The Thong I Should Be Wearing [UPDATE]

The Thong I Should Be Wearing [UPDATE] Wait. . . what? Thongs? MIT? Together? Heres the story. Well, actually, heres the backstory, then the story. Back in July 2006 there was an issue with the Doonesbury comic strip. The main characters daughter in the comic strip, Alex, had to decide which college to go to. She was accepted to several tech schools and the comic strip writer decided that hed leave it up to a vote to decide where she went. He put up an online poll and, well I read this before I came to MIT and thought it was one of the funniest things ever. I lold and lold, and then Melis wrote a wrap up entry that showed the end result of MITs poll-bombing. Fast forward a couple of years. Heres what happened this time. An e-mail got sent to several sororities, telling them about a new contest that Victoria Secret was having for their collegiate Pink! line. They had a list of 31 colleges and you could vote for yours. Whichever college had the most votes after an unspecified amount of time would be declared the winner and would have their own line of Pink! clothing. BUT! This wasnt just an e-mail. This was a special e-mail. This was an e-mail with an HTML file attached to it. An html file that, when opened in a browser, would register up to four votes per second for MIT. I smell another poll-bombing! That e-mail was subsequently e-mailed to the East Campus dorm list and thats when the fun began. The script was opened up on multiple servers, dozens of computers, hundreds of windows, and thousands of tabs, each voting four times a second. MIT, which used to be at 300,000 votes was soon to be catapulted to the upper echelon of schools in the contest. Drexel already had about 5,000,000 votes, meaning they had obviously run a script as well, but nowhere nearly as vigorous as us. Then all hell broke loose. The hack was sent to all of the class lists, meaning every single student at MIT had the script in their inbox. The e-mail thread that followed was hilarious! Here are some excerpts. Looks like Drexel already had the idea (nobody really likes them that much, right?). No worries though, at this rate well be #1 in about 6 hours. wow, looks like we killed the MIT nodeakamai is shuffling the requests around nowthat means new servers to overload! Its not just the MIT node Im in Ohio and Im getting the same major delays to the site that you guys are. Also, I just did a measure of your voting rate over 5 minutes: Start: 1,288,966 Finish: 1,344,741 = 11,155 votes per minute. Drexler is currently averaging only 400.8 votes per minute. Rock on, MIT. That means we have to overtake Drexler before the PINK server melts. I think we melted itI just tried to check the rankings and got and got an error message that says Sorry: Were working fast to make improvements to this area. Check back soon to nominate your school! (DRAMATIZATION) [emailprotected] # tail -50 /var/www/logs/http/access.log | cut -d -f 1,4,6 18.238.1.200 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:43 POST 18.248.0.106 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:44 POST 18.238.2.127 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:44 POST 18.238.6.84 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:45 POST 18.238.2.127 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:47 POST 18.248.3.109 [21/Oct/2008:20:46:49 POST 18.240.2.220 [21/Oct/2008:20:47:01 POST 18.238.2.127 [21/Oct/2008:20:47:01 POST 18.244.1.147 [21/Oct/2008:20:47:03 POST 18.238.1.200 [21/Oct/2008:20:47:04 POST *scratches head* Gee.. I wonder where all these 18.*.*.* IPs are coming from? (/DRAMATIZATION) For a short amount of time the website was back up with a fix that prevented script voting. Essentially, they just added a cookie that wrote vote=true if you voted. Everybody turned off cookies and went back to it, crashing the server again. Crashed. Were talking gone, nobody (not even my family in Oregon) could access it. Then, magically, a day or two later, it reappeared. The attack was back on! But. . . wait . . . votes for MIT werent being counted! It didnt matter where the votes were coming from, Victoria Secret had completely locked out the top several schools from voting, including MIT. The e-mail thread blazed on. I just sent an email to the vSPINK people using their contact us form. I complained that they really need to fix their broken app so that the other 3 million students here at MIT can voice their school pride. Well see how it goes. The effort split at this point. One group of people created a mailing list devoted to reverse engineering the code on Victoria Secrets website so that they could unlock MITs votes. Another group set to running the scripts on some of their favorite other schools. Suddenly, schools youd never expect to have their own Victoria Secret clothing lines were creeping up the leaderboard. At this point, the website looked like this: We had gone from 300,000 to 2.4 million in less than a day. Rock. Also, note the appearance of George Mason University, Wellesley College, and Bob Jones University. None of them had actually been on the leaderboard earlier. This is right at the onset of MITs attempt to level the playing field, running scripts for the colleges we thought needed some extra votes. What did the leaderboard look like today? HAHAHAHAHA!!! LOOK AT NUMBER SEVEN!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Also, look at how many points George Mason University earned! 2.4 Million! Ive just gotta say, good show MIT, good show. [Ok, quick note. Ive received a number of e-mails from students at GMU and apparently they ran all their own scripts. Obviously, I had no way of knowing this, but kudos to yall. MIT did help a bit, but obviously not nearly as much as I thought. Wed still like to take credit for Zion Bible College, assuming nobody there wrote any scripts] Now. . . heres the amazing part. I cant access VSPink.com. Nobody at MIT can. Any IP address that starts with 18 (MITs personal IP address) is instantly blocked. Sara 12, whos at home this weekend, sent me some screenshots though, and Ive noticed some renovations to the Victoria Secret website. First change, a new little block of text above the voting box. NO cheating. Ha. Sure. So, its not really cheating unless its against the rules, and there were never any rules. The next addition was a little pink star above the top list of schools. On to us? LOL, busted. But, hey, it looks like we won a free visit from the Victoria Secret Pink! crew, rock on! Finally, their last lovely addition, was a captcha system. Were kinda stuck now. Our scripts dont actually break captchas. But, it was an epic battle between the MIT students and the Victoria Secret SysAdmins, and hopefully there are no hard feelings. We had a great time and based on Victoria Secrets new little warnings on their website, they had a good time protecting their site from us. No, we didnt win, but thats ok. Sometimes its not about winning, its about the fight and the competition, something we definitely enjoyed. Oh, by the way, if you arent at MIT, you can still vote for us, so head over to their website and vote for us! We can do it!