Bye bye Theresa

[Simon]

To be clear, by April 12th they want a 'new plan' submitted to EUCo if the deal isn't passed next week, whereby a long extension may be agreed. We could always choose not to submit one and be out on 12/4, but I don't think this story has run its course yet.

[Simon]

You know it is Government policy not to take no-deal off the table. It IS Parliaments 'will' to avoid a no-deal, but Parliament has no majority in how this is achieved.

I do believe that with the reality of no-deal staring at them squarely, that they are bending to do things to avoid it.

[Simon]

[Jimmy Choo]

Currently at 1,056,236 with 22 new signatures per second.

And the petition website is down...

Just gone past 1.5 million

2.94million and rising...

[Brannen]

Not even sure how much it matters to TM?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... article-50

Finally got the verification email through about 4 hours after signing the petition

[Jimmy Choo]

She's never going to change her mind (or her proposal).

I'm seriously hoping for a coup.

[Richard]

She's never going to change her mind (or her proposal).

I'm seriously hoping for a coup.

Military?

[Jimmy Choo]

She's never going to change her mind (or her proposal).

I'm seriously hoping for a coup.

Military?

Couldn't be worse than what we have now, could it?

[Marv]

She's never going to change her mind (or her proposal).

I'm seriously hoping for a coup.

Military?

Even the monarchy staging a coup would be preferable to what we've got at the moment.

[Richard]

From 9 months ago..

A guy at work often listens to James O’Brien.

From what I can tell, his show is about getting knuckle dragging morons to phone in, real thick as shit types, and then James debates them about Brexit.

James is an intelligent chap
Knuckle dragger usually isn’t

James, well read and well researched makes fun of thick as shit phone in-er

People listening feel good about themselves, because they side with a James, and he shows up the other side as being intellectually inferior

[Simon]

I've phoned in and spoken to him a few times

[Zonda_]

From 9 months ago..

A guy at work often listens to James O’Brien.

From what I can tell, his show is about getting knuckle dragging morons to phone in, real thick as shit types, and then James debates them about Brexit.

James is an intelligent chap
Knuckle dragger usually isn’t

James, well read and well researched makes fun of thick as shit phone in-er

People listening feel good about themselves, because they side with a James, and he shows up the other side as being intellectually inferior

He always has a balance of callers it's just the ones who demonstrate weapons grade stupidity that go on YouTube.

[GG.]

Currently at 1,056,236 with 22 new signatures per second.

And the petition website is down...

Just gone past 1.5 million

2.94million and rising...

Has now just topped 3,000,000... however, 1.2 million of those are from outside the UK so would be ineligible to vote. That also doesn't take into account duplicates. Apparently you can just keep going even using the same email address as verification. The "Tower Hamlets" approach I think its called.

When you add that to the fact Clarkson got to over 1,000,000 for his reinstatement after ABH to his producer, it really doesn't look so impressive anymore

ETA: to be fair, apparently you can get through to the next page but you don't get a confirmation email if you use the same email address so you'd at least have to use different accounts. I personally have 3 separate email addresses that I use so still quite large scope for abuse. The funniest thing obviously is that getting these petitions above a certain level assures a debate in parliament. You can add another one onto the list for Brexit then

[Beany]

Has now just topped 3,000,000... however, 1.2 million of those are from outside the UK so would be ineligible to vote.

1.2million aren't 'outside the uk' - they've just not had their data added to the public facing data (All available on the json link on the page) - unless you'd like to show me what countries these 1.2 million are from, as from what I can tell, there's a few tens of thousands recorded as being outside the UK. Given there are several hundred thousand ex-pats in Spain alone, that's hardly staggering numbers.

As I understand it from doing a bit of reading at lunchtime, it's likely they've turned off realtime location upload (while still keeping their anti-spam and anti-abuse filters) to the main front end database source to preserve performance of the main petitions site itself. Don't have the links to hand because of course I don't. But suffice to say, there's only so much you can do with AWS scaling, and caching.

That also doesn't take into account duplicates. Apparently you can just keep going even using the same email address as verification. The "Tower Hamlets" approach I think its called.

You'd have to be remarkably gullible to believe that.

ETA: to be fair, apparently you can get through to the next page but you don't get a confirmation email if you use the same email address so you'd at least have to use different accounts. I personally have 3 separate email addresses that I use so still quite large scope for abuse. The funniest thing obviously is that getting these petitions above a certain level assures a debate in parliament. You can add another one onto the list for Brexit then

OK, so lets say everyone else has three separate email addresses (and no, you can't use 'disposable' addresses - that is weeded out) - and is sad enough to 'vote early and vote often' - that's still a million people who are significantly more motivated than the average person.

It's not like May is going to pay any attention to it anyway, as she has already stated quite clearly, last I checked.

[Richard]

That also doesn't take into account duplicates. Apparently you can just keep going even using the same email address as verification.

Nope

[NotoriousREV]

That also doesn't take into account duplicates. Apparently you can just keep going even using the same email address as verification.

Nope

Yep, it’s bollocks. They’ve stated very clearly today that each email address must be unique. It turns out denial isn’t just an Egyptian river.

[NotoriousREV]

Looking for a hard pill to swallow?

[NotoriousREV]

Posted without comment.

[Beany]

Just to be clear, here's what Unboxd (those who do the technical work for the petitions site) had to say about the last big push on the petitions site.

It covers literally everything that Julia Hartley-Brewer - who is undoubtedly the laughably misinformed idiot pushing these conspiracy theories and where G.Gs info originated from, in some form - pushed and rubbishes it.

This was over two years ago, by the way, and they shored the service up then. The current eyes on the petition has managed to break even that from a performance standpoint.

https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/08/ ... eferendum/

1.2million 'not from the uk'

The other change we made was related to a feature that tracks signatures by country. The vast majority of signatures coming from the UK caused a database bottleneck so we had to disable UK signatures from being recorded (in the signature counts per country statistics) while we fixed the problem. The country was still recorded on each individual signature and the signature was still recorded in the overall count during this period. The API published an incorrect count for UK signatures for a while but this count isn’t exposed by the main public website, and our petition map website, which displays signatures by constituency, wasn't affected.

'multiple email accounts'/email fraud/throwaway domains:

Since 90% of our emails are sent to large providers like Google, Apple and Microsoft that have their own anti-abuse measures, we are generally confident that these are valid accounts. This assurance allowed us to focus our search on emails coming from so called ‘disposable domains’, which are temporary email accounts that only exist for short periods before being discarded and can be created by scripts. We have a list of these domains but new ones are created constantly so it was just a matter of checking for these new domains.

Another warning sign is large numbers of signatures coming from the same IP address and this coupled with the domain checking allowed us to invalidate around 30,000 signatures that purportedly came from the Vatican.

We had similar reports about signatures coming from Bracknell. By the time the reports were published, we’d already removed the signatures as we were also checking the predicted number of signatures for each constituency compared to those we observed (an analyst also confirmed independently the signatures were fake).

The rest of that page is worth a read. The petitions site was never some rinky-dink setup - it's pretty solid, and currently under load that had never even been considered, even after the 2016 petition which was also unprecedented - which should give an idea of just how many people are clicking the link.

[DeskJockey]

Now just shy of 3.8m signatures. Comparing the two petition themes, it is 90%+ in favour of revoking A50.