommend that you consider rewriting the logging program
to look for contest spikes. If one is starting, remove those that come
within a short period of time. It's not likely someone is going to
stuff the ballot boxes by voting once every hour - it just takes too
long to make a significant difference. If you get 20 in the space of
an hour, you can probably toss all of them since the error introduced
by dumping 18 illegitimate votes will be greater than the error from
dumping 2 legitimate ones. As for the 2 legitimate voters, they should
understand that in a free society we all have to accept some degree of
error. Besides, it's not likely that the they would know the
difference.
The other thing to do if your software starts to notice a suspicious
blip is to pick that particular time to visit the server bathroom
(read: "this page is temporarily unavailable: be back in 15 minutes")
If the stuffing starts again when the page is available, take another
break. You can bet that anyone stuffing ballots isn't going to want to
sit and wait that long. There is, BTW a real-life precident for this:
VE3-XIX (a local Toronto 2m repeater) had a malicious interference
problem that was dealt with by means of a 15 minute timer. If we had a
problem, the repeater would go down for 15 munutes. Those of us on the
road knew what it meant, but some low-life sitting in front of a
radio, listening to static for a quarter of an hour, doesn't generally
have the patience to keep at it for too long.
It should be noted that if you make it known to those on LUGNET that
this will be the tactic, we will know what it means when the page is
"temporarily unavailable" and will simply vote later. This way, you
shouldn't loose any real votes, but will succeed in making ballot
stuffing an arduous process.
Making life inconvenient for stuffers seems like an easier solution
than over-policing (cookies, email authentications and tracking, etc.)
Hope this helps.
Matthias Jetleb
VA3-MWJ
(1) As an aside, a friend of mine that I went to college (electronic
communications) with landed a plumb job with Industry Canada as an
inspector. He was given a $500,000 Chev Lumina to drive around it. You
should have seen this thing - it was like something out of Star Wars.
It was almost scary in a way. Think your digitial cell phone is
private?? Think again. And the 8 antennas on the roof that comprised
the direction finding equipment was real slick. It made the amature
foxhunters look downright primitive. Unfortunately, there isn't much
emphasis placed on policing the amature bands (too expensive) so we do
most of the investigation ourselves and this guy only shows up with
police in tow to make the final "official" determination that a
transmitter is being used illegally and fascilitate an arrest. From
what I've read in radio communication related magazines, the FCC's
operation is even more impressive.
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