Is this legal? It's certainly unethical.
I'm pretty sure internet hotness polls are unregulated, Brock.
I'll await Mac instructions, and add that people should probably pay close attention to this thread so that ogged can control his pitiless bot armies this time.
Is it irresponsible to bot? It would be irresponsible not to.
Isn't there some way just to spam email the bot out to hundreds of thousands of random computers and have it run automatically? Why should we personally have to do all the work ourselves?
It would be so much easier if you'd just link to the mac instructions for us, Ogged. Sigh.
I don't know which are the official mac instructions.
Should this post title be orange?
I take it that the Windows bot has not been tested in ME?
6: I knew the innocent act could only last so long.
13: Apo assured me it was legal. I've no time for ethics.
Those mac instructions will vote for catherine, not 'smasher. Hang on a second.
Winbots should work in most flavors, JM. Give it a go.
But you're all racists for opposing Yates' perfectly ethical rise to hottie power.
Or rather, since 14 is perhaps a little terse and works for the catbot, rather than the smashbot:
Open "terminal" which is in apps/utilities
In the command-line window, type in the first line:
curl http://www.snarkout.org/smashbot-curl.sh > smashbot-curl.sh
Hit return. It'll do something, then give you a new prompt. Now type:
sh smashbot-curl.sh
That's it. Leave the window up until Ogged tells us to stop running the bots, then just close it.
IIRC, the solution snarkout came up with involved a cURL command and a catherine-specific URL (that's the one I used would have used if we were doing that sort of thing). Maybe I missed it, but I'm not sure if a capps-specific URL made it onto that thread.
Shit. The reptilian Vandehei is on the board.
Liz, are you running a sympathy reptile-bot?
19: yeah, like that.
DS, charges of racism without the link to the little kid will henceforth have to be ignored.
I'm at work in a law firm -- it's a wonder I can comment, let alone running software to fix beauty contests. I mayn't even upload a picture from this computer.
Is this the future of warfare? Pitiless bot armies doing battle in the nowhere of cyberspace?
What do y'all think, 25,000, then stop? I want to have a comfortable margin, so that if someone tries to launch a massive bot attack just before the vote closes, we have time to react.
I have to go swim, so if we get to 25,000 before I get back, stop there and we'll discuss.
Well, at least ogged has his priorities straight.
If vote-swamping is an issue, I can modify catbot and smashbot to turn off after some number of votes (100? 1000?). You could then just run it again as needed.
What is the process called in Task Manager? I fear it may not be running.
Whoops! We need Cappsbots, not Catbots, right? Well, at least I know it works in Windows ME.
28 et al. Probably the right way to do this would be to dominate the voting with a distribution of votes that favoured our heroes, not just plug away at one. You could scrape the results counts and adjust probabilities to account for any outside influence short of a massive attack.
Should this post title be orange?
Burnt orange!
28 et al. Probably the right way to do this would be to dominate the voting with a distribution of votes that favoured our heroes, not just plug away at one. You could scrape the results counts and adjust probabilities to account for any outside influence short of a massive attack.
This would require me to use Perl libraries that most Mac users aren't going to have installed, and it would just be mean to make B. use CPAN to accomplish a little ballot stuffing. If people provide IDs for other Unfogged favorites, I can make additional bots, though.
I mayn't even upload a picture from this computer.
Mmhmm, so I'd reckon.
What is the process called again, when running?
Throw some love Gans way, if only because she's cute and jolly-looking.
The Yatesbots appear to be out pacing the Cappsbots.
Of course, at this point voting for someone because they're actually hott defeats the whole purpose of what we're doing. There's been some mission creep.
IDP, it's working. I don't know what it's called, but it doesn't look like it's doing anything. You can tell it's working, because it doesn't give you a new prompt; the cursor just sits there.
We need better bots! Someone build a better bot or we're surely doomed!
I should be able to see a process, though, and need to be able to shut it off.
Ah. We appeared to have weathered the storm, and trends are now in our favor.
