Despite having the word "Oprah" in the title this is one of the best "hacker" stories I've seen here in a while.
Particuarly how the votes "slowed down" at the removal of the suspect code, amazingly good reverse-engineering on their end.
Particuarly how the votes "slowed down" at the removal of the suspect code, amazingly good reverse-engineering on their end.
"That extra number was labeled in the add_vote function as “eid,” which frequently stands for “employee ID” and could in theory allow for behind-the-scenes vote manipulation by an OWN employee."
Sounds like speculation and rubbish to me. If they'd read the code they could have followed through and found out what the eid was.
"but it largely corroborates with our own independently collected data. It shows that, mathematically, it would fit nearly perfectly with for that mysterious coding to have given Phyllis two free votes every time Zach received a vote, in addition to the votes Phyllis otherwise received. But while the math seems to work well for most of his time window, there is no way to confirm this algorithm was actually implemented, especially now that the coding for the button has been reverted to its original form."
Yeah, except that say Oprah's people wanted to do that, they could just do it on the back end without changing the add_vote functionality to send through the mysterious eid.
The only interesting thing is the spreadsheet screen shot, but I'd like to see the source of that to understand what's going in more fully.
"Yes, it turns out that in theory, coming in first or second doesn’t actually matter at all in terms of whether Zach would eventually get his own show or not. But in practice, there would be a much bigger backlash if Oprah anointed someone other than Zach to be the winner of the contest if he was in first place than if he was in second or lower, whether that person was Dr. Phyllis or anyone else."
And now we'll make up a tenuous reason why she needed to be in first place.
But the most bogus thing: the claim is that by changing the JavaScript that's executed when someone votes for Dr Phyllis that causes a vote for the other guy to create extra votes for Dr Phyllis. Huh? How does that work? Surely you'd change the other guy's voting JavaScript?
Don't the votes get sent up with an ID? Why could you possibly need an extra field? Just program the server to do "stuff" to the ID you care about.
And did anyone try send up votes with varying EID fields for other candidates?