Students fool 'PINK' poll

By: Ashley Peskoe

Posted: 11/14/08

Drexel University is ranked first and has approximately 5.2 million votes on the Victoria's Secret PINK web site in a competition to nominate schools to receive a PINK collegiate line of clothing.

A computer script was written Oct. 21 around 3 a.m. in about three minutes, and ran for almost 12 hours on 30 different computers, casting approximately 1,500 votes per second, increasing Drexel's votes from approximately 1,000 to 5.2 million votes on the Victoria's Secret PINK website, according to Tim Plunkett, a pre-junior computer science major.

Plunkett and another student created an automated voting bot to add to Drexel's votes on the Victoria's Secret PINK web site.

"We figured out what happens when you click and we made a computer do that hundreds and hundreds of times without showing anything," Plunkett said.

Plunkett explained that the script was written out of boredom.

"We thought it was amusing to see the reactions of the people in the group [on Facebook], which were primarily sorority girls … they thought they had organized it very well and were accomplishing this on their own, which was hilarious to us. It was mostly just because we thought it was humorous that people were getting excited that we were winning," Plunkett said.

Drexel students weren't the only ones who decided to run scripts, according to Plunkett.

"Eventually it turned into MIT starting to catch up and we just didn't want to lose to MIT," Plunkett said.

According to the blog, Snively '11, on the mitadmissions.org web site, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Mason University also ran scripts to increase their votes.

A student from Texas Tech University also tried doing the same thing. However, he was using Windows and running the script on one computer, while Plunkett was using Linux and running it on 30 computers, according to Plunkett.

"Other schools tried to do the same thing, but we just did it better," Plunkett said.

Currently Drexel is ranked first with 5,201,957 votes, with Texas Tech University ranked second with 3,286,065 votes.

Facebook groups have been created by students at many schools to get people to nominate their school.

Chloe Snyder, a freshman majoring in nursing, decided during the first two weeks of school to create a Facebook group to try to get Drexel a Victoria's Secret PINK clothing line.

"We are a smaller school compared to a lot of the other ones that get the clothes so it's pretty cool that [we are at the top]," Snyder said.

The top five schools include Drexel University, Texas Tech University, George Mason University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michigan State University.

Our neighbor, University of Pennsylvania, is currently ranked at 73.

Victoria's Secret took down vspink.com for a short time after its creation, and when it came back up, a CAPTCHA was put in place, which was added to prevent automated voting, according to Plunkett.

According to http://www.leapinghare.co.uk/help/glossary.html, a CAPTCHA is: "An image containing a numerical or alphabetic code that can normally only be read and interpreted by a human. It is used to verify a form or other log in on a web site to prevent computers from spamming the form."

"If we were somehow to figure out a way to get past what they did now, that would be hacking, but no one has done that," Plunkett said.

According to Robert D'Ovidio, an assistant professor for the department of culture and communications who teaches courses in the Criminal Justice department including Introduction to Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Theft, the CAPTCHA is not fool-proof. However, it is probably the most prevalent way of securing this type of system.

Other ways to filter votes can include looking at IP or Mac addresses to block repeated votes from the same address, according to D'Ovidio.

Currently, messages appear on the Victoria's Secret voting web site that state, "Automated votes will not be counted" and "You can only vote once a day."

"That was not there when we started; we checked that because we didn't want to get ourselves disqualified. There were no rules, so we didn't break any rules," Plunkett said.

No one from Victoria's Secret media relations was available for comment; an e-mail and phone calls were not returned.