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Sep092006

A response to the web poll “hacking”

Filed under Geek Speak, Transparency by damon kiesow at 11:59 pm

This email was received in response to the Telegraph’s inquiries into an unusual number of votes a recent online reader poll received from a single IP address in Austin, TX:

————

From: J. Ryan Earl [mailto:ryan@********com]
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 6:46 PM
To: Michael Brindley
Subject: Re: Nashua Telegraph Web poll

It is certainly about time you realized you had no mechanism in place to prevent people from voting multiple times, I was wondering how long it would take you to notice. I made no attempt to hide it, I could have proxied the requests off of countless IP addresses across the world.

What can I say about it? I’m very opinionated on the matter, and I’m glad you finally noticed. There is no disclaimer on your website that asks people to vote only once and no mechanism in place to assure this.

If anything, I have only given your company revenue by "hitting" ads on your website.

You give me too much credit, I’m afraid, for there was no "hacking" or remotely illegal activity involved. I gained access to no data in your system that was not already publicly available through HTTP requests with a standard web-browser through the Internet, nor was there any attempt to interrupt the service of your website in anyway. Your poll has a fundamental flaw in that it allows people to vote multiple times; I’m glad you now realize this. You have no protection mechanism to guard your poll from this besides using a temporary cookie-based session that gets cleared when a web-browser exits, and even then, the POST method itself has no voter authenticity checks. Absolutely anyone can vote as many times as they desire simply by closing their browser or clearing out their cookies and loading your webpage again. I submit that this is being done extensively to vote -against- my mother, and I challenge you to provide me with the access logs for your web servers for the duration of all three polls you have run involving my mother to inspect how many duplicate posts you received for and against her.

By presenting such an easily manipulated poll, you have left all journalistic integrity behind, assuming that you had any to begin with.

I accuse you of supporting Gerrymandering on the Internet and offer to you my professional skills to eliminate the gaping holes on your polls should you wish to prove otherwise.

You have not presented both sides on this story, and what you have presented has been largely erroneous or misinterpreted. Now that I have your attention, I further challenge you to run an article I will prepare, unedited and unmodified, that describes my mother and this situation from my perspective.

It is curious that you removed all references and articles about my mother from your front-page today given that I imagine those stories have probably been your largest source of media buzz and revenue over the last six months or so. Given your lack of interest in accurate polls, perhaps you are beginning to worry about the accuracy of your original reports on my mother, Dr. Earl.

Cordially,

J. Ryan Earl, BS Computer Science

Beloved Son of Dr. Julia Collier-Earl, PhD Instruction and Learning Brother of educator Brooke Blevins, MA Education

Copyright (R) J. Ryan Earl 2006

Permission to disclose, print, copy or disseminate this information is granted only under the condition that the contents herein are distributed intact, unaltered, and unedited with this Copyright information attached and viewable with the body of this message.

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