Thursday, September 19, 2024

MSN Dutch Digg Clone Forgets Spam Protection

Recently (I honestly don’t know when), MSN launched a Digg clone in the Netherlands, called MSN reporter.

You can submit your story, and others can vote for it or against it. The top stories go to the MSN.nl homepage.

Now the boys at MSN haven’t really thought this through, as they store what stories you’ve voted on in… your cookie-jar!

So, deleting your cookie allows you to vote again, and even better, rejecting your cookie alltogether, allows you to vote as much as you like…

To make things even worse, you can vote, or “kick” in their terminology, for a story by simply calling a URL…

Now of course you can script this, which I did:

<?php
$i = 1;
while ($i < 1000) {
file_get_contents(“< kick-url >”);
echo $i;
$i++;
}
?>

I ran this script for a few seconds, and before I knew it, the story was on the MSN.nl homepage

Now come on MSN, you can do way better than that!

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About the Author

Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.

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