At the time of writing there are three and a half million signatories of this petition. Given that it has been running for a very short time, the chances of it reaching four million are pretty good. But what are the chances of anyone in the administration paying any attention to it ?
I thok it’s fair to say that for everyone who signed the thing there are probably another five who feel the same way but haven’t signed. That makes nearly 20 million people who do NOT want Brexit. I wonder if the maths has occurred to anyone in No 10. Fact is that HoC and No 10 appear to be living in bubbles where no-one really knows or cares what the general great unwashed actually want. Brexit is a symptom. not the cause of our present problems.
I think My’s deal is dead unless she pulls something amazing out of the hat. Next step is her resignation (doubtful, she is too arrogant). Lord knows who we’d get in her place but Labour may insist on a GE. Which means more breathing space from the EU. After that, who knows ? Without here resignation, it’s back to HoC to squabble over the next idea.
Isn’t this all EXCITING !!!
If you must quote dodgy statistics at least get it right. It was a piece in the Torygraph which claimed the ex Ugandan president had signed 700 times, apparently Jacob Rees-Mogg has signed it 8000 times. It doesn’t matter, people like to have fun and no-one checks the name and the Torygraph claim it completely unsubstantiated as far as I can tell.
This is Leaver rubbish. In order to sign, you must have a valid email address. Not difficult to set one up, but setting up 8000 email addresses would take you about two months of keyboard time. It isn’t possible to use bots with this type of validation. If you’ve already signed it, try signing a second time - you’ll see what I mean. Fact is, leavers can see Brexit slowly disappearing into the distance…
At the time of writing the petition has hit 4,685,918. Although it has slowed right down, it will probably eventually reach 5m. Coupled with the March in London, it might just change a few minds in HoC.
I could probably manage to sign several thousand times if I wanted - I run my own email servers so creating 8000 email addresses would be the work of a couple of seconds and I could easily arrange for email to those addresses to be handled by software which “clicks” on the link provided.
What would be trickier would be making it look like the requests came from a good range of IP addresses - it looks like the government is behind the times as petition.parliament.uk only has IPv4 addresses, had it been accessible on IPv6 I have control over what is known as a /48 network - 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 different IP addresses! Unfortunately because IPv4 space is very tight (effectively it is “full”) I only have control over 62 unique IPv4 addresses which is probably not enough.
I also only have two domains to use for email which might raise some flags, setting up multiple domains would be easy enough but it takes time for knowledge of a new domain to percolate through the 'net (usually 24 hours) and it costs money for each one registered.
The alternative is to set up addresses in gmail or something where no-one would raise an eyebrow over an extra 8000 but it’s a bit harder to grab the email and “click” the link automatically.
So, getting the petition signed 8000 times would be easy enough just getting past the “once per email address” test, but not so straightforward if they start looking at other stuff.
So then, if twenty or thirty computer savvy people such as yourself all worked together in unison over a period of 2 or 3 days, then the number of false signatures would be huge.
I daresay but unless you can automate it it would still be a lot of work and if you automate it it would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone who had a good look at the data.
The team which run the website seem fairly sure that most are not faked.
TL;DR - yes you could fake 8000 signatures, no it wouldn’t escape scrutiny.
I signed it twice. Once for me and once for my late husband whose email account is still active and who abhorred Brexit with a passion. He would have signed if he was still alive so it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I think it is just as likely that most of the “million” or so marchers yesterday… were, in fact, foreign visitors who took a wrong turning… 
