Slashdot Mirror
MSNBC Accused of Rigging OS Poll
KlausBreuer writes "According to the German news report Heise MSNBC has produced a poll for the most popular operating system.
This time, the poll was rigged rather blatantly: Friday morning, Linux hat 28% (18.500) of the vote, but miraculously dropped to 3% by sunday evening (European time).
It appears that 126.500 votes came in on Sunday - all of them for Windows." Now, not knowing people at MSNBC or anything like that, I would offer the possibly that someone ran a script against it. These things have been known to happen before. Thanks to Donald van de Weyer who pointed out that this originally appeared on LinuxToday.
Ugh. This got modded up? While I can appreciate Godwin's Law in circumstances where it is warranted, some people can't seem to recognize a valid analogy even if it sits on their face and wiggles. When someone makes a comparison to Nazis or Hitler to discredit or silence the opposition, then Godwin's Law should certainly apply. However, when some Nazi-related idea or symbol is used simply to illustrate a point rather than to attack the opposition, why should it be declared invalid?
Personally, I think there should be a similar law invoked when people try to declare that the opposition supports child pornography if they don't agree with censorship. I lost count of how many times people tried to play the child pornography card in the discussion of the Freenet story earlier. It amounts to the same thing as playing the Nazi card really.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Here's the deal:
LinuxToday got wind of an e-mail that went out to WinME beta testers that encouraged them to rig a poll at ZDnet regarding whether people would buy WinME. Soon after, LT found out about another poll. This was the MSNBC favourite OS poll. They encouraged LT readers to go vote in it, noting it wasn't as easily rigged as the ZDnet poll. A couple LT readers figured out the poll could be rigged by deleting a cookie MSNBC placed on a voting machine and checking for on future votes. It's likely the Linux number of 28% came from a flood of LinuxToday readers, a few using the cookie-delete trick, though I'd like to hope most didn't stoop that low. It should be noted that LT itself didn't promote poll-rigging in its own posts. At one point, Linux had more votes than WinNT/2K.
Early Sunday morning is when the apparently faked votes started flooding in. One report from a reader claimed that for a while, all votes were going into NT/2K, then switched to adding votes for every OS but Linux - the percentages for Mac, BeOS, and Win9x/ME didn't significantly change like the NT and Linux counts.
It looks like the whole thing is a popularity pissing contest. LT is still encouraging their readers to vote (fairly) in polls that have appeared in the last few days, and LT released an open letter to MSNBC regarding the sudden, suspicious increase in NT/2K votes.
Of course, if MSNBC were really carefully rigging things, they also would have rigged the other poll on the same page as the OS popularity poll - the one that showed only 8% of voters were going to buy WinME, opposed to 92% saying ixnay:)
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Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
So some online poll on some website is showing fluctuations. Where one option was leading earlier, another one is now. What am I missing? Why in the world is this news?
When was the last time anyone actually trusted or paid any attention to an online poll, anyway? If you do, I have a bridge in New York I'd like to sell you.
And the insinuation that MSNBC rigged the poll is preposterous at best. Besides the point that it's hardly worth the effort or risk for them to do it, the far more likely possibilities are that 1) someone with a script skewed the numbers or 2)that the initial spike was because of Linux Today asking its readers to vote on that poll or 3) The initial spike was because someone with a script pumped up the Linux numbers and MSNBC took those votes away or 4) Horror of horrors, more people actually Use NT/2000!!
So is this news worthy of posting on Slashdot because it involves Microsoft or because it involves Linux or because it slings some mud at Microsoft based on some pretend charges, hoping some of it will stick?
Mmmm.. Donuts
Posted by Hemos on Monday September 18, @1:48PM
from the i-call-it-a-sporkle dept.
CharChar writes "According to MSNBC news, Slashdot has produced a poll for the name of that plastic spoon/fork combination you get at cheesy restaurants. This time, the poll was rigged rather blatantly: Friday morning, 'spork' had 28% (2,213) of the vote, but miraculously dropped to 3% by Sunday evening. It appears that 70,102 votes came in on Sunday - all of them for 'foon'." Now, not knowing people at Slashdot or anything like that, I would offer the possibly that someone ran a script against it. Still, occurances like this make you question the validity of Slashdot poll results, no matter how significant or important the question.
How many votes will you cast in this poll?