Halloween 2004 Webcam Bots

One thing I hadn't anticipated with the halloween webcam being used to "vote" for Bush, Kerry, or the Hulk (see Hulk for President) is that some folks would try to "stuff the ballot" ... and write "computer bots" that keep accessing the webcam and voting for their favorite candidate.

When I dumped frequency of access from the halloween web stats, these jump right out ... and I've subsequently added some "fraud detection" code to the webcam itself to make tracking this stuff easier. So far, I've only stumbled across one "Bot" (there could be more!) and here are the detailed webcam logs themselves for it:

067.177.058.026 - hit the webcam 1,158 times and "voted" Hulk-75, Bush-58, and Kerry-540!

When I see this, I "ban" that IP from access the webcam and also pull the numbers ... so guys, you aren't doing your candidate any favors by doing stuff like this. Also, this is my personal family web site, so I'd also appeciate a little less hacking attempts.

Update: Voting Bots show up again for the 2008 Election!