Brexit ‘2nd Referendum Petition’ a 4 Chan Prank | Hacker News Reader

Brexit ‘2nd Referendum Petition’ a 4 Chan Prank

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19 pointsdoener11 comments

This is a fake story. The Petitions Comission know what they're doing and remove fraudulent signatures.

https://twitter.com/hocpetitions/status/747063424132255745

No, they don't. There's clearly more than 70000 fraudulent signatures if there are 30000 from Vatican alone.

Dunno about then, but there don't appear to be anymore: {"name":"Vatican City","code":"VA","signature_count":58} See for yourself: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/131215.json

It's entirely plausible that whoever wrote the script intentionally designed it to submit a large chunk of votes from "Vatican City" to try and discredit the petition, especially given /pol/'s political leanings.

{"name":"Vatican City","code":"VA","signature_count":58} Where did you get 30000 from?

A look at https://archive.is/https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/... supports the claim. Although, of course, one cannot really tell how many fraudulent signatures have remained undetected.

"Gamergate hero Sargon of Akkad", seriously?

Was it though? The people who develop the app surely account for basic voting fraud..

They do. They just removed 77,000 signatures for fraud: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/eu-referendum... (Which probably wasn't even hard - if you look at the claimed 4chan script, it uses the same postcode for every vote, which happens to be the postcode of the Houses Of Parliament.) The total number of signatures is over 3 million. Additionally, this article is from a right-wing tabloid site of questionable honesty, and is based on taking 4chan comments and random tweets at face value and then accusing the "Remainstream press" of failing to perform "basic journalistic research" for not doing so.

Never overestimate computer security, it's almost always worse than "surely it can't be that bad"

Well I've met people who've worked on the app, and I doubt that both these folks and a GDS team would miss the major hostile use case of the app.

Wouldn't surprise me if they didn't.

That said I'd say hold for now until confirmed: 4C can have equally much fun trolling us by pretending they trolled them.

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