The part of this story that impresses me is not the ballot stuffing. That's been happening for as long as there have been polls.
The interesting part, from an "evolution of the Internet" perspective is how well the pollsters were able to characterize the ballot stuffing and point a finger squarely at M$ employees. Not only was the polling system sophisticated enough to prevent the obvious old-school ballot stuffing methods; ZD captured and stored enough data (and actually LOOKED at it when the poll results went wonky) to determine conclusively that ballot stuffing had occurred, as well as the source.
It may raise some privacy issues about MS Exchange etc, as others have noted, but I think it's a pretty good example of responsible reporting, and creative use of the Internet's more sophisticated polling potential. (remember those old TV polls? "Call in now to vote! dial this number to vote 'yes' and this number to vote 'no' !!")
Systems like Napster are great, and the freedom they provide is an unarguably nessecary component, but there has to be some system to address the objections raised on a case by case basis.
Such systems already exist, they are just unable to keep up with new technologies. There have always been people who traffic in illicit, "dangerous" and private data. Fake IDs, "stolen identities", it's all been here before. And there are laws against illegally distributing private or priveleged information (although thankfully, it's not illegal to distribute bomb-making instructions- just watch Fight Club!).
So, I consider shutting down something like napster or gnutella to be a short-term and short-sighted solution to the very real risk that you raise. A better solution would be to equip law-enforcement with the ability to track down the sources of that kind of criminal behavior (that'll be a long time coming, I'm sure, but you've gotta start sometime).
Shutting down napster or gnutella to stop my credit card #s from being openly distributed while the pimply faced kid at KMART (and every other store in the country) can collect hundreds of card #s a day is just silly.
What if software publishers used public/private key encryption to protect software? Or other technologies that made it lesss convenient to distribute data that's supposed to be protected? Come to think of it, that would be a pro-active open source project that could head the luddites off before they can enact all sorts of bizarre laws for things that they don't understand.
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The part of this story that impresses me is not the ballot stuffing. That's been happening for as long as there have been polls.
The interesting part, from an "evolution of the Internet" perspective is how well the pollsters were able to characterize the ballot stuffing and point a finger squarely at M$ employees. Not only was the polling system sophisticated enough to prevent the obvious old-school ballot stuffing methods; ZD captured and stored enough data (and actually LOOKED at it when the poll results went wonky) to determine conclusively that ballot stuffing had occurred, as well as the source.
It may raise some privacy issues about MS Exchange etc, as others have noted, but I think it's a pretty good example of responsible reporting, and creative use of the Internet's more sophisticated polling potential. (remember those old TV polls? "Call in now to vote! dial this number to vote 'yes' and this number to vote 'no' !!")
The poll is still available here. It carries no warnings or disclaimers...
not true. There's a big block of text above the results describing the ballot stuffing and pointing to the full story.
Such systems already exist, they are just unable to keep up with new technologies. There have always been people who traffic in illicit, "dangerous" and private data. Fake IDs, "stolen identities", it's all been here before. And there are laws against illegally distributing private or priveleged information (although thankfully, it's not illegal to distribute bomb-making instructions- just watch Fight Club!).
So, I consider shutting down something like napster or gnutella to be a short-term and short-sighted solution to the very real risk that you raise. A better solution would be to equip law-enforcement with the ability to track down the sources of that kind of criminal behavior (that'll be a long time coming, I'm sure, but you've gotta start sometime).
Shutting down napster or gnutella to stop my credit card #s from being openly distributed while the pimply faced kid at KMART (and every other store in the country) can collect hundreds of card #s a day is just silly.
What if software publishers used public/private key encryption to protect software? Or other technologies that made it lesss convenient to distribute data that's supposed to be protected? Come to think of it, that would be a pro-active open source project that could head the luddites off before they can enact all sorts of bizarre laws for things that they don't understand.