|
Cheating at
Online Polls! |
| |
|
The information in this article
applies to: |
- Windows 98
- Windows ME
- Windows 2000
-
Windows XP
|
| |
|
Everyone loves it when their favorite
team wins. Everyone also loves it when their favorite team, artist,
musician or movie wins an online poll. By using a couple of pieces of
free software, you can make your computer vote in many Internet polls as
often as you'd like - and with very little input from you! |
| |
|
To cheat at online polls
you will need the following:
|
| |
|
Some flavor of Windows - at least Windows 98 but 2000 or XP would be better. |
|
The Firefox web
browser (Internet Explorer will work too - see the bottom of the article
for more info) |
|
X,
a free security extension for Firefox |
| A
"macro recorder" program; I'm using
Mouse
and Key Recorder (free to try for 90 days) |
|
An Internet
connection |
| |
|
Summary: |
| |
|
We will install X,
which will allow us to dump Firefox's cookies with two mouse clicks. We
will then use the macro recorder to "record" voting in an online poll,
dumping the browser's cookies and then reloading the page; we will then
use the macro software to "play back" these actions as many times as you
wish. |
| |
|
Why? |
| |
|
"Cookies" are a way for some
Internet polls to keep track of whether you've voted or not. If one
deletes their cookies, he or she can vote as many times as they wish.
The Firefox extension simply makes the "cookie dumping" process a bit
easier than going through Firefox's native menu options. The macro is
there simply to automate the process so that you can vote several
thousand times when you're away from your computer. |
| |
|
Important Note |
| |
|
The methods outlined in this
tutorial are for online polls that only use cookies to keep track of
who's voting. Many (most) online polls use other methods for vote
tracking - such as recording your IP address. For those types of polls,
the following method is useless. To tell if this will work for you,
simply go to the poll site in question and vote, then dump your cookies
and try voting again. If the second vote is added to the total, the
following method is for you. |
| |
| |
|
Step By
Step: |
| |
1) Download
and install Firefox (if necessary) and also download and install
X
and
Mouse and Key Recorder
(or some other macro recorder). You will need to restart Firefox for the
X installation to complete. |
| |
2)
After restarting Firefox, you might see a new "padlock" toolbar on your
browser window that looks like this: |
| |
|
 |
| |
If you do not see the padlock icon,
click right-click anywhere near the address bar and select "Customize";
after doing so, drag the X (padlock) icon anywhere on your browser's
toolbar area you'd like. |
| |
3) Click on the the X (padlock) button; you will
see the following: |
| |
|
 |
| |
Uncheck all options except for "Clear all cookies"
(as shown in the picture above). Press "OK". Every time you click on the
padlock button, this will now be the default option. |
| |
4) Open Firefox if it's not already open and go to
the web page of the poll you're interested in. MAXIMIZE THE BROWSER
WINDOW! I'll explain why in a little bit. |
| |
|
5) Open Mouse and Key Recorder. The program looks
like this: |
|
 |
| |
6) Click on the "record" button (the button with
the red dot) and "record" yourself voting in the poll, then pressing the
X (padlock) toolbar button, pressing "OK" for the X button menu and
pressing F5 to refresh the webpage. Press the "record" button again in
the macro app to stop the recording. But before doing any of
that, please consider the following:
a) Windows creates an invisible grid on your
computer screen, with one corner being 0,0 and the diagonally opposite
corner being 1600, 1200 (or 1024, 768 or 800, 600 depending on your
screen resolution). When you move your mouse from point A to point B on
the screen, Windows notes (and the macro program records) these
movements on the grid. Therefore, it's essential that everything
on the screen be in the exact same place every single time, or
else the macro will "click" on nothing, or some other poll option, or
even some other link... whatever is in grid location 100, 528 will be
"clicked" on. This is why I told you to maximize the browser, so that
the poll options will be in the same place every single time.
b) Because of the previous point, keystrokes are
more reliable and are therefore preferable to mouse clicks when
recording macros. So whenever you can, use keys to do something you
might ordinarily use the mouse for. The prime example of this is
pressing the F5 key to refresh the poll's web page instead of clicking
the "refresh" button on the toolbar. Also, be aware that most
macro programs cannot record the movement of the "wheel" on your mouse,
so use the UP and DOWN keys on your keyboard to scroll up and down pages
instead of the mouse wheel.
