The Tab's recent survey for the worst College in Cambridge University has been rigged by a group of hackers from Girton College.

The survey, posted almost two weeks ago on The Cambridge Tab's website, offered visitors a choice of six colleges of the total twenty five. After a brief period of alternation between different colleges, Girton began to receive a large percentage of the votes and gained a majority.

In response to this, two Girtonians created a computer program to repeatedly vote for all of the other colleges on the poll. The program, that ran for five days, amassed a total of 49,352 votes across the five other colleges.

The colleges in the survey included Homerton, Murray Edwards, and Churchill, as well as the less infamous Corpus Christi and Peterhouse. Postgraduate and mature student-only colleges were excluded: according to the survey, this was done "in the interests [sic] of healthy competition".

The percentage of total votes that these Colleges held rose to around 19%, while Girton eventually dropped down to holding only 6% of the votes.

The program was created and implemented on Wednesday the 29th of May, a day after the survey had begun.

According to the poll, Peterhouse is currently the worst college with 19.4% of the total votes, 0.5% ahead of Corpus Christi. Of these five Colleges, Churchill has seemingly come out on top with only 17.59% of the total votes.

With only 5.77% of the total votes, Girton appears to have emerged as the best of the worst Colleges.

In order to investigate further, I plunged head first into the underbelly of the Girton college community to wrench free the dark truths behind this conspiracy, and deliver them (the whole 2.4 miles) unto the scandalised public.

Then in the name of Varsity and the exposition of unbiased truth, I sound forth the depths of perhaps the biggest Cambridge conspiracy to ever scar the Tab's sterling reputation for journalistic integrity. Presenting: Varsity Panorama...

*

My investigation began on the grapevine, hearing that a Fresher studying Natural Sciences originally encouraged the two conspirators to write the program. Pursuing this lead, I attempted to isolate him in the hope of an interview.

As a Girtonian myself, I decided that the ideal place and time to find the suspect would be between the hours of 18:00 and 19:00 in the Girton Dining Hall – what we Girtonians like to fondly refer to as “The Heart of Civilisation”.

This required me to traverse the vast distance between the canteen and my room at the end of B corridor, a location dubbed “the Girton of Girton” due to its estrangement from nearly all useful College facilities. Fortunately, my superior Girton Thighs enabled me to make the journey with ease – a journey I know many people from less superior colleges have died attempting. This is  why nobody ever visits me – not because the distance of my College is too great for any non-Girtonians to bother with friendship.

In the Dining Hall I soon found the table I was looking for. It became clear that the student responsible for the scandal was involved in the most infamous group of Girtonians in the world. It is known that the “flair” this group exhibits in “banter” can be so hot that the central heating of Girton frequently flares into overdrive as a result (and not because of poor radiator design of dubious energy efficiency).

As I approached, the narrow gap between tables that I had to squeeze through called to mind a certain passage from Psalm 23:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil”,

This was because their sinister reputation was as scary as the metaphorical shadow of death, not because of arguably rubbish lighting conditions that engender a state of perpetual shadow.

The identities of the three conspirators were instantly confirmed. I proceeded to ask for an interview with the organiser, but I was rebuked by claims that it would negatively affect their reputation. After pushing further, they insisted that the hack was, in fact, not amusing at all, but “kind of lame”, and I was denied any further information at that time.

Fortunately I was able to pin down the main organiser later on and catch a few words. He wished to remain anonymous.

"The original program didn't work fully. It was only a second update to the program that did, that checked for responses to ensure that the votes were being registered. To make sure it worked we tested it out on Homerton.

"It was updated again to make sure that we got a nice, random distribution among the results. And after that it went international."

International?

“Yes. [The hackers] then used proxy servers. Basically, they ran the program from thirty computers around the globe, in Indonesia, Thailand, the Phillipines, Saudi Arabia... all over the place.”

This enabled the 40,000 votes to be made in such a short time. “Lowering Girton's percentage further would take a lot longer. Because in order to get it down further, say to 2.5%, we would have to get about 60,000 more votes.”

And are they going to push for a lower number?

“To be honest, I'd be happy with a third of that...”

The percentages did not change noticeably over the next week.

I later managed to track down the two students that wrote the program, neither of whom study Computer Science. They were willing to grant me an interview, and also wished to remain anonymous. I was however permitted a photo of one of them in action, under the condition that his identity remain protected.

When they were originally called by the organiser, Girton were at 25% on the poll. [Hacker #1] talked to me first. “The thing was, only a day after it had started, there were already 9,000 votes on the poll. You could tell that something was going on. I mean sure, the Tab is a busy place, right? But it's not that busy. So we were basically just fixing what went wrong”.

When I asked whose idea the proxy servers were, the other one turned to me and claimed it was his. [Hacker #2] had had previous experience with hobby programming and the C# programming language that they used. After writing the first program together, #2 taught #1 the code within half an hour. While he went off to sit an exam, #1 improved the program, until #2 returned and got straight back to it.

This version before the proxy servers required them to use several different computers to work with efficiency. “I basically got it on a flashstick and then just went around to all the computers in Wolfie [Wolfson Court, a quaint town retreat for Girtonians] used by people revising. I just asked, 'hey, mind if we run this totally legit program?' Surprisingly people were up for it!”

“The problem was,” piped up Hacker #2, “if you voted too often from one IP address, you can't vote anymore.” He paused. “So we got more IP's.” Through proxy servers, they were able to access hundreds of IP addresses at a time.

“It was hilarious. There was a comment on the post - 'Girton have the best bot makers'. That was probably the high point”.

What's next? “Tab today – Washington tomorrow.”

I asked them what they thought the worst college was – while Hacker #1 expressed a dislike of John's, Hacker #2 remained silent. The only conclusive agreement they reached between them was that it was “not Girton”. Clearly then, the question remains unanswered.

After the interview, I was taken back to one of their rooms where they finally showed me the program in action. The name “Girton stikes back v5” crested a box on the screen. “We built a window interface into this final version."

They pointed to an on-screen window that was pitch-black. Then, after configuring the proxy servers – mostly from the USA and China, but a few from South Korea and even Columbia – they ran the program. A wizz of white writing trickled down the black box.

“Each line of writing is a vote.” I can't be certain, but I imagine there were probably around 10 votes per second.

“We haven't run it since last Sunday”, they tell me. “To be honest, we didn't want to do too much as it might have crashed their server. That would probably be illegal, and at the end of the day, we only wanted to play around a little bit."

As they themselves concluded - it's only the Tab, after all.