i personally know someone who is using a small thing he wrote for firefox to allow it to continue to answer the question every so often under all of his emails. i do not condone this but so far he has won 13 lic’s. also on other forums there are people who have won 6, 9, and i saw one who said he won 11.
many people can not win one. is there anything that can be done to stop that type of thing? why not use a captcha or something similar or would that not help?? i think its kind of ridiculous these people winning all of these free ones and a lot of legit people answering these can not win one. i dont mean to sound like a kid about it i just think a lot of people deserve then who cant win them…
again if avast doesnt care than i guess its fine and i do not want to come of as childish here either. i just know that a lot of people could use just ONE key and im sure there are others winning using throwaway emails and we will prob even see some on ebay soon enough…
I wonder if there is really any way to prevent this? I doubt facebook passes the IP address of the user to Avast, with out the IP address what other way would there be to identify multiple winners as one person?
To enter, all you need is the correct answer and a valid email address…
Facebook is only used to announce the winners, and you can open the pdf file without being logged into FaceAche as you call it
Let me clarify a few thinks. Our Winter quiz is available to everyone. Indeed we post our questions in English, however it is not limited to English speaking territories. I can ensure you, that every day we have many winners from all over the world. Our community of fans is global, so the contest is.
Rules are very simple. Every 20th correct answer is awarded, until we will reach 100 winners per day. In this way we give a chance to everyone, regardless of the time zone.
Also one person can not win more than one license (determinate by an email address → please check terms and conditions). We control this process every day.
Least but not last, if there is someone trying to take advantage of our contest, we are very sorry. However, we can not take responsibility of it. We set up certain rules, we do follow them, to make sure everything run smooth. Please remember, that there will be always someone, who is trying to misuse it, distribute illegal license, selling fraudulent products and as much as we are trying to stop it, monitor situation, it is impossible to eliminate it completely.
The same applies to our contests. We organised it for our community, to show our appreciation to our users. Our goal was to provide more people with enhanced avast! protection and we are doing our best to make it work.
So let me encourage all of you to participate on it. Have some fun with us and try your luck.
This is the problem with this process, the first post shows this in itself. People can and have won multiple licenses just by using a different email address and a script…
Surely there is some way to avoid this?
OT: welcome to the forum, the more avast! team the merrier
I think there needs to be an IP address matching function also to combat those entering multiple times in a short time (script) using different email addresses but the same IP address. This surely isn’t beyond the collective cunning of the avast team ;D
Just because most ISP’s use Dynamic IP’s for their customers, doesn’t mean it changes every few seconds, minutes, or hours. Usually, the default lease is about 8 days. In order for them to get a different IP address, they’d have to unplug their modem, or renew their IP address from within the modem and hope that they’d get a new IP. Most likely though, they’d get the same one. They’d have to leave their modem off for a number of days, wait for someone else to get their old IP address, then turn the modem back on to receive a new IP.
Or, they could go to a proxy website and run the script, but they’d have to keep doing that or using several different proxy websites and running the script once on every visit or every site.
As you can see, it would be difficult and painstaking. So basically, it could be very useful to have an IP Address matching function to thwart this type of “attack”.
My RoadRunner IP is dynamically assigned. It may persist for several days, weeks, or even a few months before changing. Even though my cablemodem MAC address is what is checked to authorize internet access, all I have to do is use the Clone MAC feature of my home router to have a new IP assigned. I’ve checked this a few times.
If I later change back to the original MAC of the router, usually I get the IP that was assigned to it unless RoadRunner has done some reconfiguration in the interim.
So what are you trying to say? Are you agreeing with me, or saying that you can get your ISP to generate unlimited IP addresses depending on if you use the clone mac feature or not?
I’d say that if you used it, you’d get one IP, and if you turned it off, you’d get another IP. That’s two IP’s, but not quite enough to run a script to answer questions on the avast site to get free AIS licenses.
Unless you start putting random MAC’s into your router’s mac clone. I don’t suppose that would be very easy either though. Change MAC, run script. Change MAC, run script…
I’ll get a new IP every time I enter a different MAC in the Clone MAC setting in the router. I’ve gotten 10 in a matter of 30 minutes this way, just to check. I have no practical purpose for doing so, other that curiosity.
OTOH, if someone wanted to go to the effort, I guess they could use it to register for the contest. As you state, it would take a lot of effort. Not worth the effort for us normal people. ;D
have to agree since the guy doing this is up to more than 25+ lic’s now… i think something should have been done to combat people doing this kind of thing. i personally think he is wrong and should not be doing it but all i can do is state my thoughts to him not much else.
now what about someone running say ddwrt and running a script within the firmware. couldnt they run a script to do that? im sure someone could figure it out though if they really wanted to nowadays anything can be bypassed / cracked etc if someone really wants to i would assume…
;D