The unintentional IP edit, my favorite part of Wikipedia Options

[WordBomb]

I've decided that there's nothing richer than catching the clique in an unintentional IP edit, and would like to list some of my favorites for you and hope you'll reciprocate.

1- Jimbo as vandal.
Long story how I know this, but suffice it to say that last winter, Jimbo Wales' home IP was 69.22.75.205. Here are some of the edits he made during that time while not logged in. Read them if you want, but with the exception of this edit to the Jeff Merkey article, they're not very interesting.

Here's what's interesting.

Missing from 69.22.75.205's edit history is an edit only evidenced by a note on 69.22.75.205's talk page. Whatever Jimbo initially did to alter the debate over deletion of the autobiography of Gary Weiss was interpreted as vandalism and reverted.

That happened at 16:00 (UCT).

One hour later he made two more edits as Jimbo Wales.

About that time he appears to have been made aware that his IP edit didn't take, and so at 17:11 (UTC) he deleted the whole thing.

As Jimbo later explained, he did it because the deletion debate contained some "discourteous commentary." (Challenge: find the discourtesy in this rescued record of what Jimbo deleted.)


2- Possible evidence of a SlimVirgin + Crum375 sock connection.
Yet again a long story, but trust me when I say that I know Crum375's home IP has been 67.85.164.120 for some time now. Crum has made mountains of unintentional IP edits, and I posted a link to them on the talk page for Crum375 on Wikiabuse.com last week (my intention was actually to prove that Crum and Slim were different people).

Because 67.85.164.120 had so many edits, I didn't bother to check more than a few to verify that they were clearly Crum's. But this guy MichaelLinnear on Wikiabuse apparently dug deeper and says he found evidence in this edit history of SlimVirgin also apparently editing from 67.85.164.120.

This would be a fascinating development, but for the fact that the entire edit history of 67.85.164.120 was shortly thereafter oversighted out of existence.

Yes...oversighted.

3- A cover-up on Wall Street.
Speculation as to Gary Weiss's obsession with control over the articles on Overstock.com, it's CEO Patrick Byrne, and Naked short selling were put to rest earlier this year when this edit history was discovered.

Weiss, whose sockdrawer is led by Mantanmoreland, created the article on St. Joseph's Church to further his claim that he's really a Catholic gen-Xer. As any wikipedian will quickly recognize, on January 9, 2007, Weiss's first edit of the day was made before logging in.

The IP edit that resulted is attributed to 207.45.43.68, which happens to be one of two main IPs used by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which is the organization charged with settling about a quadrillion stock trades each year. The DTCC is also the organization Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has said acts an enabler of perpetrators of illegal naked short selling of many public companies.

Naked shorting is very bad, regardless of what Weiss has edited the article on the subject to read.

The DTCC is not one of those businesses where a buddy might stop by during lunch and use your computer to check his email. It's a fortress. From this incident, we can reasonably conclude that Gary Weiss is using DTCC computers in some official capacity.

This situation gets still more sordid, as you can read here.

Bottom line: ¡Viva la unintentional IP edit!

[Rootology]

If this is some illegal activity in violation of Federal Trade Commision regulations, why not just report it with the mounds of evidence?

Also, MichaelLinnear is a Wikipedia admin.

EDIT: replace FTC with Federal Trade Commision

Add: Also, now we know what Cla68 did to draw down the wrath of everyone when he ran for adminship; he started that AfD of [[Gary Weiss]].

This post has been edited by Rootology:

[WordBomb]

If this is some illegal activity in violation of Federal Trade Commision regulations...

Do you by chance mean SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission)?

Also, now we know what Cla68 did to draw down the wrath of everyone when he ran for adminship; he started that AfD of [[Gary Weiss]].

Bingo, based in part (I presume but don't know with certainty) on evidence I presented here and here.

Also Joe, check your blog's traffic logs on 6/20/07 at 11:46:38 and 12:17:58 and tell me what you see.

[Somey]

Also Joe, check your blog's traffic logs on 6/20/07 at 11:46:38 and 12:17:58 and tell me what you see.

Let me guess - a bunch of numbers strung together and peppered by various punctuation marks? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[WordBomb]

Also Joe, check your blog's traffic logs on 6/20/07 at 11:46:38 and 12:17:58 and tell me what you see.

Let me guess - a bunch of numbers strung together and peppered by various punctuation marks? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

Short answer: no. Long answer: yes....specifically, he'll see this string of numbers/punctuation marks: ool-4355a478.dyn.optonline.net, which is the canonical address corresponding to: 67.85.164.120, which you may recognize from my initial post as belonging to Crum375 and, I'm becoming increasingly convinced, SlimVirgin.

