Slashdot Mirror
MTV Movie Awards Webpage Pull a Lone Gunman
abouttime writes "What happens when your webmasters and the show scheduling people don't communicate? This page on the mtv site is where the winners of the awards are known before the show even airs tonight... Way to go MTV....." I wonder if it will be pulled by the time the story goes up....oh and in case you can't figure it out, spoiler alert...
They filmed it Saturday, most local news agencies/radio stations have ALREADY told the award results.... LOTR took best movie. American Pie 2 best kiss. blah blah :)
I'm certain millions of other /. readers are having the same reaction I am: I was planning on watching the award show, but now, because of this gaffe, I'll have to find some other form of entertainment tonight. Shucks, and I was so anticipating the suspense of seeing who would win these coveted awards. Maybe next year!
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Were the results really supposed to be secret until the broadcast?
If so, then how would one explain this story, from June 2
Cheers
Actually, the award results were widely reported several days ago, for example see SFGate.com which mirrored the Associated Press feed.
MTV themselves provided the information to the AP, so this is hardly a slip up. They clearly want the results known several days ahead of the air date. My guess is they figure this is good publicity to draw people in to watch the show.
Sailing over the event horizon
Chrisd put up a slashdot story talking about how the Lone Gunmen (from the X-Files) were killed off in an episode here, before the episode had aired for a number of slashdot readers. The caption of the story was even "The Lone Gunmen Are Dead", negating any possibility that someone visiting slashdot could avoid the spoiler.
Lots of folks quite upset.
What happens when your webmasters and the editing people don't communicate?
JonKatz.
If there was any justice in the world:
Best Villain Jack Valenti MPAA
watch this
Oh my God! The Lone Gunmen are dead??
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
I think that's where I saw it too. It's dated June 2.
/. becoming slower?
I didn't think it's possible, but is
I have been pwned because my
X-Files didn't leak the lone gunman story, slashdot did. Technically MTV pulled a slashdot.
Oh my God! The Load Gunmen had a show??
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
This isn't the first time that MTV's Web stuff has been poorly implemented. Around January of 2001 my friends and I began to watch MTV2 pretty regularly.
Lo and behold we found the wonders of MTV's Control Freak show. While a video was playing on the show, you could visit their web site and vote for the next video to air. All this was implement ed with a simple "click on this video to vote for it" page that was simply replaced/edited then refreshed each time the new video began to air.
Well we had already implemeted a web interfaced, Linux based, MP3 jukebox hooked directly to our stereo and also to an FM-stereo transmitter for longer range listening. Now we had the opportunity to have our very own Video Jukebox (granted with a somewhat limited selection).
So we wrote a program to parse the page for the voting URL's, display them for selection, and then create http connections submitting the appropriate vote. On the normal interface this would send you to a new page asking you to "Click here to vote again" and the whole process would repeat itself.
Now normally you would wait for a response that the vote submission went through. We didn't really care if it did or not since we were submitting votes as fast as we could open the connections successfully.
This seemed to work fine, however we were still unable to watch anything we wanted since the rest of the world was voting as well. On the videos that were evenly split, we would supply the (many) deciding votes, but for the runaway hits we didn't have a fast enough connection with our piddly 768 u/d DSL modem (~1000 votes/min)
That prompted a redesign of the program. Version 2 allowed for distributed vote submission. With the resources that we had (root on a few high performance computers connected to a burstable T3) the distributed program soon allowed us to submit ~15000 votes/min.
This solution worked like a charm. Start the threads and the percentage on our video would start to climb like a mountain goat. Switch the video we were voting for and that one would climb. Nothing like seeing a piece of crap (Busta Rhyme's YoYoYo) go from 1% to 97% in less than 2 minutes.
Well that next week or the week after that, Control Freak was not being aired. "No worries, we'll hit 'em next week."
The next week, the show came on. We started voting for our favorite video. The percentages went up. And up. And, wait a minute the percentages just dropped 25%!
Seems that MTV had caught on to our scheme and was culling our votes from the pool. Bastards!
Well, we kept at it to see if we could find the cutoff limit for votes from a single IP address (that was the only way we could think of for them to remove just our votes). That way we could run the client for x amount of time/votes and then shut it off for maximum effectiveness.
That worked for a week. The next week we had upgraded the client to "spoof" random IP's with each vote it sent out to bypass the culling machine.
It bypassed the culling machine alright. That week the percentages would climb, then something broke. The percentages went to 20K+% on each video. Then our video went to 0%. So we chose a new video. It went to 0%.
Right then we shut down the operation. Up till that point, we had been doing nothing wrong (well cept maybe the IP spoofing of votes) since they had encouraged users to vote multiple times. We had simply removed the human factor of the voting process. But finally we had broken THEIR program.
We surmised that the program held the vote tallys in an int and when we started submitting votes, the ints overflowed and caused a serious problem with negative numbers being used to calculate the percentages. If we had continued to vote in that manner MTV could have sued us for breaking their computers. Very bad scene for 3 college students with no money. Not to mention the fact that the computers connected to that T3 were not ours, and we probably would have lost those jobs and been sued for misuse of company resources.
But, I'll tell you that was probably the most fun I have ever had hacking any type of program/protocol/interface/hardware. This produced immediate results that you could not only see, but your friends on the other side of town could see as well.