Brandt's Chat logger getting no logs anymore?! Options

[LamontStormstar]

I asked this in another thread and Brandt didn't answer (actually nobody answered this) and the thread got hijacked and then moved so I am asking again:

What's up with Daniel Brandt not getting any #wikipedia chat logs since August 6, 2006? By the way, the logs were only for one room, too and there are many rooms like #wikipedia-en?

[Somey]

What's up with Daniel Brandt not getting any #wikipedia chat logs since August 6, 2006? By the way, the logs were only for one room, too and there are many rooms like #wikipedia-en?

I can't speak for him, but I thought that was all well-known? Brandt is in southern Texas. Most of his IP addresses are geolocatable to there, so the WP chat channel moderators have, in effect, "hard-banned" most of southern Texas from those channels.

They're also agressively banning non-participants as possible logger bots, so to log the channel from any IP, you have to actually read all that crap and occasionally chime in - not always a pleasant activity, especially for someone who's not into discussing, uh... well, let's just say the sort of things they like to discuss in there.

For a while, it looked like he was being fed logs from other sources, but I suspect that once he'd obtained enough material to make it clear that there were plenty of libelous things being said about him in those channels, he decided it wasn't worth the trouble to skirt those bans.

Close enough?

[LamontStormstar]

I heard he could use Tor proxies or something. He could also go to another room like besides the main one. I mean somebody posted logs of that conversation between NotACow and Jimbo about SlimVirgin so people are logging. As for idling, the channel is just full of idlers.

[Placeholder]

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This post has been edited by Joey: Sun 15th October 2006, 6:46pm

[Somey]

I heard he could use Tor proxies or something. He could also go to another room like besides the main one. I mean somebody posted logs of that conversation between NotACow and Jimbo about SlimVirgin so people are logging. As for idling, the channel is just full of idlers.

I was under the impression they were banning all known proxies now as well, which would presumably include Tor proxies. There's a very long list of open proxies at Wikipedia, so if they're drawing from the same list, that would cover a lot of ground, I suspect. And going to other rooms would only make it easier for them to cross-index the IP addresses of other unknown (and previously kick-banned) nicks.

As for the rest, most IRC clients have a variety of logging options... Some of them turn logging on by default, and there's usually no way for the channel operator to stop it, or even know about it. So the Kelly log could've come from practically anyone, given that both Kelly and Slimmy clearly have no shortage of enemies. Last but not least, the channel certainly is full of idlers - but as long as their nicks are familiar, they presumably won't get kicked, banned, blocked, or even politely asked to play elsewhere.

Mind you, this is all coming from someone whose knowledge of IRC is much more attuned to the problem of firewalling it against operators of zombie trojan attack bots than to actually using it to chat with people... Ultimately, running bots on multiple IRC channels is a resource-intensive activity. It's certainly not Brandt's job to do it, which is to say that he's got other things he could be doing that might be much more enjoyable than watching text go by on a screen that calls him a "terrorist" and a "fucktard."

So let's not get on his case or anything for not doing it anymore... However, they certainly are (or were) an entertaining read, after a fashion!

[Daniel Brandt]

It was time-consuming to evade blocks, particularly after a half-dozen wildcard pattern blocks against me in Texas made it difficult to get into Wikipedia channels. That's despite the fact that my IP address from my desktop changes with a reset of my DSL modem.

Ditto for the dedicated servers I run, which are outside of Texas. It took a couple of months, but they figured these out also, and blocked them as well.

The various programs I had to write to parse out the logs that I managed to capture, plus the local search engine to search them, were time-consuming. To move stuff from raw log format to the website requires about half a dozen custom programs now, and I can hardly keep the sequence straight. It's barely worth the effort, even if I'm not blocked.

The IRC hostmasks I collected are useful. Over 80 percent of Wikipedia's IRC chatters have logged in at least once without a cloaked nick during the two months I collected these hostmasks. That means I've grabbed their IP address. This has proven quite handy, because it's searchable on Wikipedia-Watch. It's sort of like a CheckUser for anti-Wikipedians. But after a couple of months of collecting these, very few new ones were showing up that I hadn't already captured.

