Wikipedia Hoax Author Confesses

cmholm writes "As reported in The Seattle Times, Nashville resident Brian Chase has publically admitted that he edited a Wikipedia entry for John Seigenthaler, making appear that Mr. Seigenthaler was involved in the assassination of JFK. Mr. Chase fessed up after a cyber-sleuth tracked down the business from which he had posted to Wikipedia."

Digital signatures with GPG keys

[lawpoop]

About a year ago, I posted a discussion to some part of Wikipedia advocating digitally signing articles with GPG keys.

The plan was that each author, editor, and reader signs off for or against part or the whole of an article. The fallout should be that some articles get nearly universal positive sign offs, some get nearly universal against votes, and some are recorded as controversial. With GPG keys, we can also start ranking authors and editors -- are they generally agreed with, are they controversial, are they trolls. This is a codification of the skepticism that proponents of Wikipedia claim that any internet user should employ.

Something else I thought would be good would be to have branching articles. For instance, the entry for Hitler would have the main entry, which is the most agreed upon, a white-supremacist/neo-nazi version which stirs a lot of controversy, and maybe a David Icke version, which, while against Hitler, involves space reptiles and is therefore also controversial. Using the ranking and reputation system, a casual user can see how agreeable or controversial an article is.

Fake News is on the rise

[core plexus]

It used to be that one could tell the fake news, such as Weekly World News, National Enquirer, etc., but recently many reporters are either faking news or just regurgitating press releases.

I know, because I was a reporter, then later an editor. With tightening margins, reporters get paid less and less (try $20 for a story), and staff is shrunk in the dead-tree press. It's hard to keep the passion up when Ramen is for dinner, again. Sometimes, though, the made up news is more interesting or entertaining than the 'real' news.

Alaska's wildfires might be helping melt glaciers and sea ice [suvalleynews.com]

What tool did he use?

[daveschroeder]

What tool did he use to trace the IP back to the delivery company?

ARIN Whois only goes as far as Bellsouth for the IP address in question (65.81.97.208), as does pretty much every utility, geographic and otherwise, that I could find in a rudimentary search.

So, what tool did he use to actually narrow it down to a specific business?

Re:What tool did he use?

[JustOK]

try http://65.81.97.208/ [65.81.97.208]

Re:Fake News is on the rise

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. Then again every source of information is not 100% a solid information resource. As someone posted on an earlier article on slashdot, the CIA Factbook [cia.gov] has posted information that alot academically recognized people beleive is wrong. Yet the CIA probably for geopolitical reasons post this as a fact (following the money, it is interesting to find out that Greece is one of the biggest arm buyers of the US and they are negotiating with the US to buy a batch of almost deprecated f16s at almost double the price. With political benifits also ;) Sounds like pimping, smells like pimping to me...). Mod me flamebait as you will, but my perspective of the internet has changed over time. Never take anything as granted or fact without investigating...

Re:Fake News is on the rise

[AndroidCat]

The September that never ended [wikipedia.org] has finally created a Silly Season [wikipedia.org] that never ends either.

Try it

[quokkapox]

I'm posting this from a freely available "linksys" wireless network in the neighborhood, from the IP address of an entity I don't know who has DSL. I can easily change their IP address by disconnecting and reconnecting their broadband router.

All from my car while waiting at the local MacDonalds drive-thru.

How exactly is anyone going to hold me accountable for what I say online?

We've recently issued free personal printing presses and the potential for efficient, unlimited redistribution to the population of the entire world. We may need to reevaluate a few things about how we treat information.

Anonymity?

[headkase]

I wonder if anonymity is just a passing phase for the Internet? A way to envision having a real network identity could the upbeat notion of a Citizen's card that allows you to participate virtually within the boundaries of accepted behavior. With wise regulation there's nothing bad about that.
But outside of that ideal in the real world we can hardly agree on what even constitutes human rights internationally. So there does seem to be a need for some forms of anonymity like when something is leaked because it's in the public interest. Although, for libel and slander accountability would seem to be better overall. Pragmatically, something that satisfies both could be logged access that requires a warrant to associate id with identity.

Re:Isn't that over engineering the problem

[lawpoop]

There are two reasons to use GPG technology:

1. It's harder to steal someone's GPG identity.
2. You're not putting all your eggs in one basket like you do with logins. If wikipedia had a catastrophic server failure, they might lose all the authentication data. Goodbye wikipedia community. With GPG keys, there isn't such a large risk.

