From the illustrious Administrator's notice board - #Talk:Brandt.

And as an aside, this quote, courtesy of Lawrence Cohen sums it up nicely and is just too good to pass up. Replying to JoshuaZ on Flo's talk;

Wait a minute, I thought there was a topic ban on JoshuaZ? After it was revealed he abused sockpuppets to pursue his campaign against Brandt?

Why is JoshuaZ still commenting on the article?

Straight to Arbcom with him. Get JoshuaZ out of that place. He's a menace and an abuser of the whole thing.

We've been over the sockpuppeting accusations before and a variety of prominent editors who have looked at the evidence for that agree concluded that I hadn't sockpuppeted. - JoshuaZ


Are those the same prominent editors that agreed that SlimVirgin hadn't sockpuppeted, either?

And the same prominent editors that agreed that Mantanmoreland hadn't sockpuppeted?

Mind you, it clearly states on WP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...quests#February

Great Spinal Tap Ref …

Jon

Oh ya, JoshuaZ's sockpuppets. Apparently he's waiting for the WMF developers to physically examine his computer for a rootkit so as to clear his name, or something like that.

So 2 1/2 years ago, when JoshuaZ was a fledgling editor and no one had heard of him, someone predicted that JoshuaZ would be a future harasser of Brandt. Went to all the trouble of getting into his "rootkit" to create a malicious account that made various appearances on future afds from varying IPs of JoshuaZ. Over the next two years? Appearing within 3 minutes of Joshua on one afd. With JoshuaZ actually correcting one of his spelling mistakes.

I wish this criminal genius, who is a cross between Nostradamus and Bill Gates would reveal himself. We need his services.

HA! Holy shit, that's priceless!

Oh dear, that's going to have to be on the top-line blurb for at least a week. Welcome to no-way-outsville, Joshy!

Back to the original thread topic, though (as there was really no question that JoshuaZ was going to ignore the "topic-ban" - you might as well try to make the Nile flow southwards). Some of Mr. Brandt's recent activity has suggested, to me at least, that he might have actually wanted them to restore the article, possibly so that he could sue some people, finally. (He hasn't said boo to me about that, though.) I'd imagine Josh would be at the top of his sue-list at this point, but now there's this User:Kotniski feller, famous the world over for his list of phonetic representations of Polish towns. His M.O. seems to be to show up in the midst of ultra-high-drama situations and immediately say, "I haven't been following this, and I have no idea what's going on, but WHY CAN'T WE JUST DO WHATEVER THE HELL WE WANT WITH THESE BLP's????"

It's a standard approach, and it doesn't look like many of them are falling for it, though obviously Joshy's Brandt-Basher Brigade will use any support they can get.

How come no one has asked me if I put Brad's name on hivemind? After all, it could have been a rootkit on my computer!

Where the hell were you during the writers' strike, when we desperately needed new episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles?

Jon

And that Poetlister did?

I didn't consider the Terminator 2006 defense (I had to look up The Sarah Connor Chronicles).

It is conceivable that a time traveller, intent on creating a mild episode on some website, has managed to travel the vortex back to 2006, and hacked into JoshuaZ's rootkit. The mastermind managed to create one of the accounts before going up and down the Time Ladder, supporting JoshuaZ from his IP, whatever this IP reveals at the time.

"I'll be back...



...every so often to support your decisions in various Wikipedia deletion debates."

Your computer has been hacked by someone who uses the access to commit identity theft and/or sully your name. Do you:
[] Contact law enforcement?
[] Wait a couple of months, then talk to a wikipedia developer about it?

Hang on to that denial right up to the very end. You'd think he would have kept the fraudulent accounts operational for added plausibility, rather than chickening out after Gothnic's last sputter at the end of the "arbcom" discussion.

Yeah, just to confirm, all the "sockpuppets" have stopped editing now, right?

Probably because JoshuaZ is keeping a better eye on his computer, or something like that...

Lessee...


There is no rootkit on his laptop. And even if there were, there is no way to access a NAT wifi client machine from the Internet, as there is no inbound routing to NAT clients at coffee shops.

What WMF hasn't done is cough up the IPs that would settle whether JZ was also connecting from a campus cluster of identical machines. The useragents would be identical for a fleet of identical machines in a campus computer cluster.

Sir, I've seen Rootkits. And you sir, have no rootkit.

Seriously.

More like this —

I knew Rootkits.
Rootkits was a friend of mine.
You, Sir, have no Rootkits.

Jon

That's what I was shooting for, but you did it so much better. And it was for JZ, by the way.

Sorry, I'm a moron. Could you (or someone) please describe this in terms someone like me could understand?

