For those of you who are wondering what happened to the NYU-University of Michigan match-up, which appears to have vanished (“undefined”), here’s the explanation:
From: Nick Rau
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 1:29 AM
To: David Lat
Cc: Dan Beltramo; Andrew Touchstone
Subject: Law School Poll: NYU vs U of MichiganHello there, my name is Nick Rau and I’m the CTO of Vizu Corporation. We’re contacting you because one of your law school contest polls was the subject of a number of gaming attempts today. At least 4 different automated scripts were being run to try to influence vote totals beginning earlier today.
The scripts were starting to cause severe performance problems for the Vizu.com site. We attempted to block by IP the attempts but whoever was behind one or more of the scripts kept moving to new machines. We finally were forced to delete the poll to end the problem completely.
You can read about some of this activity and the involvement of some of the voters on the following blog post:
http://www.abovethelaw.com/2007/04/atl_march_madness_the_final_fo_1.php
We apologize that this measure was necessary but we had no alternative. Your Vizu Answers Poll Zone was never affected by any of this and continues to function normally, generating revenue. We are currently working on stronger authentication protections for our Web Poll widget and should have those in place shortly to prevent this kind of problem from happening in the future.
If you have any questions, please let us know.
Regards,
Nick Rau
Jeez, people. We’re very disappointed in you. This is a sad commentary on ethics within the legal profession — as well as the coolness of law students and/or lawyers. Don’t you people have anything better to do than cheat in a silly online poll?
We’ve asked for more details about the cheating from the Vizu folks (and we may disqualify one or both schools depending upon what we learn). We will keep you posted.
Earlier: ATL March Madness: The Final Four