Rick Astley's MTV Award Hacked, With Pleasure
October 09, 2008 | 10:22:22 AMCategories: Bands or Brands?, Digital Music News, Events, Interviews, Music News, Music Videos, People, Polls, Social Media, Videos 
After word dropped that Rickrolling phenomenon Rick Astley had been included in MTV Europe's laughable Best Act Ever category, to be decided by online polling and awarded at the network's gala in November, some resourceful individuals wasted little time in scripting stratagems designed to stuff the virtual ballot box to secure his victory. The most ambitious of these individuals goes by the handle Vote4Rick. He set up a site called -- what else -- Best Act Ever, which sends post requests via javascript directly to MTV's poll servers.
The maneuver garnered a nod on the Los Angeles Times, and it wasn't long until Vote4Rick, requesting anonymity, reached out to Listening Post.
"I know Rick was nominated as the result of a prank," he explained, "but I think it's interesting to do this as it goes against everything that MTV stands for. At least we have a good idea of the number of successful votes are going through by tracking pages that return as 304. We also have Python scripts, a bash script and something written in C, if someone was so inclined."
I asked Vote4Rick to elaborate on his Astley campaign, why MTV blows and why online polls are easier to hack than Sarah Palin's email account. Here's what he had to say:
Wired.com: Why are you doing this?
Vote4Rick: There are several reasons. First, Rick is a great artist. He's deserving of the award because of what "Never Gonna Give You Up" has become for the Internet community. It's an anthem of harmless fun. Second, apart from U2 and Rick, none of the other artists could be classified as "Best Act Ever." If we were being serious for a second, there would be acts like The Beatles and The Stones, but instead we have Britney Spears and Tokio Hotel? It's a sham. I've been involved in this from the very beginning, even with the nomination campaign, so it would be a shame to see all that work by people go to waste.
Wired.com: Do you have a beef with MTV?
Vote4Rick: No, I've got nothing against MTV in general; it's just that particular award is a bit of a joke. Another reason I am doing this is that I'm personally sick of being dictated to by the media in general on what we should and shouldn't like. This is our little revolt to show them that we decide what we like.
Wired.com: Do you think Astley should win?
Vote4Rick: I sure do. The man is absolutely brilliant and very humble. In my opinion, he's completely deserving of the award.
Wired.com How is the online campaign going?
Vote4Rick: Too well. On Tuesday, we logged about 6.7 million recorded votes with the RickVoter. On Wednesday, we're looking about 6.2 million. This number would be much higher, in the 20 million mark, but unfortunately there are still a lot of people using their own home-brewed scripts which are spamming MTV several times a second. So the servers have become unavailable a lot of the time. I guess the aim in the general web community's eyes is to get Rick as many votes as there are people on the planet. This would be fantastic.
Wired.com: Is this a goof on online voting contests? Are they easily hackable, and therefore, like MTV, irrelevant?
Vote4Rick: Online voting is a bit of a joke, if people running them don't take any steps to prevent this kind of tomfoolery. MTV recently posted a poll asking if Rick Astley deserves his nomination, and got nearly 20 million positive responses to 5,000 negative responses. The actual poll results were posted, but MTV moved the page. I actually have some numbers on the rate Rick was gathering votes. On October 3, the poll's results were 8,329,625 votes for yes, and 2,472 votes for no. Hours later that day, the results were 11,726,515 votes for yes, and 2,477 votes for no. In the same time it took Rick to secure over three million positive results, he had just five negative votes.
But even when there are steps taken to secure online polls, those can be easily circumvented. Often, all you need to do is turn off your cookies and continually vote in the same poll. Polls that use IPs can be tricked using proxies.
Photo: RickAstley.com
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