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Domain: virgil.gr

Stories and comments across the archive that link to virgil.gr.

Comments · 11

  1. Re:Mirror it quick by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 1 · on US Federal Government Launches Data.gov
    Similar to this?

    http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

  2. Re:Wikipedia = The Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Wikipedia Gears Up For Explosion In Digital Media

    Holy shit. Relax. I'm fairly sure the GP was made in an earnest effort to encourage skepticism and not to be another dick bashing Wikipedia.

    I have personally corrected the article on the C programming language of a pretty glaring error that dated back years. A few days ago I corrected an article that referred to "sex autosomes." Looking at the history showed that the article was correct in this regard at one point until an anonymous IP—of a block allocated to a higher education institution no less—transposed the appearance of "chromosomes" and "autosomes." Given that there was a history of vandalism originating from that IP and the firsthand admissions I've come across of people intentionally making innocuous, malicious edits to Wikipedia on esoteric topics, I encourage skepticism as well.

    For barrels of fun use WikiScanner to check out the edits of your local university. Whenever I'm at a publicly accessible terminal, I'll usually check contributions originating from my IP. Sometimes you'll find vandalism, sometimes still present, and you'll come across other less curious notions (e.g., people are really into college football).

  3. Re:Tagged "fuckviacom" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom

    Edits to Wikipedia by US Courts are pretty interesting....

  4. Re:Making the body politic a mob. by fictionpuss · · Score: 2, Interesting · on The Coming Digital Presidency

    The idea of using Facebook, MySpace, and Digg as instruments of government is, in some ways, breathtakingly foolish. Reading the content on Digg - full of conspiracy theories, slander, and bigotry - seems reminiscent of the chants of a mob, not the (theoretically desired) reasoned vox populi. Well yes, it would be breathtakingly foolish to suggest that these immature technologies would be used, in their raw form, to create meaningful input for governance.

    That is not at question however - these technologies are a low-level protocol which will require some higher-level (as of yet undeveloped?) protocol to become meaningful and coherent.

    are we perhaps seeing an organized campaign(s) manipulating Web 2.0 sites for their own purposes? With anonymity of site users, who can tell? It's a good argument against trusting anonymous sources, but even Wikipedia with Wikiscanner allows a certain amount of accountability. The problem appears to be tracing back rumour/FUD/misinformation to its source and a relatively (more objective than subjective) trustworthy mechanism to evaluate sources over time.

    Social Media sites dramatically lower the costs of individual citizens involvement in the political process. That's a Good Thing. Yet if we don't anticipate and accept the manipulation of those sites by external agencies and those with far too much time on their hands, we're bloody damn fools. Agreed - social networking is still pretty darn young as a technology concept though, I predict that by the end of this year we'll start seeing more ways in which we can detect and thwart the devious plot of Company X, Campaign Y or Astroturf Org Z. FWIW, I'm working on one now, and I don't expect that I'm alone.
  5. Since anonymity is guaranteed? by Itninja · · Score: 3, Informative · on "DonorGate" Is Latest Scandal To Hit Wikipedia

    Most peoples' edits are anonymous on Wikipedia only to the most surface of observations. Even minimal digging can reveal an IP, and then the Virgil scanner can do the rest. Of course, there are a some folks out there that can purposefully hide their IP identity. But still, I wouldn't call Wikipedia edits "anonymity guaranteed"

  6. Wrong Approach? by fictionpuss · · Score: 2, Interesting · on The Knol Hypothesis
    The problem of article citation in Wikipedia isn't due to the fact that anyone can edit, more so the fact that it's hard to trace who is saying what and why. Attributing editorial control of a 'knol' to an expert introduces a bottleneck which, as the article states, may be fine for those wanting to learn about Abe Lincoln but which cannot scale as dynamically as the free-for-almost-all Wikipedia approach.

    I think a better approach would be atomicize knowledge (e.g. "Hugh Hefner shaved his beard on 02/10/08"), make that source a verifiable resource attributable to individual users and then attribute adsense payouts dependent on page counts for ($num_verified_references - $num_unsubstantiated_rumours). You could then retain the successful wiki model for article construction but with greater trust for the facts contained. But then I, sadly, don't work for Google and I'm probably missing something significant.