Here's a feature you may be overlooking: GPG keys are *universal* username/password credentials. Any bulliten board system could use GPG signed messages. That would do away with everybody re-inventing this authentication system and site security.

I would argue that GPG authentication is actually simpler than a username/password over HTTP security system. If that's the case, how can you call it overengineering, especially if any other bulliten board can drop their lousy HTTP authentication mechanism and use this one? That reduces complexity for site admins all over the world.

TOR / I2P

[tdc_vga]

I don't see why this is a big deal. Anyone who wants to make it more difficult (while theoretically not impossible) to track them back through an IP address can

1) use TOR,
2) use I2P,
3) use an open/free Wifi area (without camera mind you), or
4) in the works of Lawerence Lessig (if any of you went to law school): "use a pay phone." (and yes this is possible if you have some old school gear and the patience to wait on the modem)

While allowing accountability (IP request w/o subpoenas) would catch the majority of people on the internet, allowing cases for libel, any truly subversive or "alternative" group would understand how to avoid detection. Misinformation will always be available, anonymity existed way before the Internet become a popular tool, and no matter how many hoops you add those who want to remain unknown will.\

In the end maybe I support the proposed legal change, because it would increase the popularity of tools like TOR and I2P.

Cheers,
TdC

Good and Bad for wikipedia

[nietsch]

So this guy made some amendments to an article to find out how easy it is to 'fool' wikipedians. There must be thousands that have done that already, mostly known as vandalism. Now this whole hoopla has drawn the attention of million more cowboys to wikipedia. Some of them want to verify themselves that they too can write in wikipedia. Most will be caugth as simple vandalism (most peaple are not very smart mischieving) but som ewill fall though the cracks unnoticed. That percentage might even be bigger that the extra articles this new readership write.
So readership increases, amout of articles increases, but and the signal/noise ratio decreases rapidly. Smarter people are more likely to notice this increase and will turn away from it. So in the end, Wikipedia will be read (&written) by more less intelligent people.

Re:Fake News is on the rise

[shibashaba]

Yeah, kind of like how all the big networks showing video clips of rockets going off in Afghanistan, 2 hours after the WTC was hit! And people seem to think this war wasn't rigged. While CNN and MSNBC were showing those clips, the BBC was explaining that they were not live feeds and that they weren't even depicting the right time of day. They were also reading press releases from the Pentagon saying that they had not taken any actions whatsoever.

True BUT a "real" encyplopedia has a building

[SmallFurryCreature]

Wich can be raided by police should it suddenly have a new version out denying the holocaust (an offense in much of europe).

A new version takes years to come out and will have a lot of peer review and can be reviewed just once by the rest of the world and then either accepted or rejected. You do not have to keep a constant watch to check if some crackpot is not scribbling new entries in your encyclopedia and if they are you send your kid to bed without diner.

Then again all the safety measures also tend to enforce a certain accepted thinking approach with no room for the more wild theories and ideas. I wonder if a wikipedia article in centuries past on the arrangeent of the heavenly bodies would have been a problem.

After all I seem to conclude that the holocaust is real but how do I know? Only because that is what I have been told. Just like people were once told that the sun circled the earth. For both of wich I got no absolute proof. I don't even have proof WW2 really happened. Oh sure yeah there is a very big war cemetry were I grew up but who says they are real graves?

That is the problem with the "true" version of an event not directly experienced by you. You got to take somebody's word for it and somehow I am not that willing to take the word of someone unwilling to show his/hers full credentials. Wikipedia is usefull but only for totally non-discussable things like say looking up what that the name NASA is an acronym (forgot the word a while ago).

Re:Digital signatures with GPG keys

[Desult]

No, I think you would want to change the rating. Essentially, the only useful ratings in your system are "Good", "Questionable" and "Bad". There shouldn't really be any significant gradation. If any facts in a "factual" article are incorrect, the article is "Bad" until the article is fixed. The article on John S. isn't worth having if someone inserts the line "and he did X" where X isn't true. Your theoretical Wikipedia system is in place to enforce non-fraudulent data. If a "bad" user changes one word in an article, the article should shift to questionable. If a "bad" user changes one sentence in an article, the article should shift to "bad", pending review. That is the only benefit of your system; users can be tracked for "bad" entries, and once you have identified them as a troll/liar/whatever, their contributions can be flagged as problems. A quality based system is entirely different and unrelated to the topic at hand. Under the "spellcheck rule", I change a sentence from:

"The truth about Mozart's Great Dane was that it was undeniably his."

to

"The truth about Mozart's great danish was that it was unedibly his."

