So I’m still looking into how Campus Change Coalition and its volunteer might have gotten some sort of knowledge of the voting results. People from other campaigns, privately, have been raising a stink about the link that CCC has posted to Duckweb on Facebook, which produces a Duckweb page with a frame with instructions from CCC and Rousseau’s campaign on it.
I got Ivar Vong, the Emerald’s resident Web expert, over to analyze the HTML encoding on the page and he said it was probably not capable of spying on DuckWeb votes, although “Jeremy Blanchard’s a really good Web developer.”
For anyone curious, here’s the code.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <title>Vote for Campus Change Coalition on DuckWeb</title> <link rel="icon" href="http://www.vote3c.com/favicon.png" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.vote3c.com/favicon.png" type="image/x-icon" /> </head> <frameset cols="250px,*"> <frame src="voteduckweb_sidebar.php" noresize="noresize" frameborder="0" name="sidebarframe" marginwidth="0" /><frame src="https://duckweb.uoregon.edu/" frameborder="0" name="duckwebframe" marginwidth="0" /> </frameset> </html>
The code you have posted above is simply a few frames put together. It is not possible for it to spy on who is voting for who. Also, unless you hacked Duckweb you wouldn’t be able to use a simple code like this to see who had how many votes… They were just saying that in the text to get peoples help. It’s a genius idea if you ask me
To be fair, the page you should really be looking at is the left sidebar HTML which can be seen here: http://www.vote3c.com/voteduckweb_sidebar.php
While I appreciate Ivar’s praise, internet protocols do not allow you to control content on other domains. The sidebar was simply to instruct users on where to go once they get to DuckWeb and to explain how they can go about voting for our candidates.
Really, everyone. Our text message was based on our internal estimates of the number of votes we had relative to the total number of votes cast. That number certainly wasn’t based on the number of people who went to our vote page. It was based on our discussions with voters.
Haha! The rumors are starting to pile in!
Though I am on the opposite slate as Jeremy, I have a lot of respect for him and can attest to the fact that this html code does not “spy” on Duckweb. The concept of an html code “spying” on anything external is kind of funny, you can only “spy” on your own information on your own computer (IE: catch a cheater kind of software that exists).
To actually spy on Duckweb you’d need a packet sniffer and a really good ability to dissolve script, which is essentially hacking. Which certainly isn’t visible via code, so if he did it we certainly wouldn’t know about it, but the UO IT team absolutely would– and elections certainly aren’t worth the risk of expulsion by hacking the duckweb server.