  7. Spooks editing on Wikipedia by vinsci · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Googlestalking For Covert NSA Research Funding
    Heading over to WikiScanner and searching for edits by the block 1.0.0.0 - 1.255.255.255 reveals that these ghost IP:s are editing the Wikipedia. Rather odd edits:

    ip / title / diff / comment / time

    1.1.1.227 ICF International [cur] 126207619 2007-04-26 19:14:34
    1.1.1.135 RFA Brambleleaf (A81) [cur] 114096896 2007-03-10 17:53:01
    1.1.1.127 Tata Young [cur] 118261241 /* Thai teen superstar 1994-1995 */ 2007-03-27 14:15:10
    1.2.3.4 User:Kate/lbtest2 [cur] 17115250 testing 2005-01-15 02:58:49
  8. Slashdot Scanner? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Ask Rob Malda

    You said when Slashdot started you were blown away to see in the server logs visits from people at influential institutions, including Microsoft.

    Have you ever thought about doing a Slashdot equivalent of Wikipedia Scanner?

    One wonders just how much astroturfing goes on in Slashdot w.r.t. both products and politics.

  9. Virgil Griffith and Wikipedia by Blissyu2 · · Score: 1 · on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia

    At the top of the wired blog comments right now is this one: Wikimedia Foundation employee removes source about Wiki Scanner funding by Anonymous Vishal-WMF, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, has removed evidence from a news story that uncovered that Virgil, the scanner's creator, was HIRED by the Wikimedia Foundation! News story that was removed by Wikipedia Employee (not admin, EMPLOYEE): http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_vi ew.asp?at_code=428814 Backup archive link in case the WMF 'vanishes' the evidence: http://www.webcitation.org/5RAEP2kAl Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgil_G riffith&diff=prev&oldid=151814656 Yet Wired has claimed that this is a "false claim": "Update: 8/17/2007 A Wikimedia Foundation employee really did edit Virgil Griffith's entry today, but only to cut a false claim that Griffith was employed by the foundation to create the scanner. " So what makes Wired assume that it is a false claim? This is the same guy that brought us Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services, and he is stating something as fact, not as an opinion. "On July 26, OhmyNews alleged that Wikipedia may have been infiltrated by Intelligence Agencies. The story attracted more than 50,000 readers in just three days, was highly debated on the Web, and translated in several languages. Wikipedia quickly reacted to the news and hired Virgil Griffith, one of the best known American hacker, to investigate the matter." Yet Wikipedia claims its "unreliable". Wikipedia has used ohmynews as a source in 192 of their articles: and has been used in Google news 460 times: http://news.google.com.au/news?hl=en&ned=au&q=ohmy news&btnG=Search+News Virgil Griffith does claim that he wasn't paid by Wikipedia: http://virgil.gr/31.html and the Wikipedia staff went so far as to remove the links, and then ban the IP address of the person who had inserted them: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special: Log&type=block&page=User:123.2.168.215 Daniel Brandt claims that it is far too expensive for him to have done it himself: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43697 But perhaps he really did do all of this just to make himself popular. Spend a few thousand dollars, including the $349 to do the reverse IP lookups: http://www.ip2location.com/ip-country-region-city- isp.aspx , saved presumably through his time as an unemployed student and spent several hundred hours creating something that does nothing more than make him well-known. Perhaps it'll help him to get a job sometime in the future? And perhaps its all one almighty coincidence that all this has happened just a week after Wikipedia was reeling after the massive censorship about the SlimVirgin scandal. Oh, and also note that another IP that reverted edits to the article belonged to Jayjg, the person most closely related to SlimVirgin: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic= 11853&view=findpost&p=43641 Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. And this over an issue in which we've proven that the CIA edits Wikipedia with a definite aim, as have many other industr

  10. Re:Famous Last Words by dhollist · · Score: 1 · on NASA Decides No Fix Needed for Endeavor's Tiles

    I might update this Wikipedia article to reflect NASA's decision to NOT repair Endeavor's heat shield, just to see what WikiScanner shows for IP address 198.137.240.100 next week.

  11. The Republican Party by megamerican · · Score: 1 · on See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia
    The Republican Party made some of my favorite edits so far.

    The first 3 edits listed are as follows:
    Harry Potter: They let everyone know Snape is the Half Bllod Prince and kills Dumbledore
    They create a page for Cheese sandwiches
    They let us know that the US Forces are liberating Iraq and not occupying it in the Baath Party Page.