4chan trolled Time 100

For the lulz.

All they had to do was look at the two words in the captcha, enter the proper label for the ‘easy’ one (presumably that would be the one that the two optical scanners would agree upon) and enter the word “penis” for the hard one.
...
I asked Ben Maurer, chief engineer of reCAPTCHA about this ‘penis flood‘ attack, Ben says that they’ve anticipated this type of attack and they have numerous protections that will keep the penises from penetrating the reCAPTCHA barrier.

On April 29 2009 10:57 inertinept wrote:
i do not know much about the internet. wtf does marblecake also the game mean

From the Time newspost announcing the winner...

In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.

Since moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world. (See the TIME 100 finalists.)

For proof of moot's influence on the Web, one need look no further than the TIME 100 poll results. While Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao got a larger vote total (20,391,818), the runner-up for the title of World's Most Influential Person, Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim, received a mere 47 on the influence scale. Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.

Undoubtedly, many people will question moot's worthiness of the title World's Most Influential Person. TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel says moot is no less deserving than previous title holders like Nintendo video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (2007) and Korean pop star Rain (2006). "I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll," he says. "Doubting the results is kind of the point."

On April 29 2009 10:49 Archaic wrote:

Priceless.


Even better.

“Marblecake, also the game.” Marblecake is a lewd sexual reference, but is also supposedly the name of the chat room where one of 4Chan’s online collective actions, Project Chanology, originated.

On April 29 2009 12:19 triangle wrote:
I think manipulating 21 spots deserves some recognition. It was a more sophisticated rigging.

On April 29 2009 12:19 triangle wrote:
I think manipulating 21 spots deserves some recognition. It was a more sophisticated rigging.

On April 29 2009 12:28 Jayme wrote:


This. 21 spot manipulation of a quite well known voting poll is pretty damn impressive.

Like they said, 4chan is generally full of idiots but it's really amazing what that group of people can do when they really mobilize their resources. They do have a penchant for running better than most startup companies. If they used that ingenuity for a more constructive purpose you'd have a multi-billion dollar cooperation on your hands.