Times of Malta’s poll is going haywire – hadn’t they better get their people onto it?
This morning the poll was: 69% Yes/20% No/11% Don’t Know, with a total of 27,000 votes that came in over many days.
Now it is: 18% Yes/7% No/74% Don’t Know, with a total of 104,413 votes – which means almost 80,000 votes in just a few hours. Times of Malta’s polls do not allow you to repeat vote. So that means 80,000 different computers if the votes are legitimate. They can’t be.
The poll has remained steady in votes and percentages for the past couple of days, and has shown no exceptional activity except for the high and steady number of people who want Manuel Mallia out.
Then this evening there was a suspiciously impossible surge of votes in the space of just six minutes which reeks of autobot hacking.
These are screenshots of the poll movements in the last 30 minutes.
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Taparsi n-nies issa qed jigidhom dubju ghandux jitlaq jew le.
X’hasra ux.
I once wrote a comment on here which explains how anyone can pay for “clicks” and “likes” by using the services of certain companies in Dhaka, for example.
There they have many people working long hours clicking on links over and over again to increase online popularity.
Here is the comment:http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2013/08/heres-another-good-comment/
Could this be why?
Here is the article with information about a tv program which showed how this is done.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/02/click-farms-appearance-online-popularity
Basically the Times of Malta should now check their website (I’m not sure how these things work) and focus on the activity that occurred today, and see where all the new clicks came from. Who knows, maybe Muscat has got a huge following in Bangladesh.
You can also get minions to do any task you like on the cheap at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Joseph Muscat’s popularity is decreasing fast. Yet he has over 58,000 “likes” on his facebook page. Probably thousands of these “likes” are fake.
Dhaka?
Dahka fil-wicc more likely.
We are really are in North Korea territory here. It is not that which scares me, but everyone’s complacency about it.
One of the reasons why being a politician in Malta is a walk in the park.
The current voting public in Malta are totally uninterested in the bigger picture. If they can get on the public payroll collecting crumbs for doing nothing they are quite content to allow the politicians to piss on them while they are told it is raining gold.
Mintoff did it all the time. He used to actually laugh in their faces as they clapped and cheered for him. He would make jokes about them in their faces. He was right! What a thick, stupid and ignorant electorate the Maltese public are.
The only thing that is going to change is once this government has sold everything and arranged lucrative contracts for themselves and their families. Then just as happened during the Golden Years will the majority of the public wake up and vote for the Opposition. In the meantime this government is staying in power for the next eight years. Unless the majority wake up!
In the meantime they are happy to pretend to hold working class Labour values but in reality it is all about robbing as much as they can before the game is up.
U f’daqqa wahda f’dil-kwarta li ghaddiet ivvutaw 10 telef ohra. Erga iccekkja.
You ain’t seen nothing yet. Mazunerija in action.
Elves and their bots.
bidluha l-mistoqsija minn mindu tellajt dan l-artiklu.
By now we know just how trustworthy and to what pitiful levels the Times of Malta has fallen.
All that Mabel Strickland constructed, misused.
How shameful.
How, as administrators, can you continue to walk around with your head high?
Rather a smaller building with principles in place, than this sorry excuse of a newspaper.
Let’s not get too carried away by Times of Malta and the Strickland connection. The ‘pre-Mabel’ Times was anything but pro-Nationalist. Things changed later, under her watch, when she had the foresight to realise the dangers of Mintoffianism.
I’m not talking about pro-Nationalist.
A nominal increase of 200 Yes votes (realistic), a plausible increase of No votes by approx 2000 (networking effort), and a totally incredible 74,000 increase of I don’t knows…
The aim is clear, if they just increased the Nos that would be obvious, but by bloating the Undecideds they simply diluted the Yes votes and hoped no-one would notice or do the maths.
As with any off the shelf script, the knowledge on how to compromise it must be out there somewhere, so even a relatively unskilled person would be able to apply it.
The trolls must be working harder than the elves
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/331994,ballot-stuffing-bot-hits-news-ltd-polls.aspx
Knowing those bimbos it will soon exceed our population. Because we don’t want to make it obvious ta, Maa
Just another cover up?
In actual fact when you log on from a mobile device, you can vote more than once.
You’re right. It was fine earlier.
That poll’s gone. There’s a new one now
I’m guessing it will end up the same way.
From the outside it looks like a botnet attack as that is the only way to get that amount of different IPs in such a short time.
