Swedes Cast Write-In Votes for SQL Injection, Donald Duck

An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish elections were held recently (the third Sunday of September to be exact) and it seems that a few people tried to interfere with the election by voting for parties which were in effect named to be SQL injection attacks or similar. Clever stuff! Little Bobby Tables in real life." That wasn't the only oddity of the election; reader MZeroOne writes: "The Swedish Election Authority published the results of last Sunday's general election and even though the current prime minister retained power, the candidate who got the most individual handwritten votes was Disney's Donald Duck." Maybe the existence of the Hard Alcohol Party (237 votes) helps explain why the Pirate Party didn't have a better showing.

Comments

For those who don't read XKCD.

[Dayofswords]

The 'Little Bobby Tables' reference:

"Exploits of a Mom"
http://xkcd.com/327/

The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[FlorianMueller]

Since a number of activists from the anti-software-patent movement joined the Pirate Party, including its first MEP (Christian Engström), I've been following its development closely and at some point even lent them a signature to support their participation in an election in my country (Germany), even though I ultimately didn't vote for them.

I've commented on the Pirate Party's failure to evolve into a serious political force. The EUobserver, an independent website covering European politics, published a streamlined version of my analysis. The original version goes into some more detail and appeared on my blog.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[FuckingNickName]

What every young, unrepresentative group of loud, idealistic men don't realise is that most people just want peace, a job and a house. And, if you spend your time employed rather than campaigning for the abandonment of the intellectual property concept, you will have enough money to pay for it anyway. And what you cannot pay for, you put on credit. And debt doesn't really matter... continue working hard and you can pay fast enough that no-one takes your stuff away... your government is not going to let civilisation collapse even if everyone else is in debt too.

Life has been easy for quite a while. And of course I want to exploit you if I have the intelligence to do so. And I want to protect my legal rights to make it possible, not to share. Then I'm even more secure and my surroundings even more luxurious.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[Nursie]

The only bit I object to in your argument is this -

And, if you spend your time employed rather than campaigning for the abandonment of the intellectual property concept, you will have enough money to pay for it anyway.

It's not necessarily about being able to afford to buy stuff. It's about rights and reform in the new digital age.

Other than that you're spot on, most people would rather get on with life and vote for whoever requires them to think about it the least.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Most pirates probably just vote for the green party (miljöpartiet) instead - they changed their policy to support filesharing after the pp got 7% in the EU election - because they are a mainstream party and there was no doubt that they would get in. How much of a difference this has made I don't know but they did do very well in the election.

Their internet-related policies

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[tenchikaibyaku]

As not all the ballots are counted as of yet it's possible that the final result will differ a few points, but it's worth noting that the Swedish Pirate Party basically seems to have retained its voters from the previous election:
2006: 0.63%
2010: 0.65% (preliminary)
This even though they were more or less absent from the public debate before the election.

I also think that the existence of a Pirate Party here in Sweden has managed to affect the public debate regarding piracy and privacy related questions more than what shows up in the polls.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[mikael_j]

Actually, the grandparent (or rather, the people described in the post) missed the point. The point isn't "we can't afford stuff! stuff should be free! WAAAH!", it's about rights, personal integrity and in extension safeguarding a free and democratic society. However, most people would rather get a $50/year tax cut and not think so much...

And it really helps them when people from established political parties describe the pirate party as thieves, slackers and people who just want something for nothing. Makes it a lot easier to just think "I can afford stuff, I don't need stuff for free." while you vote for whoever promises you the biggest tax cut.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[TheRaven64]

In the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, they got 90 votes in the last UK election. To put this in perspective, Mad Cap'n Tom, a joke candidate, got 84 votes in the same constituency. If the Pirate Party actually want to achieve something, then they need to start being constructive. A few suggestions:

• Change the name. Pirate Party makes them sound like a bunch of teenagers.
• Propose a sensible alternative to copyright, or propose a reasonable term for copyright. Their current proposals, if implemented, would cause significant damage to the economies of most western countries.
• Focus more on the privacy and security policies - people are more sympathetic to people who want to be left alone than to freeloaders.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[Kjella]

Just a few things:
1) The EU and national elections are really not comparable, people care about so vastly different things. Neither before, during or after did PP have anything like a 7% support in polls for the national parliament. But in retrospect, they didn't have a good enough national election platform to push while they still had media's attention because all the effort had gone into the EU election. They got silent and when it was ready media had lost attention.

2) There has been extremely little room for any other than the traditional parties and SD who got almost 3% in the last election, the number of "other" votes dropped from 2.75% to 1.41% and all others backed while PP increased from 0.63% to 0.65%. All major issues related to PPs politics have been pushed back to past the election, like the TPB trial who "coincidentally" begins next week.

