2600 Magazine_ The Hacker Quarterly - Digital Edition - Summer 2011 - 2600 Magazine [9]
Finally, I won. It all ended happily. The grand prize was won by a recently married couple who posted their sweet photo everywhere online and asked people to vote. One thing that I found significant about this and others’ legitimate projects was that, when analyzing sources of their votes (IP blocks), it turned out that they were spread evenly and over a large number of different networks (hundreds of different networks), while votes for cheaters' projects were coming in large quantities from only a few networks.
Conclusion
OK, so what's the conclusion of this story? Sometimes, you have limited resources and you can't apply sophisticated techniques to protect your application, but looking into the logs and trying to get into the bad guys' minds can help you to defeat the evil (of course you can "look" into logs in some automated way - that is something I plan to work on, having new experience from these projects).
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Telecom Informer
by The Prophet | 1349 words
Hello, and greetings from the Central Office! It's been an interesting few months. Things have settled down into a reasonable rhythm in bringing our new Central Office online and, with the project schedule on track, I've been able to enjoy a little personal travel around Asia. My most recent trip was to the DMZ, one of the world's most dangerous places.
In 2005, I was one of the first Americans to visit the DMZ from the north as a tourist, so it was interesting to see it from the southern side a few years later. The experience visiting from the north or south is largely the same, each side detailing a litany of grievances that have not been resolved in nearly two generations, showing off weapons seized from the other side, and claiming their soldiers will protect you from the opposite side's aggressions. The two Koreas are like perpetually quarrelling siblings, with long-held grudges over disagreements that ceased to really matter decades ago but are still unforgotten, each side staring at the other over the world's biggest spite fence. The only difference is that an angry shouting match has the very real possibility of escalating into World War III. This is, presumably, why Bill Clinton called the DMZ "the scariest place on earth."
Despite being technically still at war, separated from North Korea by an uneasy armistice and thousands of troops, South Korea is an incredibly modern society. On my last visit to Japan, I found myself wondering where all of the new technology went. Having visited Seoul, the answer is obvious: Korea. It's not often anymore that I find myself completely marveling at technology that I've never seen before, but in South Korea you'll find that this is commonplace. From enormous displays at bus stops that provide multi-touch enabled satellite maps you can use for trip planning to ultramodern mobile phones, Korean society is at the leading edge of technology.
This is particularly evident in telecommunications, nowhere more evidenced than mobile phones. Like Japan, South Korea doesn't support GSM. Only flavors of CDMA are supported, both WCDMA (which many AT&T and T-Mobile USA world phones support) and 1xRTT/1xEV-DO (used by Sprint, Verizon, and US Cellular in the U.S.). If you carry a GSM-only phone, you can rent an unlocked WCDMA-capable handset at the airport for about $3 per day (plus a hefty deposit), and if your carrier allows you to roam on a South Korean carrier, you can simply insert your home SIM card. Strangely enough, though, I couldn't find a local SIM card for sale to use in my WCDMA-capable HTC phone. You can only buy one along with a prepaid mobile phone. Foreigners are only able to buy prepaid handsets, and are not allowed a monthly subscription.
I carry a WCDMA-capable handset and my Chinese carrier has a roaming agreement