Damn. Someone's been giving out bots some Wheaties.
How like the sinister forces opposing us to play the race card.
Did I mention having a T1 connect? Should I stop now?
33: You mean you'd need a different library to read/parse the input? That's surprising. Everything else you'd just roll by hand, I would have thought. I don't know much about web interfaces (or perl) though, sicbw.
47: you should cap the # of votes, then you don't have to worry about this.
43: You can shut it off by closing the terminal window.
It would be cool if the bots started propagating and somehow shut down the internet. I see a movie here. The hotness contest angle makes it a natural too.
This has been fun, but I fear that the Unfogged geeks are going to try to take over the site when this is over. I don't completely trust Lunar Rockette, who showed up mysteriously not too long ago.
Throw some love Gans way, if only because she's cute and jolly-looking.
Food writer = fun. Well, not always. But Gans looks fun.
T1 is so early-90s. Here in the future your average home broadband connection is a quarter of a T1 of botting power, and if your educational institution is still behind a T1, you're on the wrong side of the digital divide.
52: Do not be concerned, John. We have everything under control.
55: is true. If mediabistro was on the I2, we could really swamp them.....
Of course, that would defeat the purpose of the I2, but still...
In the last few minutes, our vote output has diminished significantly.
All right, while, I'ma keep running this bot while I fetch breakfast (yes, shut up) for my kid. I'll shut it off later.
6: this is possible, much more complicated, and aiui criminal.
Mac users can also open up more than one terminal window and run multiple copies of the bot. There will be diminishing returns after a while, depending on the capacity of mediabistro's servers and your upload speed.
I've hesitated to reveal this, but off-the-record sources have given me reason to believe that most of the male hotties list were replaced by Skrulls before voting even began. Even Capps. Perhaps especially Capps. Indeed, Yates is very probably the only non-Skrull candidate. Think about it, Unfoggedtarians: are your bots fighting on the right side?
62: you don't need multiple terminals. just use
"&" at the end of your command line, the command will run in the background.
you can get a list of everything running this way with the `jobs' command. And if you want to stop one running, just use `kill %n' with the n replaced by the number (left hand side of th list of jobs) of the job.
you can also do this with a running job by typing C-z (ctrl and z) and you'll get a terminal prompt. Then type `bg' (for background) and the job will happily keep running in the background. If you don't do this last bit, it is just paused.
Here in the future your average home broadband connection is a quarter of a T1 of botting power, and if your educational institution is still behind a T1, you're on the wrong side of the digital divide.
Well then, maybe it's a T3. I stopped keeping up with these things. All I know is that whatever it is, my programming brother drools every time he comes out here.
I'm at work in a law firm -- it's a wonder I can comment, let alone running software to fix beauty contests.
There's a John Grisham novel in there somewhere, I can smell it.
For the sake of national health care, someone should throw a little love Klein-wards; right now he's being out-hottied by the odious Vandenhei.
The Yatesbots appear to have surrendered.
There may be a solitary Gansbot operating, although it may just be Emerson.
I kinda feel sorry for the folks with <50 votes.
although it may just be Emerson
furiously voting manually, IYKWIM.
Call of the dogs?
It's called a bark.
If we're worried about Ca/pps getting too many votes, can't one of you instead just write a bot to take votes away from his competitors? (Yates, in particular.) Just match that up against whatever bot they've got adding votes to Yates' tally and let the bots fight one another directly. Then Ca/pps' tally avoids the taint entirely.
A GansBot and a DanaPriestBot have entered the picture, but their ambitions seem to be modest.
75: I don't think you understand bots very well, Brock.
Bots are bad. uuhhh, bots are bad. http://video.aol.com/video-detail/id/2526167297
76: How can you tell the difference between a bot with modest ambititions and a human being?
If we're worried about Ca/pps getting too many votes, can't one of you instead just write a bot to take votes away from his competitors? (Yates, in particular.)
