This post is mostly for holmes_iv, <user site="livejournal.com"

[randomness]

But I thought other people would be interested also, so I'm posting:

Hacking the Papal Election
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0504.html#8

"when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."

Comments

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

Whoa, that was fascinating. Oh, for such ritual and intrigue in my life!

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, figuring out if somebody was hacking my election (answer: yes) was a noticeable part of my evening yesterday. Now to figure out what to do about it... (I'm thinking excommunication, personally).

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

(I'm thinking excommunication, personally).

That sounds like a reasonable course of action.

What happened?

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

Elementary ballot-box stuffing. I went in to check on the status of things in order to write the current-leaders page, and discovered that one Cardinal had roughly three times the average number of votes to his name (a number about seven standard deviations from the mean—not so very random, this). Apparently somebody decided he really wanted the Archbishop of Buenos Aires to win... anyway, I have some fairly simple countermeasures in mind that should quietly neutralize the distortion without adversely affecting anything else or being as noticeable as a straight IP ban (though I am somewhat tempted to redirect some people to that Crypto-gram link), so hopefully by the time traffic picks up again Monday I'll have those in place.

[ddreslough.livejournal.com]

I misread this as 'Hacking the PayPal Election'...and I was all like "Huh!? Paypal election? What's that?" and then I realized it's *just* about the Pope, and not anything /really/ important like paypal. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

*snicker*