There's tonnes of rumors about how to get sockets but they all lack evidence and complete information. If you approach it logically, there must be some kind of random chance. Only a team of idiot programmers would base a random calculation purely on the time of day for instance. Also, why would they bother with complex algorythms to determine socket chance that have the possibility to be predicted when one simple line of code can generate a random number that cannot? Admittedly, if the number generator is seeded to the system clock then there could be a time correlation, but, a difference of 1 millisecond would mean a radical difference in the generated number.
I know random number sequences can be predicted too, but only in a perfectly ordered environment, there's a ton of entropy being introduced by the unpredictable actions of players. You could only correctly predict the sequence by knowing exactly how many times it is being hit due to the actions of other players, and seeing as you cannot effectively do that without having a character logged in to every single visible zone in the game, it's a near impossibility.
Based on that, my conclusion would be that sockets are completely unpredictable.