c) Some macro programs include the amount of time
the computer sits idle between keypresses or mouse clicks while
recording macros, others do not (the program used in this tutorial does
not). It might therefore be necessary to add some pauses in your
macro to allow for slow-loading web pages. If you don't, the entire
process can be thrown off if your poll's web page takes even a second or
two longer to load in one instance that it did when you recorded your
initial vote. I'll show you how to fix this in the next step.
d) Remember: macros are stupid. All they record is
the mouse movements and keystrokes you tell it to record. If you
accidentally move the mouse while the macro is running, the macro will
click wherever the mouse ends up. If Firefox crashes and disappears from
your screen, the macro software will click whatever's underneath the
browser window. |
| |
| 9)
Click on the "Macro Code" tab and examine the code your macro just
generated. You will probably need to add a second or two between most of
your clicks and keypresses. You can do so by moving the cursor to where
you want the pause and pressing the "Hourglass" button. Each press of
the hourglass will add 300 milliseconds to the macro, therefore three
presses will add 900 milliseconds, or almost 1 second. |
|
|
|
 |
|
| Here is
the code that I'm using for a current Madonna poll:
{{Mouse 1, 1, 245, 611, 0
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{DOWN}
{{RelativeMouse www.hitz.fm :: Double the hitz - Mozilla Firefox, 1, 1,
273, 970, 0
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{RelativeMouse www.hitz.fm :: Double the hitz - Mozilla Firefox, 1, 1,
304, 41, 0
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{RelativeMouse Clear Privacy Information, 1, 1, 93, 193, 0
{F5}
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds
{{Delay 300} {{' Milliseconds |
| |
| It's
been running smoothly all day long on my machine. You will probably need
to play around with your macro to get it just right, but once it's good,
it'll run forever. |
| |
| 10)
Once you have a macro that runs well, set it to repeat as many times as
possible. To do that, click on the "General" tab in the Mouse and Key
Recorder window and set the number of "loops" to 99999. For example, in
the picture for step 5, Mouse and Key Recorder is set to run 50 times
and stop. |
| |
|
What If I
Don't Have Firefox or these Extensions? |
| |
| You can
use the macro recorder to record just about anything you can do with a
mouse or keyboard, so there's nothing stopping you from recording
yourself voting and dumping the cookies manually (in IE, click on Tools
> Internet Options > Delete Cookies > OK > OK... in Firefox click on
Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies > Clear). You can then refresh the
page in either browser with an F5 keypress. This is slightly more
cumbersome than my method, but it works too. |
| |
|
Legitimate
Uses of Macros? |
| |
| I feel
as if I might have done you a disservice by introducing macros in such
an unethical (and possibly illegal) setting. Please allow me to rectify
this situation somewhat by describing a completely benign use for
macros: repetitive computer tasks.
You see, one of my many tasks when I worked for
Digital Equipment was "closing calls". Each morning when I came to work
I was presented with a list of 60-70 "ticket numbers" and their
accompanying Airborne Express airbill numbers. To actually close the
call, I had to enter the ticket number into our call tracking system,
click a few buttons, type "this laptop repaired by Nashua, NH repair
center and shipped on [date] via Airborne airbill # [airbill number]"
into a text box, then click a few more buttons to actually close the
call in the system. It wasn't a lot of work, but closing 60 or 70 of
them was boring, repetitive and usually around an hour's worth of work.
And that was one hour I could have been playing Quake instead of
closing calls!
And so I developed a macro that would close all
of my calls for me using carefully formatted text documents. I'd open
Notepad and enter the ticket number on one line and press ENTER and then
enter the airbill number on a separate line and press ENTER again,
repeating the process for all the ticket and airbill numbers. I also had
a separate text file that contained the "this laptop repaired..." text;
this file contained that text only and needed to have the date updated
daily. By placing the two Notepad windows (and the call tracking
software window) in the same exact place on my screen each day, I
could run a macro that used CTRL+X (Cut) and the DELETE key to move the
ticket and airbill data "up" my list, while I used CTRL+C and CTRL+V to
cut and paste the "this laptop repaired " text into each call.
Typically, I'd set the macro to run while I was at lunch. I'd just make
sure everything was aligned carefully and BAM! the computer did the
rest! |
| |
| |
| Last Updated:
Friday, 07 April 2006 16:37
|
