Operation n

Happy new year to you all!

Do you like online polls? How reliable are they. Well, here’s an old story, this still pretty relevant today. Back in 1998, people magazine introduced an online poll for the “most beautiful people in the people”. Naturally, the likes of Leonardo DiCapirio and Kate Winslett were on top. However, somebody introduced Hank Nasiff Jr (a.k.a Hank the angry drunken dwarf) as a candidate. Hank appeared on the Howard Stern Show and Howard Stern asked his listeners to vote in for Hank and the rest is history. Note back then the Internet was not security intensive and it was easy for users to produce multiple votes by simply removing a cookie. Word got around to newsgroups (e.g. alt.fan.Howard-Stern) and a couple of other celebrities, not primarily known for their beauty did well as a result including legendary wrestler Ric Flair (from rec.sports.pro-wrestling) and They might be giants keyboardist John Linnell.

There was slight controversy in that after online poll, people magazine didn’t want to put Hank on their front cover for winning the .

So can you still get a little hanky panky in your results? Remember a poll is only as good as the users who take part. You should give users more credit, they can find ways of screwing things up easily. So anything like where they can enter any piece of data is bad. An online poll of “yes” or “no” is likely to be safer.

This absolutely cracked me up. Evidently Microsoft’s santa bot has turned naughty

Great SQL Injection comic strip from the guys over at xkcd:

Original .

I picked up this thing about facestalking. You can view other people’s pictures and see what they are up to. However, it does require the person to be an "added friend". Or does it? It looks like you can view other people’s profiles without friending them. If you go to ‘privacy’ and then ‘poke, message and friend request’, you can see who can see your profile.

I’d be very careful who you befriend as this man found out the hard way.

So much so, it looks some workplaces are barring them.

This hasn’t come as a big surprise. Poker has gained a lot positive media. Every other celebrity seemingly want a piece of the action. Combine an interest with this with the Internet, it’s hardly surprising that online poker has taken off.

Power hacking? Is that possible? I mean you aren’t like to slide an extra ace into your set, are you? But there are a number hacks and tricks that can be made. There is a good reference for online poker hacks that is not filled with too much poker lingo. There’s a variety of hacks include the bog standard phishing, collusion and poker bots. However, most of these are on the client side. The server side seems safe as a reputable site would use certificates and cryptography.

There are a number of poker blogs which deal with glitches in online poker software. For example, you could ‘rebuy’ more chips even if you already have chips in play. Usually there is a minimum before you can rebuy with.