A university student in British Columbia, Canada who caused malaysiakini 's poll mechanism to malfunction through a computer code that generates an abnormally high number of votes, has finally been apprehended by the campus authorities.

University of British Columbia's (UBC) representative Ron Paronchiak, in an e-mail last Thursday, said that university authorities, after being alerted by malaysiakini , had conducted investigations which led to the student as the source of the attacks.

He added that the student was not a Malaysian and was more interested in the 'mechanics' of the poll rather than the subject of the poll.

"It appears that he was more interested in the mechanics of trying to program automated voting than in your poll in particular," said Paronchiak.

He added that disciplinary action would be taken against the student.

Intruders warned

On Feb 28, malaysiakini reported that a computer in UBC's Physics and Astronomy department had been running a code which automatically cast as many as 10 votes a second for the "Don't know" option in the current malaysiakini

"The perpetrator ran a script which consistently connects to the poll and submits the third option. This may be a holdover from the earlier MCA poll where the same third option showed an unusual increase of votes," said Internet security expert Dinesh Nair, who helped malaysiakini to trace the culprit.

Malaysiakini had also faced problems with its past poll entitled 'Who can lead MCA best' which registered unrealistic vote counts pointing to the fact that it had been manipulated.

Malaysiakini chief executive officer Premesh Chandran said that such spam could lead to a website being inaccessible to readers.

"We have fixed the problem to ensure that readers can only vote once. We would also like to warn potential intruders that we will take action against them," he said.