wikipedia

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New Features On Wikiwatcher

August 1, 2008 by 2 Comments


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 are associated with multiple accounts and could be run by the same person. It takes data from the Poor Man’s Checkuser and arranges it by organization and IP range. Beaver Scope keeps an eye on edits coming out of all specific locations on MIT campus. The author used this list of MIT IPs to monitor MIT’s activity during the Caltech-MIT pranking season. It is able to pinpoint exactly which building an article is being edited from. The team hopes to see people develop new tools from the Poor Man’s Checkuser data.

HOPE 2008: Wikiscanner 2.0

July 18, 2008 by No comments


[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 anonymous edits though. Users could log in to avoid having their IP reversed.

In the new version, [Virgil]’s team developed a Poor Man’s CheckUser. If you spend too much time editing a talk page, your session could end and when you hit save it attaches your IP. Most regular users will then log in and remove their IP. They found 13,000 username/IP address pairs by searching for IPs being removed and replaced with usernames. These are some of the most active users. Using this list, they could potentially uncover sockpuppets or potential collusion by top editors.

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The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It

May 11, 2008 by 15 Comments


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 were rented by the census bureau. The machines didn’t encourage any sort of innovation. Next he talks about “generative” technology like the internet and modern OSes where anyone can build whatever they want. The final step is the more recent move to what he calls “tethered” technology. These are the systems with upgradeable firmware where devices can ship with unfinished features and remove features after the consumer has already purchased the device. He uses the iPhone as an example of this walled garden that could hurt innovation. Watch the video for his thoughts on this new world and how he thinks it could be fixed.