IAMC Calls on TIME Magazine to disqualify Indian politicians
from TIME 100 online poll
Automated bogus voting attempts to create fake popularity
for Indian politicians in the midst of elections
Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC, http://iamc.com), a group dedicated to safeguarding India's
pluralist and tolerant ethos, has called on TIME magazine to disqualify Indian
politicians from the 2014 TIME 100 online poll. Millions of fake online votes
were cast using automated systems for Indian politicians Narendra Modi and
Arvind Kejriwal, sometime running into 1,000 votes every 5 seconds. In the two
hours between 1:15-3:15PM today (past midnight in India), over 1.4 million votes were
cast for candidate Narendra Modi. Since 6PM last evening (April 21st 2014),
over 4 million votes were cast for Modi and 2 million for Kejriwal. This
polling fraud has implications on the ongoing Indian elections where
perceptions on the outcome of the TIME poll have impact on the masses. Over 300
parliamentary seats go to polls in India between now and May 12th.
While the TIME Magazine poll is known to have been rigged for the last several
years, the Magazine has done little to address the issue. Although a detailed account of how Katie Perry was pushed to the top
spot in last year's TIME poll through automated polling has been published by
hackers, TIME continues to use the same polling service. What is rather
alarming is that TIME seems to actually believe in the authenticity of its own
online poll and is publishing 'news' reports based on how Kejriwal and Modi are leading in their
poll.
In order to demonstrate how easy it is to crack the TIME poll, IAMC has listed
below step-wise technical details on how fake voting can be automated on the
TIME Magazine poll:
Open a Facebook account
Using a browser recording tool such as Selenium, record a session for the following:
Go to TIME Magazine poll, click on the person to vote.
It will give the option to login to Facebook or Twitter. Login into Facebook.
This will result in the poll service accepting the vote.
Write a script that does the following:
Clear all cookies and other private data from the browser
Play the Selenium recording
Write an auto initialization script that continuously runs the above.
Save the virtual image of the machine.
Use the virtual image to launch hundreds or thousands of machines on a cloud service or data center to cast their millions of votes for the person of your choice.
This loophole can easily be plugged by TIME through the introduction of
industry standard techniques such as Captchas, however TIME has persistently ignored poll fraud
on its site for the last several years.
"TIME Magazine should reflect on its willing complicity in allowing itself
be used as a PR tool, especially when it has the potential to impact elections
in the world's largest democracy," said IAMC President Ahsan Khan. Mr.
Khan further called upon TIME to not include any Indian politicians in the
outcome of its poll. "Given the well documented history of the poll being
hacked year after year, it would be irresponsible on the part of TIME to
publish its poll results when elections are ongoing in India and the
top two candidates in the TIME poll are Indian politicians vying for higher
office."
IAMC also called upon the Election Commission of India to ensure that the
results of TIME 100 poll are not used as a publicity tool by the Indian
political parties during the course of these elections.
Indian American Muslim Council is the largest advocacy group of Indian Muslims
in the United States
with 15 chapters across the nation.
REFERENCES:
TIME: Indian Politicians Are Dominating the TIME 100 Poll
http://time.com/70002/indian-politicians-are-dominating-the-time-100-poll/
Rigging Time's Person of the Year poll? All in a day's twerk
http://www.dailydot.com/news/time-person-of-the-year-miley-cyrus-rigged/
TIME poll hacked by Modi BOTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U4hqNcZcQc