The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by makomk:

From what I've read, people were complaining that the exit polls didn't match the primaries. Be careful where you get your election poll data from - I think that some of the providers fix it up to match the actual results. (This is based on the assumption that the actual results are accurate - they can then get further statistics out of them that they can't from the official results.)

The other detail that you're missing is that there are a number of known ways of exploiting this model of optical scan machine with a moderate amount of access and some technical skills. The usual people were complaining about this before the election, but were ignored.

(For example, if the information available is accurate, they're using the paper tabulator printouts for the vote totals. These are generated by a program - written in Basic, of all things - on the memory card containing the election data. Anyone who can modify the data on that card can reprogram how the totals are calculated. Another method is to preload the card with votes adding up to zero. There's a "zero report" that can be used to check for this but it's produced by - you've guessed it, a Basic program on the same card. Yes, this is a really stupid design.)

Sure, they're only tabulators and there are paper ballots, but unless the paper ballots are actually counted that doesn't matter.

Also, as evidence to my previous post, I present the fact that the person proposing the new rules immediately accuses the first person to object of being a sockpuppet on the basis that their first edit to Wikipedia was too good and they spend too much of their time on AN/I. This was withdrawn after some private communication.

Note to C. Wingate @ 44.

There were recently some interesting proposed changes to the Wikipedia sockpuppetry guidelines. The initial proposal was that secondary accounts should only be allowed to edit articles, and not take part in any of the meta stuff like policy discussions, reporting trolls and vandals, replying to ArbCom cases against themselves etc. It was by SlimVirgin, who IIRC was more than a little involved in the whole attack sites mess.

Shortly afterwards, the person I mentioned who incorrectly banned someone on evidence she couldn't reveal (I think that was a sockpuppet case too) suggested it should be possible to ban accounts because they look like a sockpuppet, even if there's no clues as to whose sockpuppet they could be. New account and show too much knowledge about Wikipedia procedures? Banned forever, unless you can show exactly what account you got your knowledge under to the satisfaction of the admins. Same if you take part in controversial areas with a new account. This is not a strawman argument - it's what they'd actually ban people on the basis of.

Of course, if you create another account that's ban evasion using sockpuppets - so that account gets banned forever too. And, for those of you who aren't Wikipedians, suspected sockpuppet accounts are banned forever - otherwise, banning someone indefinitely is close to impossible and will certainly get a lot of scrutiny. Sockpuppet bans are so commonplace that no-one bothers looking into them.

Hmmm... there's an interesting reminder on AN/I that careless troll-fighting can do more damage than the trolls themselves.

Basically, an admin banned a well-known editor with a good reputation and refused to say why, but insisted she had a good reason that she couldn't reveal. She claimed that half a dozen admins have seen the evidence, but wouldn't say who they were, and they didn't have time to get involved.

Then she realised the whole thing was a mistake and got the entire discussion courtesy blanked to protect the blocked editor. (He didn't ask for this, though he doesn't appear to object either.) Cue further controversy - and, as far as I can tell, the whole thing was done with good intentions.

I notice there was also an (ahem) interesting Register article on the matter in question: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/13/boing_boing_license_abuse/ (Well, I'm not sure you can call it an article - it's more of a vitrolic screed against Creative Commons and Cory Doctrow.)

Anyway, it had this quote from Andrew Burt, which appears to show a rather unfortunate lack of Clue on his part:

"Numerous copies of her piece have been discovered on the web and attributed to boingboing, illustrating that many people are being mislead by this incorrect application of a Creative Commons license."

Of course, there may be some evidence that I'm not aware of linking this to the fact that BoingBoing is Creative Commons licensed, but I doubt it. It looks like normal blogging activity to me. Besides, how many people out there are clued in enough to care that BoingBoing is CC-licensed, but not enough to realise that this doesn't apply to quoted material?

(Actually, I googled a phrase from the story in question, and there really don't seem to be that many people quoting some or all of it that came to it through Boing Boing - most came across it elsewhere, which is what you'd expect.)

Stud finders, universal remote controls and comment registration systems requiring True Names have two things in common - they don't work enough of the time and they're a pain to use. (They do, however, work just well enough to still exist.)

Actually, I don't think I've ever encountered a comment registration system that actually enforces the use of real names. I don't doubt there are ones out there where the blog owner tries to enforce some such rule, but it's futile.

I even know of one blogger who deletes any comments not posted under the user's Second Life name - fortunately, (s)he isn't technically-minded enough to actually make the comment system enforce this. (It's a long story.)

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