SeattleGameboy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Online Parody Cartoon Targeted for Prosecution (kirotv.com)

Submitted by SeattleGameboy on Thursday August 04, 2011 @03:38PM

SeattleGameboy writes: It seems that Renton (suburb of Seattle) police needs remedial course on US Constitution.

"The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated Internet videos. The "South-Park"-style animations parody everything from officers having sex on duty to certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications. While the city wants to criminalize the cartoons, First Amendment rights advocates say the move is an "extreme abuse of power."

Submission + - SC Primary - First probable voting machine fraud? (fivethirtyeight.com)

Submitted by SeattleGameboy on Monday June 14, 2010 @06:27PM

SeattleGameboy writes: South Carolina sure knows how to pick'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy facing a felony obscenity charge. Oh, he is also the brand new Democrat Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guys like this wins a primary race and much of the signs point to voting machine fraud "Those three are Darlington, Horry and Marlboro, and there are two others, Bamberg and Fairfield, with zero residual GOP votes (i.e., the total number of GOP voters in the county is identical to number cast in the GOP gubernatorial), which McDonald informs me is very, very rare."

Techdirt.com points out (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100609/1616099761.shtml) that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines which have had strings of problems before and has no audit trail.

Is this the first documented case of voting fraud via voting machines?

Submission + - Scalpers earn $25 million hacking ticket sites (wired.com)

Submitted by SeattleGameboy on Monday March 01, 2010 @08:43PM

SeattleGameboy writes: Online ticket brokers known as 'Wiseguy Tickets and Seats of San Francisco' used bots, server farms, and CAPTCHA hacking to buy vast number of premium tickets (Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, NFL and MLB Playoffs, etc.) and made $25 million in profits.
They wrote a script that impersonated users trying to access Facebook, and downloaded hundreds of thousands of possible CAPTCHA challenges from reCAPTCHA. They identified the file ID of each CAPTCHA challenge and created a database of CAPTCHA “answers” to correspond to each ID. The bot would then identify the file ID of a challenge at Ticketmaster and feed back the corresponding answer. The bot also mimicked human behavior by occasionally making mistakes in typing the answer, the authorities said.

I guess you can break systems like CAPTCHA if want it bad enough.

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