TOR is unreliable and slow and intermittent, even if it isn't blocked. I have never found TOR satisfactory for anything at all.

I feel that I've already established that Wikipedia's chat rooms are somewhat different from what you'd expect from real "encyclopedia" editors. I've also established the presence of malice toward me, which will be relevant in a court case if the court disagrees with my claim that I am a "private person," in the legal sense of that term. This is certainly true with respect to a defamation of character claim, and it is probably also true (although less well-established in case law) with an invasion of privacy claim.

Jimbo says I am a "public person." Brad Patrick will use this claim, along with Section 230 and any other desperate argument they can find, to defend themselves.

Jimbo is wrong. How many "public persons" can you find that don't have even one photograph on Google, Yahoo or MSN image search, who doesn't go to conventions or conferences, and who hasn't given a speech since 1970? I don't think a judge or jury will buy Jimbo's idea that I'm a "public person." But if I'm wrong, then I have to show malice. I think I'm already in a position to do that, thanks to the IRC logs and the history pages behind my bio.

Right now I'm much more interested in the plagiarism project, which is very time-consuming because all the rogue Wikipedia scrapers have to be separated from the sites that were partially copy-and-pasted by Wikipedia editors. There is no way to do this without checking the sites manually and looking for bylines and/or copyright notices, etc. I'm not at all surprised that no one has ever done this before. But I think it will be an issue, particularly since Wikipedia seems to delight in exposing any journalist who borrows from Wikipedia without giving credit.

[LamontStormstar]

If a journalist plagarizes a wikipedia article, it is the ultimate victory for whoever was controling the article. Now they have a source they can reference that will back up all their propaganda pushing.

And Mr Brandt, well... your main public thing is busting the guy who vandalized the Siegler article, which was really big to wikipedia. As for everything else, well... You mentioned your picture. People have constantly wondered what you look like in real life. I've seen threads about this and even one a few days ago on your wikipedia article. Also I hear a lot how people try to contact you (they're not using gmail) and you don't answer them, so you do try to keep private in that sense.

Wikipedia does have plagarism, but they do try to fix it when they find it. Actually they'd thank you for the work.

[Somey]

You mentioned your picture. People have constantly wondered what you look like in real life. I've seen threads about this and even one a few days ago on your wikipedia article.

I think Uncyclopedia has a couple of photos of Brandt, but they're a little... fuzzy?

As the man says, the lunatics may be running the asylum, but as long as you can still eat your breakfast cereal in peace, there's still no reason to join them!

[Daniel Brandt]

Wikipedia does have plagarism, but they do try to fix it when they find it. Actually they'd thank you for the work.

I doubt it. I'm working with a sample of 12,000 articles, which is just under one percent of their 1.4 million English-language articles. If I find 200 examples (merely a wild guess at this point) of plagiarism, then by extrapolation, they should be looking for the other 19,800 that I didn't try to find. They don't have any tools in place to do this, nor have they even discussed the issue. I don't think they will be thanking me.

[Somey]

From the talk page in question:

Malber, ED removed all the funny stuff you and several other people added in the article because there's lots of Brandt fanboy over there. Yet still all it did have was stuff about his hygene and clothing, not say his hair, his build (thin, fat, muscular), eye color, race, etc. Anomo 00:06, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Surely, this "Anomo" person just hasn't been paying attention. It's been well established that Brandt wears a 6-ft. diameter neon-pink Afro, is approximately 37 feet tall (but only 4 inches wide at the hip), has eyes "the color of film-noir dreams," and is a member of the Bwanabanuhiri race of tiny goblins from the planet Gongaloo.

Isn't that in the article? I mean, what good is Wikipedia, if essential stuff like that isn't even in the article? I mean, if they can't even manage to do a better job of compiling known sources than ED, ferchrissake...