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Comment by chris11 | Hacker News Reader

I think the original title, Iowa man convicted of lottery rigging scheme granted parole, works better.

He was a software engineer who worked on rng software for state lotteries. And he was charged with installing code on lottery computers to predict winning numbers. It sounds like a legitimate conviction to me.

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We've reverted the title now. Submitted title was 'Iowa man convicted of defrauding lottery with predictive code granted parole'.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hey dang, I see that this guideline is not currently duplicated on the submit page. Is there a reason for that? It seems like it would be useful as a reminder to submitters.

We generally don't put reminders like that on things, partly because we don't want to be nannies, partly because it's hard to know where to stop with such measures, and partly because of laziness. Or inertia, to be more polite.

Does this mean that only one person reviewed the code or that he was able to hide the predictable algorithm so well it passed review?

Sounds more like he was able to install software on the same computer to use the same RNG as the lottery. In essence not doing anything to the original code, but using known information about it to get similar enough results.

He did alter the code. See this comment for details:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30188266

Oh, yeah, that should have been caught.

This article goes into a lot more detail. It looks like it was just two lines of code. But apparently the codebase actually had backdoors already present. His employer, MSLA doesn't come out looking good. After winning a few lotteries Eddie actually reported the security hole and suggested a fix. It was ignored.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/...

From the current title I expected him to have cracked the state of a PRNG in order to be able to predict what the next numbers would likely have been.

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