Tag Archives: social media

Unknown devices…..

Posted on by

Unknown devices keep showing up under network adapters in my device manager. I keep disabling them and they keep showing up.

They have no signature, no device ID or function, no location or vendor information. They just have the word root and then a number.

Then there’s the comment link on which I accidentally clicked that took me to an empty website. Was someone tying to download something or find my IP address?

My computer got very buggy and slow yesterday. Then my security software keeps turning off.

Worse, there are the unknown devices of my fellow man.

Someone sent me an email at which to contact them. The handle was something like city-slicker@usa.com (not the actual handle, of course).

Now do high-profile people usually have emails with such handles,  and, even if they do, do they give it out to strangers on the web?  Do they insist on contacting you and then insist that you respond only on personal email and private cell numbers?

And then do they comment on this blog using a fake handle?

One with a link on which I accidentally click that takes me to an empty website set up a long while ago?

Methinks I smell a set-up.  Especially when the high-profile one claims to have intelligence contacts/experience.

I could be wrong, of course. In which case, my profound apologies.

But that is why I do not respond except in ways I choose.

And that is why I like to keep it strictly about politics, except for people who have actually intersected with me.

Even then, I tend to be wary.

Anything a stranger needs to tell me can be posted at this blog.

If it’s confidential and has some public importance, disguise the information and post pseudonymously.

If it’s private information, please find a personal friend in whom to confide.

It does you, the reader, and me, the blogger,  no good to confuse web-reality with real-reality.

Wikipedia Scanner and Deletionpedia

Posted on by

This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool – the wikipedia scanner – for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like Diebold (the maker of the Diebold voting machine), Walmart (among many corporations), and the CIA have all been involved in altering information.

“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……

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their username, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.”

Though it´s nice to see a mainstream publication like Wired, take up this topic, I wonder if it´s only touching the tip of the iceberg.

It´s not the suppression of so-called “conspiracy theory” type articles or their authors that I worry about. It´s the skewing of mainstream topics  and the tarring of perfectly respectable publications that are well-sourced and written by well-educated and informed people, and that have broken or explored important stories, often long before and far better than the mainstream media.  By removing those sources and sending researchers to so-called mainstream media sources the establishment keeps a tight control of whose voice gets heard, and more importantly, whose voices are annointed with authority.  Since many of the alternative voices are those of foreigners, working class or disenfranchised people, immigrants, or political dissidents, this skewing is both censorship as well as a form of cultural imperialism, with a distinct racial, religious, and linguistic bias, i.e. in effect,  the skewing tends to promote Anglo-European, state-centric, non-religious or anti-religious, English-language  perspectives over others.

If you want to search for articles that have been deleted that you think should be put back on wikipedia, check out deletionpedia. You need to look in the deletionpedia archive, and even then, not all deleted articles end up there.

More Apparent Wiki Whacking On Naked Short Selling

Posted on by

Deep Capture has more on wiki manipulation in its latest post:

“In the past (as you can read about here), we know Weiss spread misinformation relating to stock fraud via Wikipedia on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the Wall Street firm considered a key enabler of illegal short selling. Exactly who’s sponsoring Weiss these days is unclear; however, as the evidence that follows will demonstrate, his concerted effort to whitewash DTCC’s Wikipedia article makes that company the prime suspect.

Now that his ruse has been uncovered – yet again – the focus becomes one of identifying and repairing the damage done. A brief review of some of the thousands of changes made by Weiss will give you a sense of both the scope of the problem and the nature of his motives. I’m organizing the following tiny sampling of Weiss’s Wikipedia edits by topic, with the content as it originally appeared on the left, with Weiss’s changes on the right. Words added or removed appear in red.”

My Comment

For now, I am just posting this as an interesting development that I haven´t personally verified.  Also, I think any notion that the tide has turned on wiki manipulation is overly optimistic.  I doubt, for example, that Weiss´ media bosses don´t know what´s happening. That to me is an incredibly naive position to take.

Wiki Whacking: Green Doctor Of Wikipedia

Posted on by

“Lawrence Solomon at the National Post writes about a topic that WUWT readers have known about for a long time: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information. Solomon starts off by talking about Climategate emails.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

He then focuses on RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley, who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with his unique brand of RC centric editing:

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.”

My Comment:

As you know, wiki engineering is one of my recurring obsessions, having had to go through 3 rounds of wikipedia fighting to stay on it, and having nearly had some associates’ wiki pages wiped out because of their connection to me.

And what was I guilty of? Of nothing more dreadful than respectful, fairly carefully modulated writing on such hoary topics as Zionism, media corruption, racism, racialist ideology, banking, and the Federal Reserve. Never have I advocated anything that could remotely be called racist, foul, biased, or misogynist. I have simply been factual and rather indifferent to political codes or the particular form of brainwashing prevalent in the US – which is, if we don’t know about it, it ain’t worth knowing.

Whenever I suggested that wiki was manipulated, I was told I was being conspiratorial, that I was imagining things…and that that isn’t the way the world works.

But now…wiki-whacking has been exposed for all to see. If it’s this bad on climate-gate, think about all the other topics that have been skewed.

But that’s all going to change soon….little by little. Now that the whistle has been blown on these kapos, their come uppance is round the corner.

See this piece, that reports on the canning of errant wiki administrator, climatista Connolley.