Marblecake Also The Game
.. or how Time Inc got their asses handed to them by a bunch of internet users with a great deal of time, creativity, imagination and just plain pwn on their hands to dish out.
Long story short, TIME’s annual list of 100 most influential got gamed big time, with the rank 1 position going to ‘moot’, founder of 4chan.org, who basically perpetrated the scheme. Better yet, although TIME sort of admitted that they did notice attempts to hack the voting process, they claim that the final result is unblemished. Riiight. The title of this post is named after the initials of the top 21 names in the list. I highly doubt that’s a coincidence.
The denial’s pretty typical of big media. Admitting weakness, or even worse – incompetence – is one thing that probably won’t happen in either your or my lifetimes, barring cases of monumental fuckups such as share prices dropping to rock bottom levels, or when public scandals force information out into the open via legal means or otherwise. Obviously, TIME isn’t willing to admit that a bunch of internet users figured out how to get past their Captcha implementation, and instead stood by the results as they were.
There’s a very thin line between appearing to look like you’ve got integrity, and looking stupid for getting embarassed and not even being willing to admit to it. On which side do you think TIME stands?
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