See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
August 15th, 2007Anyone with the sophistication of a computer literate 12-year-old could render this IP tracking tool for Wikipedia edits worthless.
So, either:
1) The CIA, Diebold, et al don’t know what a computer literate 12-year-old knows;
or
2) Someone 0wNs machines that trace back to CIA, Diebold, et al and wanted to make them look like idiots.
Take your pick.
Again, any miscreant with even half a clue would be able to obscure the origin of the sessions with ease.
Via: Wired:
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
I’m gonna go with choice number one. The flunkies tasked to “wikipedia trolling” are probably pretty freaking low on the food chain, and I’m sure their computer skills reflect that.
Or maybe it’s just some asshole within his respective organization who had some spare time?