No. There's only one form of interaction with the poll: voting for someone. There is no way to unvote for someone.
What don't I understand, M/tch? Sure that might require slightly more formidable programming but I'm assuming these people are professionals.
79: Oh, it's just a little Turing test I've been tinkering with.
I refuse to beilve there's absolutely no way a sophisticated hacker could subtract votes from a candidate.
79: Ask the bot why, when it sees a tortoise lying on its back in the desert, it doesn't flip the tortoise over.
There would be no point in subtracting votes, because if you had the ability to do that, you would also have the ability to set the vote totals directly.
83: What leads you to believe that any such persons are reading this?
I refuse to beilve
Oh, you'll beilve in the end. They always do. We have our methods.
It's hot and I'm tired from running around to stuff, so let me just reference Jack London and let the rest of you do the cognitive work of tying SEK's dissertation to 70/73 and making it funny.
85: but that would defeat the whole purpose of the contest.
88: Actually, feel free to just mock me for not seeing it. I call it "Wharton-blindness," and it's a damn nice disease to have. (Good deal better than London's.)
Why don't we simply start our own contest where all votes automatically get diverted to Catherine (or Ogged's crush of the week)?
Man the Bottlestations!
Shouldn't that be "bottal stations"? (C.f. "the affected footal area".)
33: You mean you'd need a different library to read/parse the input? That's surprising. Everything else you'd just roll by hand, I would have thought. I don't know much about web interfaces (or perl) though, sicbw.
I guess I could use sed or straight Perl regexes to parse the response, but down that path lies an amorphous, gibbering horror that haunts my very dreams.
I refuse to beilve there's absolutely no way a sophisticated hacker couldn't remove the other contestants' names and pictures from the voting page.
Even better, a sophisticated hacker should be able to photoshop bad teeth and bad hair onto the pictures.
Alright then, I'll leave my 65 kristonbots running.
93: no, i understand that. parsing xml or whatever isn't going to be fun (you really don't want to use regexps for that sort of thing). The histogram-y stuff and targetted voting I assumed you'd hand-roll (it's easy). But the surprise was that you could assume a library to read this stuff would be installed, but you couldn't assume the same for a parser (I assume it exists, but like I said, I don't do perl/python or web)
71: another part of my reason for saying targeting a distribution of votes would be less heavy-handed
How about just botting everyone except Vandehei?
I refuse to beilve there's absolutely no way a sophisticated hacker could subtract votes from a candidate.
But to give you a serious answer, Brock, what's going on doesn't involve hacking into the voting site. It just involves automating the manual process of going to the page, making a selection, and hitting the "vote" button. The site allows anyone to vote multiple times, the bots just do that faster than a human could.
102: really what you lot are doing is better termed `scripting', i.e. automating a repetitive task. A `bot' sort of presumes some decision makeing ability ... and what Brock was talking about, while entirely possible, is out and out cracking.
M/tch, I can't decide if I should reply politely in gratitude for your willingness to take the time to explain something you think I don't understand, or if I should reply rudely because you apparently believe I'm an idiot.
103: cracking good fun, you mean?
The site allows anyone to vote multiple times, the bots just do that faster than a human could.
Wanna bet?
104: I can only go by the evidence I see in the threads, Brock, I can't read your mind to know whether or not you're an idiot.
Just because I am not funny does not mean I am stupid. There are some very intelligent people with atrocious senses of humor. Just look at bitchphd, for gawd's sake.
Much as it pains me to say so, 106 is very funny.
Don't drag me into this, Brock, or I'll have to cut you.
109: There lies a mouse driving man.
Ah! B! Back from your breakfast run, I presume?
112: Currently procrastinating on starting to pick up crap.
Was the "very" too strong for your taste, B? I can revise it to "moderately" if you'd prefer.
115: You've got a kid already, right? So you won't be needing those testicles any more.
He's rocking in the chair next to me, saying "lunatic, lunatic" over and over again.
118: Ah, so everything's normal in the Bitch household then. Phew!
