Risker Calls for Full Cavity Inspections All Arbcom Voters

[Triptych]

Risker calls for automated examining all Arbcom voters for IP and user agent, detection of who might be living with whom, and literacy testing.

Unhappy with the lightest of evidence-based standards for "sockpuppet investigations" and checkuser probing, or even the evidence-free WP:DUCK in which any administrator may simply say "I suspect," arbitrator Risker (no-one misked her) has called for persistent and comprehensive cyber scanning of anyone who voted in the 2013 Arbcom election, to include an evaluation of who may be living with whom.

"I'm going to be more specific here," she says. "Go to Special:SecurePoll/vote/360. Using the tabs at the top, look for same/similar IP and user agent combos (there are bound to be some) and then review the users to see if they are likely socks or are two people who reside together (there will be some of them, too). Look for CSRF tags and see if there is a reason to question those votes; in the past, scrutineers have sometimes contacted those editors directly. Look for near-identical usernames. Check with the election commissioners to see if they have received any emailed concerns about possible socks. Once you've investigated all of these issues, and all of you have signed off that you are satisfied there are no further votes to be eliminated, then you contact the person who holds the key (the election commissioners will tell you who it is and how to make contact). At that point, you can insert the key and do the tally. User:Risker|Risker." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =585445741.)

Of course in her mind it can't be outing (better said, "privacy-based harassment") to do such things. Why? Because it's her and her fellow arbs and administrators, and they feel perfect entitlement to sniff the body orifices any editor they please, however long it takes, and whenever they see fit to sniff them.

I wonder if those who voted had any idea of what they were really subjecting themselves to.

[Mancunium]

Don't forget the hanging chads.

[Vigilant]

For anyone with half a brain it is utterly trivial to bypass these types of checks.

Install free VirtualBox.
Make multiple guests from .vbi libraries where the name of the VM is the name of the wikipedia account so you don't forget who you are at the moment.
Use a cellular/tetherable device from a major ISP to access the internet. Toggle airplane mode/force a new IP often.
Use Firefox Agent Switcher. Leave it set to whatever on a particular VM. All edits from a given account are from the same agent, but none of the accounts share an agent string.

Takes about 2 hours
Edit and !Vote to your heart's content.


I do like the fact that Risker seems to be putting her hat in the ring for en.nsa/tsa director.
She might just be the perfect combination of fascist and moron to pull it off.

[EricBarbour]

For anyone with half a brain it is utterly trivial to bypass these types of checks.

Install free VirtualBox.
Make multiple guests from .vbi libraries where the name of the VM is the name of the wikipedia account so you don't forget who you are at the moment.
Use a cellular/tetherable device from a major ISP to access the internet. Toggle airplane mode/force a new IP often.
Use Firefox Agent Switcher. Leave it set to whatever on a particular VM. All edits from a given account are from the same agent, but none of the accounts share an agent string.

Takes about 2 hours
Edit and !Vote to your heart's content.

Yep. Or hell, just install multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Seamonkey, Chrome, Maxthon, Opera etc.).
Use agent-switcher plugins when available, they'll never see you.

I do like the fact that Risker seems to be putting her hat in the ring for en.nsa/tsa director.
She might just be the perfect combination of fascist and moron to pull it off.

[Vigilant]

The VMs make it possible to stay logged in at all times and never make a mistake with your account name.

All the best raconteurs are doing it.

[Mason]

The VMs make it possible to stay logged in at all times and never make a mistake with your account name.

All the best raconteurs are doing it.

But that means you have to make 150 edits with each account if you want to vote with it... is that a wise investment of your time?

[Vigilant]

The VMs make it possible to stay logged in at all times and never make a mistake with your account name.

All the best raconteurs are doing it.

But that means you have to make 150 edits with each account if you want to vote with it... is that a wise investment of your time?

It's a trivial amount of time and allows me to pee in the swimming pool. Repeatedly.

[Triptych]

"Happy-melon" posted a redacted screencap of the interface of the election tool they've been handing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki ... s_view.png. You can see it has the IP, XFF, User Agent, CSRF field and other fun things for the curious to click on, no doubt with matching features and user-friendly hotlinks to Geolocate and TracerouteIP and so forth.

