“Luckless online news organisation MSNBC is showing every sign
of having been pranged by poll-packing twice in the one week, and
on the one page. We do feel slightly sorry for the loves,
who’re clearly not themselves fixing polls in Microsoft’s favour,
but if you run meaningless polls as entertainment in order to get
hits, you do bear a certain amount of responsibility for the
consequences.“
“Picking up the story from where we left off yesterday, we can
report that MSNBC has confirmed that its poll on which was the best
operating system has fallen victim to “what appeared to be
electronic ballot stuffing.” MSNBC therefore took the poll down,
and put up a notice which confirmed that “MSNBC Live Votes are not
scientifically valid surveys.”
“Course they’re not – they’re a bit of a laugh, and arguably
they depend on word getting round about them, and the various
interest groups all piling into the site in order to vote for their
favourite. Linux Today encouraged that with the OS vote initially,
and then apparently some huge, brutal, psychotic bot was unleashed
in the Microsoft interest. The fact that it did so in such an
obvious, over the top and unsubtle manner does tend to make one
recall the business methods of certain top Redmond execs, but more
likely it was just some nutter.”