Yahoo! Picks - bringing you the best of the Web since 1995
No matter how settled the Web becomes, it will always retain something of the wild frontier. One muckraking cowboy can still blast into town, infiltrate the shady goings-on, and kick up a hell of a storm.
Enter Virgil Griffith. This 24-year-old grad student and "disruptive technologist" has unleashed The WikiScanner, a search tool that scours Wikipedia for anonymous edits and connects them with the IP addresses the edits came from. This means that if, say, a change was made to the Wikipedia entry for ExxonMobil and it came from ExxonMobil's IP address, The WikiScanner will reveal it. And so far, it's revealed a lot. Such governmental, religious, and corporate notables as the C.I.A., Wal-Mart, Diebold, the Vatican, and the A.C.L.U. have logged unsigned and—sometimes—eyebrow raising changes to Wiki entries.
Don't take our word for it, though. Get the lay of the land with Wired's "wall of shame." Then hop back to the site and investigate a few organizations of your own. Let the PR showdowns begin.
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comments
Posted by rightonetosee | Tue, August 21, 2007, 4:43 pm PDT
keep it up this is good love it
Posted by zorrokidpekin | Wed, August 22, 2007, 1:39 pm PDT
WikiScanner cannot determine the host (pc, etc) that the request came from because the actual IP address is dynamic changing based on DHCP. Even if you could know the host address that the request came from you cannot determine the person who made the request. We should be very careful to accuse any organization based on WikiScanner's results. If that is not enough to doubt the real end user identification we need to prove that IP spoofing is not involved in all cases.
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