The question occurred to me: "have all these election administrators and scrutineers and so forth self-identified to the WMF, in accordance with their access to private data policy?" Happy-melon is an oversighter, so presumably yeah for him or her. "Giant Snowman" however, judging by his page, is a stock administrator, and that only since last year. Stock administrators normally do not self-identify. And then that miserable excuse of an sergeant Tparis who's been banking the yuans for paid administrating while on the job at Lackland AFB, well he doesn't appear to be a functionary either, though he's knee-deep in that other IP-sniffing tool UTRS. I'm willing to be corrected on either of those, but their userpages are not tipping me off that they've self-identified to WMF, and thus we're greeted with the concept that Wikipedia is routinely granting access to private editor information to theoretically anonymous users.

The scrutineers are drawn mainly from other-language Wikipedias. They're apparently "stewards" described as "global sysops." Good lord, I hope they self-identify, and according to the steward guidelines yeah they do.

Still leaves the question of why arbitrator Risker is poking her nose in it and telling the election appointees what to do. Risker is not an election appointee, yet her knowledge of the election tool interface is clearly non-theoretical. She's been using it, and a lot. Have the other arbs been using it? Have the arbs Roger Davies and AGK, both standing for re-election, been using it? They should publish the logs.

EDIT: I noticed here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... volunteers) that it is stated that Tparis and Giantsnowman have self-identified. List of such individuals: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ID#G. Procedure for identification: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward ... s_required.

[Pen]

(sigh) Trying to find the socks is a trivial matter, and yes, the sole purpose of the secret ballot is to enable sockFARM voting, nothing else. (if it were about 'retaliation' then the vote, but not the voter, would be hidden). Arbs protect sockfarms, and protect that tool of tyranny. Finding sockfarms is pointless when you can't even get a single solitary sock blocked by the farmers that be. Only fully replacing wp will do.

The thing is, finding socks will do nothing except get you killed. Finding the socks is a trivial matter, it's getting anyone to do something about it when they too see it, that is the impossible part. Nobody knows better the value of a sockfarm in electing Arbs and their friends, than of course,.... an arb and their friends. They will protect the farm at all costs, and vote down any proposal that seeks to change that new status Quo.

ThatPeskyCommoner (T-C-L), a lovely user, saw how Worm knew and protected even the most blatantly obvious socks.

Currently, you have nearly 1000 edits to Wikipedia, and only 35 of them are to articles (Only one edit in the past 7 weeks). You have over 10 times as many edits to user talk pages [http://toolserver.org/~tparis/pcount/in ... =wikipedia]. That ratio should be the other way round. The primary purpose of this encyclopedia, is to build an encyclopedia - it's not meant as a place to talk to other users. On that, you've made 189 edits to Penyulap's talk page, around 1/5 of your edits here.

He knew, diff Pesky knew (two requests here diff) and worm did nothing but protect the sock's right to use one user's userpage as an attack page against another user diff Palz9000 was my official, approved, with offical community approval, bot account. Worm graciously offered to ban me (diff read the section 'offer'), he handed out what Montanabw (T-C-L) called a wiki 'Death threat'. Later, another arb, courcelles, did the deed. on this page diff you can read how Courcelles considered the legit, approved bot edits, with a bot flag and community approval btw, 'sockpuppeting' which required a 'checkuser' to work out which person owned the bot. Or it could have been just to 'own the block' so no-one else could undo it except a checkuser, the bot was already indeffed after all, so why would a person block an already blocked bot ? The clear and obvious-to-all attack socks were never blocked even once. The third Arb that came to my talkpage to block me was dear Elen of the Roads who blocked me for, you'll never believe it until you read it, for not editing.

diff this is the best read for you lot, as it explains how the better you are at spotting socks, the more incredibly dangerous to the status quo you are. The person using the account I am chatting to there in that section took the next six months off from editing. That is apparently the time it officially takes for CU info to disappear. I didn't know that at the time, and it is meaningless, as the actual info is kept forever, it's just accessible to different people than wiki CU's. As for on wiki blocking, none of the socks, no matter how completely self-admitting or obvious, were ever blocked by any of the arbs involved. The only person blocked was the one who could see them. Check PALZ9000 (T-C-L) userpage history, there has never been anything done about the vandalism by multiple socks with complete arbcomm backed immunity, and never will be. It's 500 days blocked today, without any diffs, without any policy mentioned.

[thekohser]

Oh, man... Look out -- the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Wikipedia's "scrutineers" snoop on living arrangements of contributors
Gregory Kohs, Examiner.com
December 11, 2013

[Zoloft]

Oh, man... Look out -- the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Wikipedia's "scrutineers" snoop on living arrangements of contributors
Gregory Kohs, Examiner.com
December 11, 2013

Just when you thought that the nerdy know-it-alls who run Wikipedia couldn't get much creepier...

