Just like the real IT markets the Tech Buzz game is modelled on, somebody’s been hacking.

Looking at it one way, it’s an encouraging sign of the accuracy of the Tech Buzz simulation if someone really has successfully hacked it to improve their standing, or to make their company, brand or technology look better in this very public forum. But if your glass is half-empty, then the Yahoo! Tech Buzz game was first hacked only two weeks after it launched, and will be hacked again and again, distorting the underlying opinion market and the final results until either Doctor Flake packs up his bat and ball and goes home, or the winning technologies/brands/memes are declared as “Hacker networks” and “Linux”.

Nothing has been done to address the situation as of this time (it’s Saturday for pete’s sake) and the players are anxiously awaiting what remedy will be made, if any.

The game has been rampant with accusations between players of exploits that the leaders must be using. Exploits such as bogus accounts being used to funnel positive trade activity into a single account and bots to automatically and speedily detect opportunities to make trades and to effect those trades.

The exploit that players have fessed up to actually involves nothing more than buying a high performing stock and a low performing stock. Doing so in the right amounts, in the right sequence and quickly hoodwinks the software into paying out more than it should under normal conditions.

Players using this exploit amassed several million dollars in a short time whereas the leaders prior to this had portfolios of just over a million after two weeks of game play.

It will be interesting to see how this gets handled – as a player and as a sympathetic Yahoo!.

sort out your email

and get rid of the text ads and pic ads for paying personal address customers!

the cheek of it