However I do think it is far more likely to be an inside job which would typically be very easy for anyone who has access. That would not require any votes at all, not even fake ones.
Just clear your cookies. Then you can vote a second time.
Probably this can be repeated.
Let them keep trying to influence things. People love backing an underdog.
Or a bunch of elves with cookies disabled on their browsers.
What about the website hits per day? Times of Malta has spiked up since July and it is impossible for such a huge spike. With some research one can know how these thousands of hits per day are acquired.
It is time to cover up.
One massive blunder after another.
Who on earth do they think they are kidding?
At this rate they will soon run out of cover-ups.
Then it will be mayhem with no holds barred.
1986 revisited.
That’s great. Labourites pissing off the times. Maybe the times will stop being Labour’s other English daily.
Probably it’s part of the Chinese deal.
A billion clicks away!
Actually there is a simple way to have multiple votes. One can use something like imacro, run a script that includes the clearing of cookies and history. The script can be left running for a determinate number of loops – so actually one is voting automatically as many times as one wishes.
Another thing: the poll has been there for the last two weeks. It’s like they’re waiting for the result to change, before they take it off.
Daphne, you can vote as many times as you like on those polls. All you’d need to do is clear the cache of your browser and the cookies stored on your computer. Without tracking the poll is open to abuse.
i noticed it last night…about 9pm the yes vote had dropped to 49%. My first reaction was the bots are hard at work.
We knew since before the election that the strategy was one of leaving no stone unturned. That is why it was successful, simply because every cohort was told exactly what it wanted to hear.
Unfortunately it seems that many focused only on what they could get without asking how and why and without thinking who they were selling their (and our) decade to.
Every day we discover that we haven’t reached the bottom of their manipulative pit yet.
The question is do we give up and sink or do we want to swim?
This is not the first time this has happened either, FYI, if you clear you computer’s history and browsing data you can vote again.
I agree with you NGT, but it’s not only that. Being curious I tried using four different browsers from my computer and I managed to vote four times, one vote on each browser.
I even managed to vote another four times by opening the private windows for each browser. So that’s eight votes. My conclusion is that I can never believe the Times of Malta polls and have my reservation on other polls too.
With all this lying and tampering with results, who is going to control the next general election results?
stat komunista qed nigu hawn.
There’s a new poll.
Are you satisfied with the energy minister’s explanation for delaying the new power station by 15 months?
Even though 1532 only voted till now, 80% said NO already.
On a related subject ….
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-12-03/local-news/Education-Minister-attempted-a-cover-up-of-his-political-responsibilities-PN-MP-Joe-Cassar-6736126770
“Education Minister ‘attempted a cover up’ of his political responsibilities – PN MP Joe Cassar.”
A cover up by government is a very serious matter. Joe Cassar should not trivialise it by using the term inappropriately.
On the contrary, the PN should keep explaining to people why a cover up of the facts and fabrication of stories by government is unacceptable.
This is not the first time something like this has happened. Probably they wanted to surge the “No” votes but mistakenly surged the “Don’t know” ones instead.
I wonder who is behind this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were Times of Malta themselves who caused the surge. This has occurred before in other polls, inverting the poll result and with the poll being removed soon after.
Amazing what this country has come to in just a short two years! What these people don’t realise is that the more they do such things, the worse the common wo/man’s perception will get…
re:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20141203/local/evarist-bartolo-no-regrets-on-language-used.546717
One word – borrowed from our (their, rather) finance Minister:
FAZULL
I have noticed this happening to. It is virtually impossible to get all those votes in such a very short time.
There is a way you can vote more than once but it is not possible to get that result is that short span of time.
The site has ether been hacked or it has been an internal job.
The fact is that truth is being tampered with at the highest levels. Truth is hidden, created, or deleted, depending on the circumstances. It looks like it is becoming the modus operandi for the PL government. It is as in the glory days of Stalin when his propagandists used to erase people from photographs, for similar reasons. And not only from photographs.
Because this poll is easily manipulated (clearing browsers, opening multiple tabs/windows, etc), it can’t be taken as a scientifically accurate poll at all.
I noticed that the same ridiculous surge happened a few minutes ago today in the poll regarding Dr Mallia. And the poll is now changed.
If this continues to happen all credibility in Times of Malta’s polls will be lost and it would be better for the newspaper to stop them.