Great lede clause.

[Pen]

What, Risker IS an arbcom member, investigating arbcom members. Well that can only do as well as checkusers investigating checkusers. Cu's managed to spend $40,000 on a junket to hong kong to discuss what a great job they were doing, while nobody has ever been able to find evidence of them actually doing a job AT ALL, EVER, on meta.

Luckily, no editor can double check the socks voting in the election, 'cause it's a secret ballot. Wikipedians can simply rest assured that Arbs are trusting other Arbs. Idiots all.

[thekohser]

What, Risker IS an arbcom member, investigating arbcom members.

That's not what's happening here. Or, are you being sarcastic?

[Pen]

What, Risker IS an arbcom member, investigating arbcom members.

That's not what's happening here. Or, are you being sarcastic?

Hang on, here is the source of my conflooshion. It's in the article

"The revelation that contributor-voters would come under the lens of these scrutineers was offered matter-of-factly by an ArbCom member "Risker", otherwise known in real life as "

so track down who wrote that article and glare at them, after 500 days blocked without cause on en.wiki, I don't keep up with the goings-on there.

[Admiral Bobbery]

1. Risker administers the Wikimedia Foundation Board elections, which is why she knows so much about the SecurePoll interface.

2.

@Risker: I use to calibrate the depth of my analysis upon delta. A very very deep analysis must be taken with a 2 votes margin, while it's a useless waste of energies with a 50 votes margin. --Vituzzu (talk) 23:38, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

... because heaven forbid we don't do a "very very deep analysis" of this life-changing election

[thekohser]

What, Risker IS an arbcom member, investigating arbcom members.

That's not what's happening here. Or, are you being sarcastic?

Hang on, here is the source of my conflooshion. It's in the article

It would have been more accurate for you to say, "Risker is an ArbCom member, explaining how scrutineers will be investigating voters in the ArbCom elections (who, incidentally, may include members of ArbCom itself)."

[Hex]

Welcome new members Pen and Admiral Bobbery.

[Triptych]

Oh, man... Look out -- the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Wikipedia's "scrutineers" snoop on living arrangements of contributors
Gregory Kohs, Examiner.com
December 11, 2013

Just when you thought that the nerdy know-it-alls who run Wikipedia couldn't get much creepier...

Great lede clause.

I liked the article. I tried keyword searching Google news and Bing news for it, but they're not indexing it (among the news) that I can tell.

The article captures indeed some of the invasive and unregulated behavior of these insiders. Risker's attitude is so telling. She regards it as her right to probe these IPs and associated editors, who *haven't even done anything at all*. When, as she says she does (as well as actually professorially instructing the election officials, some from other Wikipedias) she's inquiring to the living arrangement of the voters, specifically who might be whose family member, who might be whose lover, who might be whose co-worker, there is no way at all she's doing that without Googling for clues, and tracing and geolocating those IPs. It is "sleuthing." It is "outing." The rules do not apply to administrators and certainly not to arbs. It is her attitude and that of most of them. It's AGK the Policy Theorist's attitude. He says "policy doesn't control me, policy is just the reflection of whatever I choose to do." I'd like to know if AGK, like Risker, has been fooling around with the election tool. It's quite bothersome as well that Risker attempts to instruct the voting officials volunteering from the other language encyclopedias. She seeks to export the lawless and casual administrator abuses endemic to English Wikipedia to the other ones. That must be why WMF gifted her (and AGK come to think of it, and who knows which of the other arbs) that free Hong Kong Wikimania vacation, so they can go and lord it over those from the other Wikipedias, and export their "I do what I want" brand of management.

The article is good because people need to know this stuff. People need to know the unregulated and policy-free use of checkuser, that anyone may be targeted. They need to know about the untouchable statuses of these administrators for life. We see the tiniest bit of the corruption at these times, where someone like Risker lets slip the merest indication of how pervasive the rot is, of how deep and casual their contempt for the privacy of content editors. It's not brand new, we had another glimpse with the Malleus Fatuorum and George Ponderavo affair, where no less then 17 checkusers were implicated. I hope a checkuser has a conscience crisis this time around and comprehensively publishes all the usage logs. I hope an arb snatches the complete mailing list cache on the way out, and then blows the lid off all their furtive communications. People deserve to know.

