MiddBlog Nominated for Best Alt Media 2008!
U.S. News and World Report’s Paper Trail Blog has a contest up for Best Alternative Media Outlet 2008, as part of larger media contests (best college newspaper, news story, etc.). MiddBlog has been nomainted!
So, if you like MiddBlog, vote for us! We’ve got stiff competition in Wesleying (our model) and of course IvyGate, gossip-girl for the Big Ivies (as opposed to us little kids). But we’d love your support.
EDIT 2/09: Papertrail is following up about possible voting fraud involving MiddBlog. Again, keep voting, but keep the hacking out of this, please!
20 Comments
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
Comments are closed.
Congratulations!
i really hope this doesnt win. that would be a sorry state for journalism
Sophie, you’re breaking my heart! All sorts of criticism, but no solutions for change. What can MiddBlog do to win your heart?
Thanks, Molley!
Don’t worry … we’ll win
Writing a program to automatically vote for you a bajillion times is definitely not classy. Let’s play by the rules.
hey guys, anyone can write a program to repeatedly vote. it’s called ethics. you should consider looking into it.
going from single digits to 30 in a day
wow
you guys must have some basic programming skills.
Actually… it’s called US News making an anonymous poll is not only meaningless but a popularity contest. Glad someone else thought the same.
A meaningless popularity contest that you’re apparently willing to cheat to win?
Makes sense.
Well first, I’m not the one cheating. But I think the fact someone is shows how this isn’t a meaningful poll in the first place.
Woah! As the lead editor of MiddBlog, I too am a little surprised that MiddBlog has shot up in the polls. Then again, I’m not sure exactly what Middkid is passionate enough about this blog to write a hack…
You’re right in a sense, Actually. It’s not as meaningful as, say, a humanitarian prize, or a grant of some sort. But the way it has brought the Timothy Dwight community together is amazing, and that’s something that makes it meaningful to us.
I’m also agree with you that there probably is cheating going on. If it is, I don’t think it’s right, and it’s upset more than a few people in Timothy Dwight that something they care about has been manipulated.
Regardless, just wanted to explain Timothy Dwight’s stance and dissolve some tension here. Thanks for reading.
I posted on the USNews site (http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2009/2/9/student-media-voter-fraud-/comments/#2115969) but I thought your readership might enjoy.
When I first heard about this poll I thought, “Oh cool, recognition for my favorite college blog!”
Unfortunately USNews doomed this poll from the beginning by not adding ANY security to the poll. A simple CAPTCHA test like reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/), or an email confirmation code, or any of many other security techniques would have made voting take a moment longer and would have given the results some meaning. The current poll uses a very basic form with no authentication, so it is absolutely trivial to automatically vote.
For example, if the following line is pasted into a UNIX Bash terminal (such as on Linux or Mac OS X), it will submit a vote for the “Critical Badger” every 5 seconds.
while [ true ]; do curl -v http://www.usnew.com/Polls/addVote?urlname=best-alternative-media-outlet-2008&optionvalue=130; sleep 5; done;
Really, that’s all there is to it. Its absolutely trivial. Similarly, the following line pasted into a Unix Bash terminal will loop through and add a vote for each blog, one every 5 seconds:
while [ true ]; do for i in {124..133}; do curl “http://www.usnew.com/Polls/addVote?urlname=best-alternative-media-outlet-2008&optionvalue=$i”; sleep 5; done; done
While I have not run these scripts on the poll, it does not require any advanced skills to do so. While calls for people to “play by the rules” are nice, there needs to be at least basic security on the form. As it stands, this poll is just inviting abuse, like putting a shiny gold award statue in the entry-way to your home and leaving your front door open.
Please USNews, scrap this poll and start over with one that has some basic security so that an actual winner can be determined.
it’s clearly not a matter of passion about a blog. it’s a matter of ruthlessness, and probably a little bit of “look what i can do!” whatever, we’re catching up, and we didn’t have to be dishonest!
TD, I don’t think you understood AnonyMouse’s post.
I was responding to Ryan
Anony, so if I get your argument right.
It’s essentially okay to steal from someone’s house as long as they leave the door unlocked? Because their door was unlocked?
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean its justifiable to do it.
Vlad, I most definitely think it wrong to steal. It is also wrong to run the script I posted (or the ones that were run prior), doing so is known as cheating. My analogy was off. It should have been “Set your shiny gold statue on a busy city sidewalk.” Sure, 10,000 people might be honest and walk by (or vote once), but it just takes one person to reach down (or write a loop) for the prize to be taken from its rightful owners.
My point in posting the script above is to highlight for those who have never written a program or used a command-line environment before how absolutely trivial it is to tell a computer to load a web page repeatedly. (BTW: the script I posted will be easy for the poll administrators to filter out by looking at their server logs, but minimal changes would make that process harder.)
Any online opinion poll that does not have at least some basic security (such a CAPTCHA, email-verification, or just a limited audience of people) is a farce. Whether ‘vote fraud’ was obvious (as in this case of highly inflated numbers) or not, the Paper Trail blog would be dishonest in awarding any honor based on such an insecure poll.
Similarly, it is dishonest journalism to report findings from such a poll on any topic where people would care enough about the results to spend 2 minutes writing a loop. A poll of “What is your favorite color?” would probably be safe from tampering just by disinterest, but “Which truck is better, Ford or Chevy?” is almost guaranteed to result in attempted tampering. Far too often major news organizations publish the results of such insecure online polls while not being honest with readers that these polls are likely to be a complete sham.
It is dishonest (and not justifiable) to cheat. All I am saying is that it is also dishonest to claim to measure “opinion” when all that is being measured is how many times a URL was loaded.