These changes, small and vaguely similar though they may be, have altered the "truth" into nonsense... the article is now questionable and useless as a fact resource. Anyone reading the article probably isn't going to be deeply involved in your digital signature scheme. The burden should not be on them to determine which parts are signed by a reliable source. Odds are unreliable sources will just be put into a moderation queue, or banned from using the site. But... then they will have to simply generate a new GPG key! Then we are getting into the same user validation problems we have with traditional U/P based systems... tracking dead users, validating new users... requiring a central, important user repository. This erodes the value of distributing authentication data. If repository is unrecoverable, then all the bad users are not bad anymore. The existing "verified" or "signed" data can no longer be relied upon until the user database is rebuilt from reputation, or guesses, or whatever. This is slightly less catastrophic than a U/P DB failure, but not by much.

Still, this is only part of the reason why I disagree with your position that it would be great for any messageboard. The only thing this system is great for is identification... and even that it would fail at in a global context. This wouldn't miraculously solve accountability and identification for every messageboard, as you have posited in other posts. Why don't we have a single sign-on system so we can have one user/password for every site in existence? You're right that a GPG system distributes the storage, but the problem is, you can't know if the user is "good", or "bad" or whatever without having some sort of central user repository, which is either too difficult or too invasive to do, so people don't do it. You, on your site, can keep track of every GPG signature that you get, and assign each signature some meta-data that allows you to know that the user is a troll, or non-contributor, or in a real good mood on Tuesdays, but that doesn't lead to some utopian single sign on system, where I can identify someone by their GPG signature. I still have the problem that they are unknown to me, whether they are "lawpoop" authenticated against a central U/P server or 512 bits of a universally verifiable signature... I still have to have some central repository to tell me that the signature or U/P combination corresponds to some reputation.

Your system distributes authentication data (good), prevents impersonation of users (good), and presents a slightly easier authentication routine (this is questionable, as the other respondant to this post points out, it creates as big of a problem, if not a worse problem, than it solves). It does not alleviate the need for user meta-data tracking (user name, post history, interests, whatever) that most messageboards use. So essentially the messageb

Re:I am Mr. Cyber-Sleuth

[_Sprocket_]

Wow. So you're Danial Brandt? Mr Google-watch [google-watch.org]? I've always found you to be a rather facinating [google-watch-watch.org] character [aaronwall.com].

Honestly - if you didn't have an axe to grind with Google, and then Wikipedia... would you have even bothered to do this?

Re:Notable quote

[Wavicle]

Only in cases of fraud is there any reason to limit speech.

So if an anti-abortion groups publishes the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and time they normally arrive home after work of doctors performing abortions - that isn't fraud, it's just information. It should be protected speech, right? Google for the court's opinion. It doesn't match yours.

Federal agents aren't required, any more than cops, to respond to you yelling "Bomb".

Somewhat wrong. If you shout it in the middle of the woods and there is nobody to hear it, that's true. If you shout it in the middle of the airport, that's entirely false.

It is the simple case that federal agents and cops are there not to prevent crimes but to respond after the fact.

Conspiring to commit a crime is a crime. That argument is going to be circular. How can you prevent a crime until conspiracy to commit a crime has occurred, and then of course it is too late.

But the second they discover you do not have a bomb, they have no basis to stop you from shouting "Bomb" to your hearts content.

Let's conduct an experiment: Go to the airport; don't carry a bomb; shout bomb. When they discover you have no bomb, see if they just let you go. Explain to the judge your rantings on the 1st amendment.

If neighborhoods do not want outsiders yelling on their streets, they should own them so they can kick people out.

Yeah the Steel towns tried this already. The company owned the whole town - streets, houses, stores, everything. Trying to organize a union? Suddenly you, your wife, your children, will find themselves homeless out in the snow in the middle of winter. As with many things, such tyranny was eventually made illegal. It isn't enough to own the streets. You would have to be in a gated community with an effective means of keeping the unwanted people out and a fair process for expelling those already there.

