Build your own Wikipedia reader

diy-wikipedia-reader

One part inexpensive uC, one part touch-screen, one part Internet knowledge-base all come together to make up this Wikipedia reader. It functions in a very similar way to commercial versions by parsing XML dumps from the popular website to an SD card for use on the device. This is not limited to Wikipedia, but could just as easily be an e-reader. [Rossum] developed the package using an NXP ARM … [Read more...]

$100 portable Wikipedia

wr_hand1_small

OpenMoko, the company behind the FreeRunner open-source phone, released their latest product today: WikiReader. It's a small mobile device for browsing Wikipedia. Rather than use a wireless network to pull data off of the web, it has local copy of the database on a 8GB microSD card. This approach has been used before, and it lets the WikiReader be compact and really cheap. It uses a Kindle-esque … [Read more...]

WikiBrowser

This project is particularly amusing. It doesn't have a whole lot of practical use, but it makes up for it in style. They have an SD card with Wikipedia from 2003 downloaded to it. This is accessed with a Parallax propeller microcontroller based system and displayed on a small retro looking screen. We like it. We don't think we would ever actually use it, but we would definitely keep it around. … [Read more...]

New features on Wikiwatcher

Wikiwatcher has just officially released their new tools. We covered their announcement at The Last HOPE just last month. The 2.0 version of Wikiscanner is not ready just yet. Poor Man's Checkuser exposes the IPs of quite a few user accounts. There is a wealth of data here which can be used as a base for your own tools. Potential Sockpuppetry is a good example of using this data; it shows what IPs … [Read more...]

HOPE 2008: Wikiscanner 2.0

[Virgil] presented the next version of Wikiscanner at The Last HOPE today. To build the original Wikiscanner, he scanned the monthly database dump of anonymous edits and compared that against a purchased list of known company IP addresses. The 34.5 million edits account for nearly 21% of all edits. The idea was to unearth businesses and groups white washing critical pages. This only handles … [Read more...]

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It

Yes, even we were getting tired of that Indiana Jones marathon on TV. So, we ventured online to find something entirely too geeky for a Sunday afternoon. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is a presentation Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain gave at Princeton near the end of March. He begins by covering early 20th century "sterile" technology like tabulation machines that … [Read more...]