I like that both active threads are now about PK's care and feeding and rocking back and forth.
You all make me so proud. I was worried that I'd come back to find that you'd let up, but instead I see that you've gone completely overboard. Good work! But I think we can stop for now. Stop the bots.
You might want to update the post to say that, too, ogged.
123: I think "coming off" is the operative verb in B's plans for you.
This is where I would say that I stopped a bot if I had ever admitted to running one.
ogged, we're barely clinging to 61% of the vote. Do you really want to let up now?
Shouldn't someone distract B so that someone else could check on PK?
Come one, leave the Gans bot on.
130: you left a "c" out of "once", and the tense of "come" is wrong.
Maybe this is old news -- I didn't follow all the hottness threads closely -- but I just found you can speed up manual clicking by setting the browser to not accept cookies from mediabistro.com. Then click, click, clickety-click from the same window, no reloading or anything, and it seems to register each time.
That's right, minivet, but we're in the post-clicking era.
Not that it really matters, to forestall anyone.
I predict surges on multiple fronts tomorrow. Stay the course!
ogged, I fear the way you phrased the update may impinge plausible deniability.
That's right, minivet, but we're in the post-clicking era.
Minivet remains stuck in a pre-9/11 mindset, it appears.
136: Not a problem. The whole post and comments thread is clearly an ironic counterfactual.
(Except for the warning about the Skrull takeover, which was in deadly earnest.)
The whole post and comments thread is clearly an ironic counterfactual.
Except for the part where Brock implies that he's not stupid.
129: I am forcing him to help me with the laundry. Or I was. Now I am going to force him to help me pick shit up in the living room.
Somewhere in the heat of that long and interminable afternoon, a lone smashbot continued its mindless work.
OT, but as you've been assiduously keeping your eyes on the prize over here, Karl Rove has been subpoenaed and the Dow is totally tanking. This has been a public service announcement.
As you were.
141: It would be funny if it weren't so damn true.
help me pick shit up in the living room
If you'd go to the bathroom for that, it would save you tons of clean-up time.
That mediabistro post is totally off base when they say that Yates and Capps have all of their computer tech-y friends waging a bot-war
. Capps didn't "have" us do anything for him; we're doing this out of the goodness or corruption of, or lust in, our hearts. I don't know Yates personally but I'm sure that he too hasn't requested any unsavory favors from his friends. The worst that can be said about these hot hot journalists is that they have unscrupulous friends. They themselves? Above reproach.
137: I regret nothing! Has anyone even tried to engage the broad mass of mediatypes, within which the Holzerbots and Howleybots are a small minority? Is it taboo to even consider what we, Unfogged, might have been doing that helped bring about this tragedy?
Why can't we all just get along?
147: Exactly. Plus, not all of us read Harry Potter. How will the lifetime supply of RAM be divvied?
147: Come on, look at the way they're dressed. You don't leave the house like that unless you're totally asking for a bot war.
Now I am going to force him to help me pick shit up in the living room.
You might want to hire this guy instead.
Dude. That recognition is such whingy sour grapes. Poking fun at nerds via one's blog: not self-aware.
I can speak openly about this because I have run zero bots. I voted once like a decent procedural liberal. While I'm feeling a dim spark of self-righteousness, I'm just starting Harry Potter because all my nerd friends just finished it. Being way behind the curve is the new way ahead of the curve.
So, it turns out there's a py2app, which knowledge would have come in handy like two hours ago.
Karl Rove's been subpoenaed? Time to turn off Amy Winehouse and listen to NPR.
Oh, sounds like NPR's gonna have a story about a mule. Good to know their priorities are as sound as our own.
WWTDD: "Cigarettes must be packed with vitamins because [Winehouse] looks radiant."
Yet I have this feeling of guilt. It's been fun, but aren't internet beauty contests one of the things that should be sacred?
This is the very kind of unmotivated evil that opened St. Augustine's eyes to his own sinful nature. You can't fly in the face of goodness and truth forever; at some point your conscience starts to plague you.