Re:I am Mr. Cyber-Sleuth

[yukster]

Yeah, interesting fellow... more nuggets here [google-watch-watch.org] and here [counterpunch.org] and here [outer-court.com]...

The google-watch-watch one has a good quote from a Salon article:

When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense.

This also adds a little interesting twist to his disdain for wikipedia...

Email from Wiki on crediability (worth reading!)

[Vrejakti]

I emailed Wikipedia inquiring about their creditability, and they sent me a good informative email, explining how hard they really are working to improve the realiability of their site.

Wikipedia relies on the good will and hard work of our thousands of volunteer editors. Although we always have some visitors who insert faulty information we find that the balance is positive and that more people fix problems than introduce them.

We have various tools to help contributors check new edits: we have a "recent changes" page that lists new contributions, and "watch lists" which allow editors to closely monitor pages they are interested in. The editing and verification of the text works on the same open-source principle as other aspects of the site with thousands of contributors visiting the site and checking each other's edits. One of our most important policies is that articles should be written from a "neutral point of view", which reduces the problem of people adding their opinion rather than facts. This policy is explained at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_poi nt_of_view [wikipedia.org]

Another important policy is verifiability, which states that all contributions should be well-researched from credible sources; information which is not may be removed. We do not allow original research, and we strongly encourage our contributors to cite references for all material added. One of the most important discussions on Wikipedia at the moment is how we can take the project to the next level. We are considering various strategies including intensive fact checking of particular versions of articles, labelling verified versions as "stable", highlighting the best of our articles, and software changes to enable selection between "verified" and "live" versions. Some of this work is already underway; other aspects are still under discussion. We hope that this ongoing work will lead to the eventual publication of a print version or CD/DVD.

However, there is no official editorial team verifying the information in Wikipedia. Our general disclaimer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_di sclaimer [wikipedia.org]) states that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information contained in Wikipedia and you use it at your own risk. It is worth noting that similar disclaimers are found on the websites of britannica.com and bartleby.com as well, which are professionally reviewed.

You can read more discussion of some of these issues at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_ common_objections [wikipedia.org]

You can also see some helpful guides to using Wikipedia in research at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching _with_Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Thank you for your interest in Wikipedia.

Re:I am Mr. Cyber-Sleuth

[Linuxbeak]

You know something, Daniel, I thought somewhat higher of you. I didn't know that you were such a publicity hunter.

I'm not saying that what Mr. Chase did is defendable. It's not. However, all things considered, it wasn't that big of a deal; you found Mr. Chase out, caused him to have enough inner conflict to apologize to Mr. Seigenthaler in person (not to mention resign from his job), and scored a point for your anti-defamation campaign. So far, so good.

But wait! I thought you were a champion of privacy!

I'm noticing a rather disturbing trend here. On your wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html page, you list several people (myself included; I'm sure you'll add another juicy tidbit to my section) which you want to get personal information (such as home addresses, age, schools, information about offspring, etc.) about. You also list several quotes which, if taken out of context, seem to be rather hostile towards you. However, those comments are in fact blatantly out of context. Additionally, when you yourself were an editor on Wikipedia, your contribution page (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions /Daniel_Brandt [wikipedia.org]) shows that you were not only disruptive, but a full-blown troll! No WONDER why they banned you!

I think you're the most dedicated hypocritical crackpot that the Internet has ever seen. I don't see your above post as "modest"; in fact, I find it quite disgusting. It's just *dripping* with brownnose comments ("It was a pleasure to work with Mr. Seigenthaler on this trace. He is an amazing, accomplished person, and I have a huge amount of respect for him." "He's the genius." "...all the clever Slashdotters...").

Guess what, Daniel! The world doesn't revolve around you, and your self-righteous crusade against Wikipedia is misguided at best.

Re:I am Mr. Cyber-Sleuth

[Gamaliel]

Congratulations to Mr. Brandt for his continuing effort to prove he is not a public figure by hitching himself to this controversy and getting quoted by the New York Times yet again. In his attacks on Wikipedia for creating an article about him, he claimed he was in fact not a public figure, despite his half dozen plus appearances in the Times and more in other publications. It's obvious from his use of this controversy to promote himself and from his hit list of Wikipedia editors that he has no real interest in privacy issues, he's just pissed that the Wikipedia article about him had links to two sites critical of him, an article in Salon (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/goog le_watch/ [salon.com]) and http://www.google-watch-watch.org/ [google-watch-watch.org].