At the moment; this is me;

Thanks.

Technically, a rootkit (anyone else remember when they were called "trojans") could connect to an external server - e.g. IRC, and accept instructions.

Not that I'm saying it's likely.

We also don't know that the IPs in question are wifi and not JoshuaZ's home IP.

That is why we have wikipedia

Actually, according to Wikipedia, the term Computer_cluster refers to something else entirely. I think Moulton meant to say Computer_lab, and that JoshuaZ may have operated his massive sockpuppet army from one of those.

Yes. I believe that group consensus overruled a bunch of MIT Profs, and defined it as a breakfast cereal.

Aah, wasn't aware that rootkit = trojan...I'm at least passingly aware of what the hell they are. Thanks.

Squeakbox; quiet you

I suppose one can argue whether the term 'rootkit' includes a 'bot that fetches instructions from a botnet controller. But using a botnet to edit WP articles seems like such an advance in the state of the art of malware that it would be a major story in itself. And it's unlikely only JZ's computer would have been so commandeered.

But remember, this is a haphazard theory for which there isn't a shred of evidence, and for which the technical reasoning to characterize it requires features beyond the known state of the art of malware. Moreover, the malware would have to have successfully installed itself on more than just JZ's laptop. One can imagine that JZ was lax in firewalling his personal laptop, but that's almost surely not the case for campus computer clusters.

MIT-Mensch geekiness asside, what we have here is yet another illustration of Wikipedia's Gang Ethos, where one's Status in the Gang is measured by how many rules one can break and still get away with it.

Jon

What it reveals to me is a systematic pattern of ineptitude in crafting credible theories grounded in evidence and reasoning. They can't do it when they don't like, and they can't even do it when they do like you.

At least in the era of King John's corrupt regime, they could get the partisan judicial outcome they wanted without getting tripped up by sloppy forensic analysis.

Look, diverting as the whole CSI:Wikipedia Schtick may be, diverting is all it really is.

The fact that someone like JZ even gets the benefit of the first doubt — much less the benefits of all the nauseatingly n-definite shadows of subsequently trumped up doubts — is already sufficient proof of the Gang Elite Ethos (GEE) that is in place.

Believe me, the lesson is not lost on T.C. Nits (The Common Nøøb In The Street), and everyone — 'cept maybe for some self-diverting larned perfessors — knows what it means to watch yet another Corrupt Self-Policing Force deafside the Public with their Code of Silence, and when that fails, skunk the Public with one damn Red Herring after another.

But I'm sure the Kabal Kops appreciate all the Φish …

Jon

Relax, Ryulong's got it all under control. He's protected the page, and even kickstarted productive editing on the article with this gem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=210596862

Well, there's different origins. A rootkit was originally a very specific thing - patched userspace tools or even patched drivers on a Unix system with two objectives: Conceal its own existence, and conceal that the system has been compromised. A trojan originally referred strictly to how things were spread (malicious software attached to something legitimate-looking like a game that someone would download and run), but later referred to specific pieces of software like BackOrifice, NetBus, etc, later rootkit referred by analogy to stuff other than on Unix systems, and the meanings have since totally converged.

Cult of the Amateur meets the development of neologisms. Anyone else notice how terribly imprecise the new words of the Internet age are? "Spam" and "troll", I'm looking at you.

Spam: junk-mail on the net. Junk email.

Troll: Person who is a drama-addict, who injects drama and discord into public internet discussions in order to increase the level of drama and raw emotion in the discourse. Such persons are usually initially mistaken for those seeking to teach facts or to learn facts, but this is a guise.

Is that helpful?

I've concluded that a troll is someone who asks a good question that the other guy doesn't want to have to answer.

That's the WP definition of troll, used as term of art in application of a bad internet term with bad connotations to somebody, for purposes of "labeling" them as bad, preparitory to kicking them out of the ant-hill.

I gave the definition in common usage everyplace, other than special cult-speak.

That said, trollerly, like evil, is rarely pure. Even the worst is usually no better than 99 and 44/100% pure. Some people go to ventilate as well as inform, and that's about half trollery, depending on circumstance. And even nearly pure education has a bit of emotional component, as otherwise it would sound like two Vulcans conversing. But as in all fuzzy undertakings, you have ask yourself the general aim, and that controls the binary label, if binary label is what you're stuck with.

That's the basic problem with language, you know, as Hayakawa, following Korzybski, never tired of reminding us. Language is usually binary, because words are either used as descriptors, or not. But reality itself is fuzzy. Very fuzzy.

According to The Age, the 30 year aniversary of the first piece of spam being sent is this saturday.

And OrangeMarlin has even updated the definition of spam.