Gary Weiss = Samiharris = Mantanmoreland, Here's how I know. Options

[WordBomb]

Depending on how much you care to know, you can bail out after making it through the short version of this story, or you may stick around for the long version, which will include all the details of how I know what I know.

The short version

• On January 21, 2008, User:Samiharris was using the IP address 151.202.103.104.
• On January 21, 2008, Gary Weiss was using the IP address 151.202.103.104.

Given this is a Verizon residential dsl account, which assigns a single IP per subscriber, we can safely conclude that Gary Weiss and Samiharris use the same computer, and are most likely the same person.

The long version
Gary Weiss is an idiot, but he’s not stupid. So he’s learned to use Proxify any time he visits a site he’s unsure of. Matching his IP to Samiharris’, therefore, would require coaxing him to a site au naturel, both as Weiss and as Samiharris, in the relatively short period of time in which his dynamic IP would likely remain unchanged.

I, editing as User:Post Doctorate y-o-y (so named because anybody doing post-doc work must certainly, and regularly, ask themselves “why, oh why am I still in school?!”) engaged Samiharris in a discussion over inclusion of some facts he (Samiharris) clearly wants to keep out of the article on Patrick Byrne. It happened in a very out-of-the-way place (Post Doctorate y-o-y’s brand new talk page), where nobody else was likely to notice it.
EDIT: They blanked that talk page in record time, so I've substituted a cached version of it here.

In the process of making my case, I invited Samiharris to read an article (which is not otherwise available freely online, btw) on a website that a friend can monitor. To put Samiharris at ease, and maximize the chance that he'd go there directly instead of anonymizing first, the link was presented as a Webcitation.org cache of the page, created that day and linked to by no other source.

Because Webcitation maintains the original html of the pages it caches, viewing it would still trigger the embedded ActiveMeter script.

Only one person visited the link that day, and the timing of the visits coincides precisely with Samiharris’ posts on the topic.

A screenshot of the resulting pings (he visited twice) is here:

At that point the challenge was to quickly capture Gary Weiss’s IP, sans anonymizer.

Like Webcite, the Wayback Machine caches a page’s html intact, also including any tracking scripts that might be present. But for some reason, most anonymized browsing of past versions of pages captured there is not allowed.

So, I arranged for Gary Weiss to receive email from somebody encouraging him to visit an archived version of a website that I used to own, promising that he'd find damning information about me there. I knew that when (not if) Weiss followed the link, it would be while not anonymized, triggering another ActiveMeter account which I am also able to monitor, though the old version of the site is long gone.

I was correct and a screenshot of the resulting ping from that visit is here:


I doubt this comes as much of a surprise to anybody, much less Jimbo. But we'll see what happens from here...whether Wikipedia manages to police itself for once, or whether I need to work this out in the media again.

This post has been edited by WordBomb: Sun 27th January 2008, 2:05am

[One]

Lamont pointed out the MONGO vote. Any other examples of recent abusive socking?

[Piperdown]

Lamont pointed out the MONGO vote. Any other examples of recent abusive socking?

I don't know where to start.

Look at Naked Short Selling beginning when I first edited there in Mid-March 2007. That man showed up with 2 accounts and started cold blanking well-sourced material I added from major publications, the SEC site, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=115876803
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=116128698
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=116568061

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gary_Weiss/Archive_2

It was a 3RR trap. That is what that person what up to with those 2 (at that time, he used 3 at a time on other people in 2006). Read the tag teaming, it is eerie.

Then the guy had conversations with himself. Read the talk pages of Short And Distort, where he decides with himself that merge with another general article, to get rid of reliably sourced material from Wired Magazine, several books, Forbes, an Attorney General's site, etc, that mention that scam. Because he doesn't want the flip side of Pump and Dump mentioned. Because he once wrote about a man is serving time for shorting and distorting. Favorably.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Short_and_distort


What a damn low life. I, and other people I read about in the history of the articles he socks, were run off of WP too.

Cla68 will be very interested to hear about this. He had many a consensus building conversations with what he thought were 2 people who weren't the subject of the article under review.

Double voting? Check out any AFD that person ever voted on. Every RFA. He would give a reasonable lag time before popping up with his sock.

Checkuser those 2 accounts. Now. This is bullshit and it has gone on too long to too many people.

And after pages of b.s., there still is no good reason given for why Piperdown was banned on Sept 8 2007, a ban that has never been apologized for or reversed.

This is a pattern of longterm abuse that has gone on even after (see my WR sig, last paragraph and link) WP Arbcom warned him to stop it in 2006 with LastExit and TomStoner accounts.

This post has been edited by Piperdown: Sun 27th January 2008, 4:11am