For the sake of laughter, hackers clogged up votes in favor of Miley Cyrus at the Time of the Year man voting

Yesterday on the website of Time magazine began voting for the title of "Man of the Year." The title can be received by the one who, over the past year with his actions, most influenced humanity.

On the first day of the voting, it seemed that Edward Snowden would win without any problems. The number of votes cast for him was ten times higher than the number of votes of the nearest competitor. However, at night from 26 to 27 November, the situation changed dramatically. In the first place came the former star of children's television DisneyTV, scandalous singer Miley Cyrus.
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Immediately there were suspicions that the case is unclean. Now the situation begins to clear up.

It turns out that last night the hackers found a vulnerability in the Time voting engine. They found that in the voting, you can use the identifiers of Facebook users without their knowledge, writes the Daily Dot journalist, who for several years has specialized in covering Time vote markups.

After finding the vulnerability, two programmers under the nicknames Gains and Marek argued for whom to win votes. It was supposed to be some kind of cool outsider. Marek wanted for the Tsarnaev brothers, who at that time occupied the 16th place, and Gains for Miley Cyrus, who did not understand how to get on the voting list and took the 15th place before the brothers. Arguments for Cyrus boiled down to the fact that this is an ideal object for lulz: a former girl from DisneyTV, who is now in full program shocking the public. The funniest thing is if she won. Agreeing on this, Gains and Marek wrote scripts in C # and Ruby - and launched them from two machines.



Voting "Man of the Year" Time was accompanied by cheating before. So, in 2012, thanks to the scripts, North Korean President Kim Jong-un was put in first place (again, for the sake of laughter). By the way, the DPRK press took this very seriously: the official news agency reported with pathos the news of the victory of their leader in the voting for Time magazine.

In 2009 it was even funnier. Fans 4chan brought to the first place a businessman and the founder of the forum 4chan, an unknown Christopher Poole. Naturally, Time editors did not recognize him as "the man of the year", but chose Ben Bernanke . But Poole still became famous, he was invited to give a TED lecture, and soon investors gave $ 3 million to his new startup Canvas.

This year the situation with the wrap may repeat. During the day, cheerful little Miley already came out on top. Here is the leaderboard for this minute.



True, the version with the vote wrapping for Miley Cyrus does not explain why Snowden was ahead of Indian politician Narendra Modi, who also lagged behind him ten times yesterday. It seems that the votes for Snowden simply “evaporated”.

Supporters of Snowden, meanwhile, do not give up. Through the IRC channel, Anonymous activists distribute instructions on how to vote again.

Voting has already become a farce. There is nothing wrong, because the results still do not solve anything. The winner of the title "Man of the Year" will be announced by the editors of Time magazine without taking into account the vote. However, this does not stop activists from cheating attempts.