Cyprus-Forum.com

[Get Real!]

Here’s an example of a programmer unashamedly looking for technical assistance to get his auto-voting script to work...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/589 ... bot-urllib

Eventually, he finds the solution to the technical problem and proceeds to boast of the script's capabilities...

“Basically the bot opens the url, parses the page for two operands, then inputs the sum into the form before proceeding to vote on a poll in the following page.”

This planet has gotten so crooked that it’s become a crime bringing children to it!

[Sotos]

At the very least a vote should be restricted to 1 per IP and there should be a good captcha for bots.

[Get Real!]

At the very least a vote should be restricted to 1 per IP and there should be a good captcha for bots.

Unfortunately programmers can keep changing the IP address for each run; I can do this via node.js or with a Chromium API, and there’s probably some way of doing it in Python too that this guy is using.

As for captcha images they can utilize someone else’s clever script that uses optical recognition to defeat images, etc.

The MAC address is the best uniqueness I can think of to differentiate systems, but a system can support multiple network interfaces defeating this method too.

[Get Real!]

There seems no end to the cheating; some programmers take pride in defeating padlocks that crooked politicians would welcome with open arms.

The foolish nerd gets his one-off paycheck and 5 minutes of patting on the back for being ever so “clever”, and the crooked politician his 5 years in office (in cases of presidential elections that support online voting).

The point of my thread isn’t a technical one but my disgust at Man’s insistence it cheating and corruption, and in this case resulting in a serious blatant violation of a democratic procedure.

So much for democracy determining the outcome of a vote/poll!

[Sotos]

Unfortunately programmers can keep changing the IP address for each run; I can do this via node.js or with a Chromium API, and there’s probably some way of doing it in Python too that this guy is using.

With a programming language you can only change the IP that your own application sees, not the IP that a server on the internet will see when you access it. There are ways to use different IPs, like proxies, VPNs, botnets etc, but those are either limited or cost money.

As for captcha images they can utilize someone else’s clever script that uses optical recognition to defeat images, etc.

The most sophisticated captchas don't use images anymore. Of course they are defeated eventually, but when they are then a new version comes out, until that one is also defeated also and so on. There is no perfect or permanent solution but having such measures is a lot better than nothing... that guy at stackoverflow would have probably given up if such measures where in place.