[Rootology]

Also Joe, check your blog's traffic logs on 6/20/07 at 11:46:38 and 12:17:58 and tell me what you see.

Let me guess - a bunch of numbers strung together and peppered by various punctuation marks? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

Short answer: no. Long answer: yes....specifically, he'll see this string of numbers/punctuation marks: ool-4355a478.dyn.optonline.net, which is the canonical address corresponding to: 67.85.164.120, which you may recognize from my initial post as belonging to Crum375 and, I'm becoming increasingly convinced, SlimVirgin.

Slim and Crum are different people. They may communicate off-wiki, or just watch each other's edits. Given the IP ranges and alleged geography involved, the only way they're sharing an IP address is if one if either tunneling into the other's home network to edit from that IP in question, or is using a tool like RDP or VNC to do so. Which would be pretty stupid, wouldn't it, to deliberately SHARE an IP address between two admin accounts?

I've also seen much better IP evidence and other evidence (non-IP) than you have. Unless they're doing some fairly decent technical work with Slim remotely editing from Crum's home location (which again, would be frankly retarded for poisoning the IP well), they're different people.

They're either gabbing on IRC, Yahoo/AIM, or just--shock--talking on the phone or VOIP, perhaps to coordinate stuff. Or just looking at each others' edits.

I'm all for a fun conspiracy theory, but the Internets does have physical rules and limitations that can only be circumvented in certain ways. The ways I know of would preclude, combined with the evidence I've seen, the notion that SlimVirgin and Crum375 are the same person. I could be surprised, later, and find otherwise, but based on my own technical knowledge and things I've learned and observed, I believe they're two distinct people from two distinct geophysical locations, separated by at least one time zone.

Not many people swing both ways. I tried it for a while when I was younger, but it was just a phase.

I know at least a dozen people that swing in some combination between Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix systems. Several of the Linux users aren't even tech nerds. I myself routinely will use Windows XP, Vista, Mac OS 10.x, and various Linux flavors (mainly Slackware, Ubuntu, and RH Fedora, in that order). Its much more common than most realize. Tracking individuals by OS and user agent, unless they also come from the same IP, is generally a shitty prospect.

Bomb, no offense, but all I ever see of all this is a snippet there, a snippet here of all this evidence that Gary Weiss is the kid from the Omen.

Why not put it all on one page, as a complete connect-the-dots time line, to see if all adds up? To be honest, I don't doubt Matanmoreland is him, given the single-mindedness that user has about the subject, but the whole thing sounds damned off and awkward.

Whats your relationship to all this, anyway? Are you definitely Bagley?

[WordBomb]

Bomb, no offense, but all I ever see of all this is a snippet there, a snippet here of all this evidence that Gary Weiss is the kid from the Omen.

Why not put it all on one page, as a complete connect-the-dots time line, to see if all adds up?

Been done. Here's one example. Here's another.

What's the point?

I can answer that a few ways. For the purposes of this conversation, I'll tell you that the Wikipedia component of the Weiss+Truth campaign is done for sport and the perverse thrill of seeing someone behave as shamelessly as you expect them to.

The process of getting Weiss to concede the obvious, much less force some accountability, has sort of taken on a life of its own. It seems that at this point, exactly five people persist in denying the evidence presented in the above two links (among others). They are: SlimVirgin, Jayjg, Gary Weiss, Albert Laverne Kidd (you don't know him), and...Jimbo Wales.

It's a microcosm, but the Weiss situation is fascinating by virtue of what it says about the larger system.

Tell me whether this sounds familiar:

• SlimVirgin has a pet issue.
• Those who challenge her on that issue with any degree of backbone soon find themselves silenced and, should they survive, marked by a scarlet letter.
• Wikipedia leadership flaccidly observes but does nothing.
• No amount of evidence or reason is enough to alter the situation.

Gary Weiss is the incarnation of this dynamic.

• SlimVirgin adopts Weiss as her own pet issue.
• Those who call Weiss on his abuses are silenced and marked.
• Wikipedia leadership, including Jimbo Wales, watches flaccidly.
• No amount of evidence against Weiss matters anymore. Here's a good example.

Forget the specific policy and personal issues I have with Weiss. At this point I find him simply fascinating to observe, the same way any student of a living system might find fascination in the emergence of a deeply flawed yet strangely resilient member of the population.

If I have a regret it comes from seeing good people needlessly hurt by Slim's spiteful thrashings while protecting Weiss. I'm thinking about Ptmccain, CLA68 and EveryKing in particular.

This post has been edited by WordBomb: