They should be able to see that a bunch of immediate up votes to this submission were from Redmond, WA IP blocks. There's no need to guess as to motivation then.
They can also look for people going straight to a story and upvoting there, upvotes clustered around MS domains, and other things. All of which are currently in the voting ring detection code.
HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).
HN has pretty advanced code to handle cases like what MS is being accused of right now, and none of it's been triggered (or this story would've gone up the front page then fallen back down).