Hacking the Presidential Election

An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers at a recent summit predicted US voters will be targeted by web-based dirty tricks campaigns as the 2008 election gets nearer. Spam, botnets and phishing all provide good opportunities to mislead voters and attack rivals with little risk of being caught, they say."

Comments

Re:Say your piece well--and get slammed for it

[shanen]

Been there, done that. Doesn't help. You didn't bother to mention a number of other tools and tweaks within /. that I've already tried and I can also tell you that they don't help.

There are a couple of potentially redeeming features of /. that give misleading hopes. Actually, one aspect is directly related to the official topic of this discussion, the hacking of elections, and especially presidential elections. The politicians frequently claim that they are also interested in encouraging substantial intellectual discussions of the real issues--but we probably agree that the reality is different. Some of the politicians are most interested in power, and others are more interested in money, and some of them have other motivations such as using the government to ram their religious beliefs down our throats, but any actual believers in democracy are quickly knocked out of the American political process. That's why we see so many of these vicious anything-goes elections.

The situation here on /. is somewhat different. The editors sure can't be in it for the money or the power, though I don't know about any religious lunacy there. I think the problem is that they have some good goals, and some good ideas, but they lost their focus in a couple of areas. I basically think the #1 problem on /. is tightly linked to what could be the #1 strength. Moderation is a good idea, but anonymous moderation is *NOT*. My guess is that this was a design decision they made when they had a very small user population, and they were concerned about revenge mods. As it works now, it's just the easy way for lazy cowards to effectively contradict and destroy any position that they can't actually address on the merits.

A simple example that's again linked to the presidential politics--and one of the most clear distinctions between the two parties. (Last I heard, most of the neo-GOP candidates were rejecting evolution.) A creationist is going to have a hard time debating against evolution on the merits of the science, but it's going to be easy to recognize posters who speak effectively in defense of evolution--and give them negative mods until they get frustrated and go away. (Most of the time I'm in the gone-away group, though I've known of /. for many years.)