By Angela Gunn, Betanews
The editors of Time's current "World's Most Influential Person" poll would like you to think that their online poll wasn't owned hard by the denizens of 4chan's /b/ realm: "TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote," says the overview. Maybe, if by "extinguish" they mean "were kitten-helpless against." If you doubt the power of /b/, check out the first letters of the first 21 entries on the list.
Maybe the editors were making a meta-statement about the power of creative hacking, because the collection of exploits run against the poll are a nifty little set. Music Machinery's got a nice overview of how the multipart effort came off. So was Time asking for it by including 4chan founder moot (Christopher Poole) on their nominees list and implementing such slack security, or did they just include him for the lulz and get the excitement as a big /b/onus?
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009