In the meantime, "Giant Snowman," who had sought to gain access to those checkuser-like election tools without even self-identifying to WMF, and was repeatedly prompted by a noble IP before finally doing so after the deadline, has uttered the words "I hope you trust me." Umm, nope! Not with that stuff!

[thekohser]

I tried keyword searching Google news and Bing news for it, but they're not indexing it (among the news) that I can tell.

Just got indexed by Google News at 10:30 AM Eastern. It's showing up now.

You can tell that the story damages Wikipedia, because mention of the story on Wikipedia is not allowed.

[Triptych]

I tried keyword searching Google news and Bing news for it, but they're not indexing it (among the news) that I can tell.

Just got indexed by Google News at 10:30 AM Eastern. It's showing up now.

Okay, works here as well, for example https://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia+snoop&tbm=nws. Nice work.

[Vigilant]

Good thing wikipediots are as good at choosing polling software as they are at protecting BLPs...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit ... =585741409

There are no SecurePoll logs, other than the voter list, {{ul|Vituzzu}}. No logs of who changes the translations, when, or from what to what. No logs of who pushes the tally button. No logs of who strikes votes or when, or who reinstates them and when. If there was logging, what you said would be a deterrent to inappropriate administrator behaviour, I quite agree. But there is no logging on SecurePoll, other than the voter list, and technically that's a database, not a log. [[User:Risker|Risker]] ([[User talk:Risker|talk]]) 15:51, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

*sigh*

SO DUMB!

[Bottled_Spider]

Risker calls for automated examining all Arbcom voters for IP and user agent, detection of who might be living with whom, and literacy testing.

Hey! Maybe she should change her name to "Frisker"!

[Vigilant]

Risker calls for automated examining all Arbcom voters for IP and user agent, detection of who might be living with whom, and literacy testing.

Hey! Maybe she should change her name to "Frisker"!

[Mason]

[Pen]

Welcome [...] Pen [..]

Thank you Hex.

[NotNormal]

Yep. Or hell, just install multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Seamonkey, Chrome, Maxthon, Opera etc.).
Use agent-switcher plugins when available, they'll never see you.

Don't forget to use several different laptops (both Mac & PC) with different browser configurations with accounts created from IP addresses from 3 different proxy companies. Oh wait.......maybe that's just me avoiding detection. I get paid to edit, not vote for the idiots trying to track me down. I will say that I'm not surprised that they want to violate their own privacy policy to see if people voted multiple times. Somebody must be pissed that they weren't elected or did I miss something in the article?

[Arithmancer]

Oh, man... Look out -- the mainstream media has picked up on this story.

Wikipedia's "scrutineers" snoop on living arrangements of contributors
Gregory Kohs, Examiner.com
December 11, 2013

Wonderful. I love the way the reporter casually drops Anne Clin's (just a little bitty consonant away, oh it's so tempting) identity in real life, whatever that actually is. But he ought to real up: I very strongly suspect arbcom involvement in this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25359939.

Anyone seriously identified the NSA candidate here yet BTW? If I was advising I would suggest mentoring 1 a Catholic 2 a paedophile 3 an anorak. Bring anyone to mind?

Complaints on a postcard to GCHQ. Cheers.

[Clipperton]

"Happy-melon" posted a redacted screencap of the interface of the election tool they've been handing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki ... s_view.png. You can see it has the IP, XFF, User Agent, CSRF field...

What is CSRF? (...something about cross site scripting... which I don't get in this context.)

[Arithmancer]

"Happy-melon" posted a redacted screencap of the interface of the election tool they've been handing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki ... s_view.png. You can see it has the IP, XFF, User Agent, CSRF field...

What is CSRF? (...something about cross site scripting... which I don't get in this context.)

Cavity Search Risker Factor (force 12 me - god it hurt).

Or you can try wading through this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MBis ... e_election, where it's mentioned specifically. Can't make head or tail of it myself.

I can't believe how little attention this is getting from MSM.

What's the best browser for maintaining anonymity in relation to the user agent thing?

[SB_Johnny]

Cross-site request forgery (T-H-L)

The only thing I can figure is that they're afraid someone will try to rig the election using a botnet. Because that's how important the election is.

[thekohser]

I can't believe how little attention this is getting from MSM.

Only one comment on the Examiner article, after 140 page views -- shows a lack of interest in the story. I think that people just don't care anymore that various mysterious entities are spying on them.

[Vigilant]

"Happy-melon" posted a redacted screencap of the interface of the election tool they've been handing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki ... s_view.png. You can see it has the IP, XFF, User Agent, CSRF field...

