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At the ten thousand level -- the impeachment-themed "Grading the Senate," for example -- there's usually a hacker or two eyeing the gates. And to do their dirty work, they send in the robots. "Bots" to the initiated, these are simple, small programs written to vote again and again, thousands of times in a single minute, for the purpose of "winning" the poll or ruining its credibility. The ten-thousand-level hacker, usually an angry-young-man-in-a-dimly-lit-bedroom operation, doesn't have anything in his arsenal that Martino can't handle.
There are two types of identifiers that can be used to foil a bot: "cookies" -- a tag that a web site puts on the computers of its visitors -- and Internet Protocol (IP) -- equivalent to a computer's address on the Net. The good guys, like Martino, use these to target the computer hosting the bot and to block it from voting. (The perfect bot defense, of course, is to use a registration system such as those employed by Amazon.com and e-vendors to protect your credit card number, but there are few better ways to consign a poll to obscurity than to demand that would-be voters register. Just take a look at U.S. voter turnout.) The downside is that cookies and IP marking tend to slow down a poll's response time. So thousand-level polls, and sometimes ten-thousand-level polls, are often are left undefended.
Some polls, though, are more like nuclear explosions. One such followed India's detonation of nuclear devices last May. Our story noted that India was using the test blasts to send a message to China, and we ran a poll asking which superpower the U.S. should support if tensions developed. The poll went onto the wild, wild Web with no protection and was immediately overrun by bots. The hit count was gargantuan -- more than a million -- but so many of those hits were bot-driven that the results were more than faintly ridiculous. What had begun as a contest of passions between the Chinese and Indian communities (in the U.S. and abroad) had become a battle of hackers. One server in Rochester, N.Y., was discovered to have launched hundreds of thousands of pro-China votes at us. Wildly successful by commercial online standards (hits are the currency of the Web, after all) but embarrassing by journalistic ones, the poll was yanked, and TIME Daily learned its lesson the hard way: Controversial polls -- the ones that highlight centuries-old ethnic conflicts -- should not go out to the public without IP-based armor.
Internet Protocol is not inviolable. "It can be hacked," says Martino, "but it has to be someone with the know-how to get to the very kernel of a computer, and stop it from revealing its signature." He smiles. "Someone like me." Generally, however, techies with Martino's skills have jobs like Martino's -- computer-tech jobs that pay a lot better than sitting home and hacking news web sites all day, and the IP-proof voter hasn't yet appeared on TIME Daily's site. But there's another way to make a defender-of-the-poll's life miserable: Volume, volume, volume. And that's where the Turks rode in.