3) It might look more like an activist group, but as long as no party is willing to seriously fight for the same issues then PP will have to fight for representation on their own. It took three days after the election for the Greens - including the Swedish representative - to vote for another anti-filesharing bill in the EU, they are only playing the populist opinion but will trade it away in any negotiation.

4) There have been no rounds ot mass lawsuits in Sweden, TPB is still up and running, they get some of the world's best free services like Spotify, in short people don't see the immidiate need for political change. But polls asking people for their opinions rather which party they'd vote for show that PP is having an effect on the attitude to copyrights. More and more people dispute that copyright infringement equals theft. If it again becomes a political topic, PP will do better than last "wave".

Personally I'm at least hopeful for 2014...

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[vadim_t]

No, it's not about that.

I don't object paying for stuff. I pay for indie games, and donated to the musopen project and some others. Many of those are things I don't even have to pay for if I don't want to.

I object paying to parasites who want to create laws that will make it impossible for me to avoid paying them, because they want to introduce taxes on media, internet connections, and restrictions as to what my hardware can do. Simply not buying their stuff doesn't do it, because even if I don't buy or pirate a single CD they'll still put a tax on my hard disk and connection, throttle my torrent of CC licensed music, include DRM crap in my hardware, and prevent centuries old material from entering the public domain. If I don't buy, they'll say that I'm torrenting and use that as a justification for the things I've listed.

That bullshit has to be removed at the source, through laws that make it illegal and cut its funding. I'll gladly pay the artists, but I don't want to give a single cent to the parasites from the RIAA, MPAA and ASCAP.

Re:The Pirate Party probably was a one-hit wonder

[TheRaven64]

They also proposed non-commercial copyright infringement be completely legal. This basically means that there is no reason for anyone to ever purchase entertainment, or any other copyright material that they are not going to make a profit from using, because they can legally get it for free. On the other hand, they didn't (for example) say anything about forcing the BBC to abandon DRM, support open standards for distributing its own work, and use CC (or similar) licensing for license-fee funded programming.

Hard Alcohol Party...

[Anonymous Coward]

... sadly isn't what you'd think. They are antibooze-ists. Huge disappointment.
Translated homepage: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http://www.spritpartiet.se/&prev=_t&twu=1

On a separate note, other notable entities voted for were "Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits", and a silly javascript insertion attempt. Full data at http://www.val.se/val/val2010/handskrivna/handskrivna.skv

Re:Hard Alcohol Party...

[Adambomb]

R;12;Skåne län;83;Helsingborg;01;Helsingborg Norra;0701;Ödåkra V;Stick it up your fucking ass!;1

oh my.

Donald Duck

[BetterThanCaesar]

The Donald Duck party is an all time favourite joke vote in Sweden, but it is actually a registered party. They promise free alcohol and wider sidewalks. They don't have a budget for voting slips, but write-in votes are valid (if spelt correctly). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_Party

Re:Donald Duck

[BetterThanCaesar]

Spelt is a valid and common spelling. I'm not from North America.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt#Etymology_1

For those who are American

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweden, is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe.

Re:For those who are American

[caluml]

Its capital is Bern, and they are famous for cuckoo clocks and Hitler.

Re:For those who are American

[arb phd slp]

Actually, Bern is the capital of Switzerland (which is also famous for the clocks), and Hitler was born in Austria and was the dictator of Germany. It looks like you've got some problems with geography and history.

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Re:SQL Injection?

[MichaelSmith]

More than you might think.

Re:SQL Injection?

[pla]

Seriously? What is this, 1997? Who still writes code vulnerable to those?

Seriously, you don't even want to know.

Over my past two jobs, all but one of the most important enterprise systems we used had zero protection from attacks like these. Talkin' accounting, inventory, POS - Even the Borg of ERP packages, MS Dynamics, still chokes on merely having apostrophes in most fields.

And from what I've seen of banking systems that I've had to interface with, I'd keep my money under my bed - Except many of them haven't quite caught up to all this fancy "new" SQL tech. Nice safe 60s era COBOL code - And yes, they still use two digit years, because after all, we have another 90 years before the Y2K fixes will break.

You might want to sit down for this...

[Chineseyes]

There are banks, hospitals, utilities and other institutions that don't take kindly to change. These institutions have ancient (as in I ran across a piece of code that was written when I was in diapers) legacy systems running key functionality that many people's everyday lives depend on. If you ever had to take a look at any of the code for these legacy systems it would frighten you, but what is more frightening is that most of these institutions have an "if it's not broken don't fix it" mentality so don't expect modern security issues to be addressed in a lot of these legacy systems anytime soon.

Re:If people are tossing their votes away . . .

[bint]

No, it just says a lot about what *these people* think about quality of the candidates.