I don't necessarily subscribe to that values system, but part of me understands the attraction.
It's pretty funny how butthurt the MIT people are that the Singaporeans and Taiwanese managed to beat them. If you look at the leaderboard[0], Houston even put the "United States Leaderboard" above the "Global Leaderboard" so that people would think that MIT was in first place.
For me in Israel, Israel's board was the top one.
Enrollment statistics of National University of Singapore http://www.nus.edu.sg/registrar/statistics.html or of National University of Taiwan http://www.ntu.edu.tw/engv4/about/about.html
I guess we disagree over the meaning of the term 'captcha' then. Besides that, it is also pretty trivial to spoof a MAC address.
> For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
Agreed. But there are smarter ways to do it. Take Gmail for example - it normally doesn't require you to pass a captcha. But if you fail a certain number of login attempts, it does. How hard can it be to start displaying a captcha after, say, 5 accounts get registered within 24 hours for the same IP address?
5 seconds per captcha * 30000 accounts = ~42 hours That is if they use can't OCR.
It wouldn't surprise me if they assumed it would be cheated, so this was an attempt to improve their fraud detection. After all, it's not like these extra 50,000 accounts actually cost much to Dropbox. They each will presumably have only the starting files in them which are all duped in every other account.
I see no problem with that ^^
If so, that expands the pool significantly :)
It doesn't matter when you can create unlimited e-mail addresses, though.
Maybe it's because I play quite a bit of online games (so I don't find it too troubling. Since there's no real stakes in play in this DB Race) but most gamers are always looking to calculate (or exploit), pushing the boundaries and efficiency of their playing experience. The only difference is the various levels each party takes it to.
To me (as a outside audience), the boring way is to get real students to sign up. Creatives and non conformers (trying to win) will be the ones to watch for. Whether it's auto email generation and sign ups, poking at DB servers to do w/e, or even posing as another university and massively signing up and crashing the servers and getting them disqualified. Imagination and how far/risk you're willing to go is the limit.
(And this is even more common and evident in competitions, like cute Dog photos, where most likes/votes win something - and you get people generating fakes and voting. Kinda expected more 'action' with all these tech schools involved.)
And those crying foul at the US Leaderboard being at the top - I'm pretty sure it depends on your position/location cause I'm seeing Canada leaderboard. So let's all calm down :D
If you fake users, you're getting the service without fulfilling your side of the bargain (paying money or recruiting users). That seems like fraud to me.
That being said, I'm sure Dropbox expected some of this behavior and is still happy with the legitimate signups and overall press they're getting.
Although, I was really hoping Georgia Tech would beat MIT for once in something...
(I was tempted to write a script to do something similar to what those guys did, but I can't afford losing my campus internet access if caught.)
