Advocating for transparency and accountability in university governance.
The Age of Transparency will Revolutionize
University Governance and Management.
:: e-Governance :: e-Accountability :: e-Democracy ::
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Advocating for transparency and accountability in university governance. The Age of Transparency will Revolutionize University Governance and Management. :: e-Governance :: e-Accountability :: e-Democracy :: |
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FOI Poll - subversion attempt from Trent University OurTrent was conducting an on-line Freedom of Information Poll asking for a simple Yes or No to the question "Should Ontario's Freedom of Information Legislation apply to taxpayer funded universities?" Due to limited resources we selected a freely available tool known as Advanced Poll 2.03. Unfortunately the poll is not 100% secure and simply clearing the browser's cookies will allow someone intent on voting multiple times to do so and skew the results. If anyone out there can volunteer to securely host a poll on our behalf, please contact us. On November 25, 2004 there was an attack on this poll from machines under the direct control of Trent University. The attack consisted of stuffing "No" votes into the poll. We have accepted one of the "No" votes into the poll, for a grand total of 2 (the other came from the a machine at York University interestingly enough name served as "hegel.secretariat.yorku.ca" with an IP address of 130.63.215.104). The bulk of the vote stuffing events (269) came from Trent University IP address 192.75.12.74. Insiders tell us this is on the IP network that is restricted to the university's servers and to information technology staff (192.75.12.0/24). This raises a number of very interesting concerns. For example, who has access to this network and from whom do they receive directions? If the Ontario Universities were subject to Freedom of Information legislation then we'd have some ability to obtain this information and we might be able to identify the culprit(s) and the motives for this attack on our poll. We know Ontario universities don't want to be subject to Freedom of Information legislation, but has this university resorted to what some have called "ballot stuffing"? OurTrent has now suspended the poll as we do not have the resources to assure this kind of buffoonery does not recur. The poll ran for 43 days and collected a total of 172 votes:
Clearly the overwhelming response was "Yes". If anyone wishes to present an argument against including Ontario's universities under FOI legislation then please send it to the Editor at OurTrent and it will be posted. We specifically challenge those involved in the vote stuffing attack from Trent University to come forward and present their views publicly. Details of vote stuffing attack: Between approximately 7:00am and 12:25pm EST 5 machines under the direct control of Trent University subverted the poll by repeatedly entering "No" votes. The vote stuffing event took place in two waves. The first and major wave commenced at 8:54 EST and lasted roughly 25 minutes. The second commenced *after* the counters were reset by OurTrent to eliminate the stuffing commencing at approximately 1:23pm EST and lasting only a few minutes. These times are consistent with the normal working day at Trent University. The IP addresses and vote stuffing counts are;
Clearly some miscreants have too much time on their hands. Interestingly enough, all but 4 of the vote stuffing events came from the machine 192.75.12.74. The log of these events may be found below. One of the Trent University IP addresses involved was 192.75.12.151. This appears to be a Novell file server. Has it been hacked or was someone at it's console? All we did was enter the URL http://192.75.12.151:89 to get the result below (the text "/a?.BQ.e1.BQ.d" was added by the responding server). 
And similarly when try to access the machine by SSL using https://192.75.12.151:449 we get; 
When we examine the certificate we see that it was issued on November 15, 2004.  The machine is off line by the time you read this, or maybe access to it has been secured, and therefore you might not be able to see the same responses. These images were captured on November 25, 2004. Given the certificate was issued on November 15, 2004 it is reasonable to assume that this Novell server has been operational for at least 10 days and is therefore, one would hope, unlikely to be a rouge machine on Trent's network but rather a server under the control of information technology staff. There are a limited number of people (maybe 4) that have access to the network 192.75.12.0/24 *and* have a copy of the Novell software *and* have the required skill set (although rather basic) such that they can put up a Novell server and it's WebAdmin interface, even for a limited time. So, what's going on over there at Trent? If you're going to open an unlocked screen door and take the apple pie from the kitchen table, at least make sure you don't leave your very own unique muddy footprints on the floor! But would it not be better just to ask for a piece of pie? The results of a WHOIS search at Arin.net show the assignment of the network 192.75.12.0/24 is to Trent University:
Log of vote stuffing events (times are PST - add three hours for EST):
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