Every day the News24 site has a user vote. I recently decided to take a closer look at their system – perhaps I could defeat the vote security. It would be fun (who says I’m a geek?) and I could learn something new.

I used a combination of Firebug and Python to watch their voting system in action. Pretty soon I realized that the security is very simple.

This is the process that News24 uses to record votes:

1. Show the user the vote (question and options) and get their choice
2. Go to a page that checks if the user has already voted
3. If the user has NOT voted yet:
   1. Save a file showing that the user has voted
   2. Move to another page that counts the vote
4. Move on to the results page

It’s a pretty simple process and it works as long as nobody messes with it…

The problem is that it is very easy to derive the URL of the page that counts your vote (3b). So you can skip all the checks and go straight there as many times as you like!

So I wrote a very simple program (34 lines in Python including copious comments and whitespace) that:

1. Fetches the vote details
2. Asks which option to vote for and how many times
3. Hits the vote counting page X times

As simple as that!

And no, I don’t use it. That would be pretty lame. The fun part was figuring it out and defeating a well known site. Not screwing up the polls for everyone.

These are some stunning photos of a kingfisher feeding. At first I only saw the one below (best kingfisher photo I’ve ever seen) and couldn’t figure out how the photographer got it right.

I managed to find the source page (check it out for high-res photos). It has some more stunning pictures which offer hints as to how the photographer could get the first shot.

I just came across an interesting website – Illusion of the Year Contest. They have a competition for best visual illusion of the year and some of the entries are great.

I’ve included some of my favorites below.

This one is very interesting. When you zoom out and the faces are smaller they appear to be looking at eachother. Zoom in and they suddently appear to be looking at you.

It seems like our brains use different heuristics to figure out where a person is looking. When no other information is available the brain uses darker patch in an eye to indicate where the iris is and hence where the person is looking.

When the images are closer and more information becomes available then the border of the iris itself dominates. Awesome illusion.

I really like this one. The two images are actually of exactly the same androgynous face. The only difference is the contrast. Higher contrast seems feminine while lower contrast seems masculine. I don’t really know why that would be the case – any ideas?

It does help to explain why woman wear contract increasing mascara, eye-liner, blush and lipstick.

Finally, this one is also pretty cool. The dots seem to be bouncing off of eachother. In fact the inner dot traces a square and the outer dot traces a circle. Maybe our brains have a hueristic to infer a relationship between them.

I just came across the website of that guy who does the 3D street art. He’s got a few new pieces on there and it seems that he is tackling a whole new scale. This stuff is very clever and excellently executed.

This page that includes a few of the images (the official page is quite rubbish).

His name is Edgar Mueller and he’s from Germany. He’s been producing street art for decades. It seems there is a whole street painting community because he was awarded the maestro madonnari’ (master street painter) at the world’s largest street painting festival.

National Geographic have put together this cool “infinite photograph”. They’ve used hundreds of user submitted photos to create an infinitely zoomable photo mosaic.

To see what I mean let’s go through an example. You start off with this image. Use the yellow border to choose an area to zoom into:

The app will zoom in to show the selected area made up of hundreds of small photos:

You can carry on zooming in forever. Eventually you’ll zoom in to a single image and the whole process starts again – hence the infinite…

The Economist has a very interesting article reporting experiments that show a relationship between smiling in a yearbook photo and divorce later in life.

The Experiment

• The experimenters got hold of about 700 yearbook photos
• The smiles in the photos were then rated
• Smile ratings were then statistically compared with divorce in later life

The Results

• Never divorced subjects had average smile ratings of 5.9
• Divorced subjects had average smile ratings of 5.2 (a statistically significant difference)
• Those who were least smiling were three times more likely to be divorced than those who were most smiling

It seems that statistically significant information can be gleaned from a thin “slice” of information. Smiles really do indicate personality.