I follow Mark Twain in suggesting that you poison your conscience, which is as useless as the appendix and can sometimes kill you.
144/156: I don't see anything about this on the NYT. Are you joking?
151: Yes. they asked for it. Further, using bots doesn't invalidate the hotness rankings at all. The more unscrupulous the means the more pure the motives.
As the heart knows no law, so must be its contests.
161: That picture of Rove looks like it was take while he was sitting in a bar on Tattoine.
158: 'probably not technically necrophilia' is possibly the cruelest phrase I've ever read.
Clinton Yates and Kriston Capps' Nerd Friends Are Duking It Out!
This description strikes me as too generous to Yates supporters. Perhaps the bots should be reactivated pending an unconditional surrender.
And why no love for the Catherine bots?
Re: the Rove thing/Congressional investigations in general.
I idly wonder if there's some legal strategist for the Bush administration that's suggesting that they put a little blood in the water, deliberately show some weakness on he-said/she-said areas of relatively complex technical scandals. The concept is, you let your critics think hone in on a perjury or obstruction of justice issue relating to a technical scandal that most people aren't too hip on. Congress, seeing an actual criminal charge in the future, narrows its focus in on that.
Eventually, they put a charge to it, and Bush pardons Gonzalez or whomever. Lasting impression on the public: some guy may have lied about seemingly unimportant details about reauthorizing a program that they don't understand in the first place -- who cares? No outrage = no support for impeachment, which is about the only thing that Bush and co. can fear at this point. They already have no public support, and having the President on their side, no need to worry about criminal charges.
That's probably overly convoluted and paranoid, though.
One argument for impeaching everyone impeachable is that it's not pardonable.
You people have gone bot crazy over in the men's contest. But has anyone checked on Catherine lately? That Howleybot has been working overtime...
Clinton Yates 81767 votes
Armsmasher 75565 votes
Smasher appears to be gaining, but far too slowly to catch up in time.
In fact, I'm rapidly growing less attractive this morning; the vote simply reflects the record.
the howleybot has overtaken me. given that kerry howley is like 37 times more attractive than i am (plus nice), i'm okay with that.
Smasher should overtake Yatesbot in about an hour and a half (at current run rates).
am i the only one who thinks chris carter from CNN is totally cute? anyways. i'm positive the unfoggedbots will do their capps duty.
the howleybot has overtaken me. given that kerry howley is like 37 times more attractive than i am (plus nice), i'm okay with that.
I'm going to assume that's the booze talking.
When do these contests end, anyway?
I'll bring in my "40 clicks per minute" methodology if it really is a matter of today or nothing.
177: No way. You are still the hottest! At least, that's what the votes say.
i believe they end monday 5pm. who knows what could happen over the weekend!
the howleybot has overtaken me
I warned you people! Didn't I warn you? I told you there was a howleybot and an andreabrucebot!
w-lfs-n, you said the howleybot was yours and it was under control. This fiasco is on your head, buddy.
This is YOUR FAULT, ogged. We wanted to leave the bots running 'round the clock, but you wanted to make the contest "fair", or something.
I guess we know who among us will crack under pressure. Relax, fire up the bots, and let's win.
i think we have time. i would fire up my bot to a reasonable amount today to try to pull even with the howleybot, then wait and see how the weekend progresses.
The howleybot, unless I'm mistaken, is Ben goddam w-lfs-n, who seems to be under the impression that you want to lose. Maybe drop the feminine subtlety and tell him you're ok with winning.
The howleybot, unless I'm mistaken, is Ben goddam w-lfs-n
This can't possibly be true. Is there any reason to think that at all? And if it is, he ought to be cockblocked for life.
it might be. i told him it was fine w/ to run the howleybot. am i banned now?
And if it is, he ought to be cockblocked for life.
Maybe he should receive a punishment that he'll actually notice.
It's like the Nixon Administration all over again. It turns out this reaches to the highest levels.