An interesting and detailed report how users of 4chan hacked the TIME 100 poll (which polls the "World's most influential person", on the Internet, of all places). They managed to both vote moot (creator of 4chan.org) to the top position and also to spell out the message "Marblecake, also the game" with the letters of the top 21 finalists.
[The] loose collective known as ‘Anonymous’ took to hack the poll. This group (that gathered on an IRC channel at anonnet.org) probed for weaknesses in the poll protocols and wrote autovoters to stuff the ballot box with votes that would put the candidates in the proper order to spell out the Message, adapting as necessary whenever Time adjusted its protocol in a meager attempt to keep the hackers out. But two weeks ago, Time got serious about poll security. They modified the poll so that you needed to prove that you were human (via a captcha) in order to vote.
This instantly shut down all of the autovoters. Anonymous was offline - no longer able to submit thousands of votes per minute. And what’s worse, when the autovoters were shutdown, the Message ‘Marblecake, also the game’ soon decayed into a meaningless “mablre caelakosteghamm”. It seemed that Time.com had won - the Message would not survive the next two weeks of voting. But Anonymous didn’t give up, they considered it a challenge to restore the Message. Here’s how they did it.
moot wins, Time Inc. loses « Music Machinery
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