

Did Team Oprah Rig a Contest Against Zach Anner? We Investigate (thoroughly) - interesse
http://www.geekosystem.com/zach-anner-rigged-votes-oprah/

======
camworld
About 10 years ago I was approached by Oprah's producers to be on her show. I
showed no interest but they were very persistent. They called me every day and
tried to get me to change my mind, but I told them "No" every time. They
eventually called my boss (!) and tried to get him to convince me to be on her
show. Luckily, he was aware that they were harassing me and took my side and
basically told them to leave me alone.

I respect Oprah for what she has accomplished but I detest how her producers
deal with "recruiting" the people who go on her show to tell their stories.
All they care about is being sensationalistic so they can hook their audience.
They don't give a flying fuck about the people who go on the show or how going
on the show affects them afterwards.

So, when I question whether Oprah's people are rigging the vote? Well, my mind
is made up. It's pretty obvious to me.

But don't be surprised if Oprah "reaches out" to Zach and has him on her show
but doesn't choose him to have his own show.

~~~
anemecek
You tell us this story without saying why they invited you :-)?

~~~
mahmud
He was the victim of an online scam.

<http://www.camworld.org/archives/001376.html>

~~~
camworld
No, that was not it.

<http://camworld.org/screwed/> <http://camworld.org/screwed/oprah>

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ismarc
I'm not sure who the "investigators" are over at geekosystem, but while they
present a lot of data, they fell over when it came to analysis of the
situation (as did numerous others).

Scenario: For a time period, contestant B received votes at a rate of roughly
3 votes for every 2 that contestant A received. Contestant B had a different
value for an unknown field that was combined as part of the cookie used in
voting/vote confirmation.

The extra value on contestant B's call is meaningless if they're estimating
that the vote rate was determined by contestant A's votes.

Based on the data reported of the two time periods:

Shawn saw a 100% increase in votes/minute

David saw a 66% increase in votes/minute

Cheryl saw a 175% increase in votes/minute

Maria saw a 28% increase in votes/minute

Jasbina saw a 100% increase in votes/minute

Jacqueline saw a 13% increase in votes/minute

Kornelius saw a 10% increase in votes/minute

Zach and Phyllis saw a decrease in votes/minute

Total rate of increase in voting (excluding Zach and Phyllis) was 31% increase
in voting rate for the non-top 2 positions. If we include Zach and Phyllis,
there was a drop in voting rate to almost 50% of the previous number of votes
per minute.

Determination: eid probably played a large role in the cause of what appeared
to be tampering of voting. There's no correlation between votes of any
candidate and any other candidate. The most likely cause? The reported vote
counts are not 100% live. The votes are processed on a server and displayed
via a cache. Most likely EID is a way to force vote counting onto a specific
system, which caused a backup of cast but un-counted votes for Phyllis. While
the backup was being cleared, the rate of voting appeared distinctly high.
Once the cause of the backup was identified and resolved, the backup was
quickly cleared out and the rate of votes appearing took a sharp drop as there
was no backlog for that candidate and the others still had backlogs to
process.

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bryanh
I think this is extremely interesting; not because of the supposed "rigging"
but because of the uproar and sleuthing of the community as a result of
perceived misdoings. I mean, just think that this random guy Zach Anner has
all these people behind him because of one video. And then something fishy
starts happening and they all flock to it.

What are they more interested in? Catching "Oprah" in the act of allowing
someone to effectively cheat or do they genuinely want this guy to win?

~~~
earl
They're btards; of course it's for lulz. But I think they genuinely want Zack
to win, just to see what happens :shrug:. They started voting for Zack last
week, so well before any cheating.

~~~
trafficlight
It's not just 4chan, either. Reddit is up in arms over this whole thing, but
I'm not really sure why.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
Reddit tends to act as a filter through which the useful[1] outputs of 4chan
reach the rest of the Internet.

[1] - where "useful" here means "non-pornographic" and "not illegal" more than
"provides real value"

------
BoppreH
It reminds me of the Times poll where moot won.

And guys, please don't feel bad if Zach loses for some absurdity. Remember
that this contest is being rigged on 4chan's side too. There are tons of
people using macros and I've even seen messages like "now that Zach is
winning, let's DDoS the site."

Not that I don't find that fun, but don't hold your breath.

~~~
mahmud
Zach Anner

Z4ch Anner

Z 4 Channer

Yep :-)

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aresant
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.

~~~
jgrahamc
Seriously? You thought that was good analysis?

"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?

~~~
jim_dot
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the EID has nothing to do with
anything and it was a coincidence that the javascript changed when the vote
cheating work on the backend was changed.

~~~
ars
Especially because adding an "eid" has to be the stupidest way of manipulating
a vote ever.

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?

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Revisor
I don't find this submission HN worthy.

