Stop Diana...

This year (2002), the BBC launched a campaign to discover the greatest briton of all time. They started off with lots of advertising to get lots of nominations of the public. This was followed by a programme counting down the top 100 greatest britons of all time, giving a quick life history of each. The countdown stopped at 10, and it was left for the public to vote on the order.

Each of the top 10 had a special programme dedicated to advertising them as tht greatest, members of the public were encourgaged to vote either online or by phone after each programme.

The top 10 were, (in alphabetical order)

The corporation says a "sophisticated method" has been used to multiple vote for Churchill, Darwin and Shakespeare

I was determined to stop Diana winning, and so was born a cunning plan. I wrote a piece of software to automatically vote online, for either Churchill, Darwin, or Shakespeare. The software also provided false email addresses and personal details to allow the votes to be made.

The software was capable of voting about once or twice a second, and I ran it whenever I went online over a period of about 2 or 3 weeks. I estimate I voted around 25,000 times.

Unfortunately I decided to run the software at about 4am one day, this gave me away as they must have noticed the large volume of votes at the strange time. Later that day the story made the BBC news