What is CSRF? (...something about cross site scripting... which I don't get in this context.)

Cavity Search Risker Factor (force 12 me - god it hurt).

Take it like a man.

What's the best browser for maintaining anonymity in relation to the user agent thing?

I'm a big fan of FireFox with the Agent Switcher extension.
I do run my accounts in virtual machines as well to prevent accidental login mistakes.

[Arithmancer]

"Happy-melon" posted a redacted screencap of the interface of the election tool they've been handing out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki ... s_view.png. You can see it has the IP, XFF, User Agent, CSRF field...

What is CSRF? (...something about cross site scripting... which I don't get in this context.)

Cavity Search Risker Factor (force 12 me - god it hurt).

Take it like a man.

What's the best browser for maintaining anonymity in relation to the user agent thing?

I'm a big fan of FireFox with the Agent Switcher extension.
I do run my accounts in virtual machines as well to prevent accidental login mistakes.

Cheers. Thanks for that. Made a note of it and shall investigate.

But TheKohser is quite right. We all know that websites can gather a lot of information about us when we use them, to the point of making a pretty informed guess who we are and where we come from. That's why they offer these privacy guarantees in the first place. But with Wikipedia it's different. Cross Wikipedia, and you can do so over a totally lame issue such the correct formatting of dates, and you get a posse of checkuser police coming after you ever after making "checkuser-like" erm ... checks on you. And these people are the nerdiest of the nerd, they know what they're doing and they enjoy doing it, like vigilantes they get off on it. Imagine our man in the Canadian Ministry of Defence, who's not really a published author, not really a well known singer, not even ever so much as a lousy council candidate in his political aspirations, who has max 25 followers on his Twitter account devoted to quoting quotqble quotes gleaned from Reader's on what other people think about things, imagine this total fantasist and loser getting checkuser rights, how he will cream himself. And he will get them if he makes it to ArbCom - check out Ann Risker's talk page on that.

However I should discipline myself here. Thanks everyone for putting up with me. I'm going to stop posting for a while (or at least until the results are in ...). Isn't that the weirdest of all wikiphenomena when you get addicts trying to rehab their habit asking admins to block them?

Thanks all. As for van H., I really do have a soft spot for him - just being playful there.

Added: Just uploaded Agent Switcher. It's excellent. Thanks so much for that. Off to plant a few more cabbages down at allotment now. May they grow huge .

[Triptych]

I can't believe how little attention this is getting from MSM.

Only one comment on the Examiner article, after 140 page views -- shows a lack of interest in the story. I think that people just don't care anymore that various mysterious entities are spying on them.

You might write a viral one one of these days. The Internet is democratizing news, yet mostly you still need an established platform, I guess Examiner isn't quite getting you that. Wikipediocracy front page probably gets more views than that. Still, the right story could go viral. Like that thing from six years ago where Jimbo's editing the article of that Fox News woman, and she releases the text messages where there's a sexual nature to their relationship, not just the COI editing. And then she's selling his soiled garments on EBay, so he *blocks* her! LOL! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/03/04 ... c-breakup/. That's pretty viralish. Maybe you want more substance and less salacious luridness than that, but it did have the WP:COI and WP:INVOLVED use of administrative tools in there.

The Risker affair here has substance, it's a total disrespect of the illusion of security Wikipedia's editors' computer fingerprint information, and another indication there are no standards at all by the legion of "sockpuppet investigators," just World of Warcraft kill tallying and contempt to the fact they're messing with real people, except of course when the tables are turned.

[thekohser]

You might write a viral one one of these days. The Internet is democratizing news, yet mostly you still need an established platform, I guess Examiner isn't quite getting you that. Wikipediocracy front page probably gets more views than that.

Examiner is a much more popular domain than Wikipediocracy, but with content spread more diffusely. I have had two stories on Examiner go somewhat "viral".

The first was the Secret Donor List, which got 8,153 page views in April 2011, mostly from StumbleUpon.com sharing.

The second was the more recent Jimmy Wales Hunts for Snowden piece in June 2013. That had 12,467 page views that month, with traffic driven from several key sources: TechMeme.com, Reddit, Twitter, direct links (people e-mailing the story to friends, I suppose), and Google search results for queries like "edward snowden wikipedia" and "snowden wiki".

Perhaps Zoloft can give us an idea of how many page views (or perhaps more meaningfully, unique visitors) our best front-page blog posts have received here at Wikipediocracy.com?