8 ms·

Anon – Tweet about anonymous Wikipedia edits from particular IP address ranges

118 points by wodow 12y ago

kitd 12y ago
A bit OT, but I found IFTTT the most interesting part of this announcement. https://ifttt.com/ https://ifttt.com/
- tgb 12y ago
  Can you explain? I don't see the relevance.
  - frogpelt 12y ago
    I'm having trouble too. But I think the idea that kicked this whole thing off was @parliamentedits created by Tom Scott using IFTTT. So, maybe that's what kitd means.
    - kitd 12y ago
      Yes, that's it. Maybe I'm just behind the times but I'd never heard of IFTTT before and it looked intriguing.
wodow 12y ago
If this kind of thing becomes popular, I expect editing activity will get pushed out to the home ISPs of officials and their staff.
- ejr 12y ago
  Bringing work home has not been a popular option in these spheres as far as I know, so the staff may become excluded. The officials themselves may be doing the edits if that's the case.
- _delirium 12y ago
  They could alternately just create accounts, and continue to edit from work. Non-logged-in edits have IP addresses attached, but edits by logged-in users are pseudonymous; you wouldn't know if a user was editing from the Danish Parliament any more than you know whether I'm posting this HN comment right now from the Danish Parliament. The IPs are logged internally for a period of time, but those logs are available to only a small number of users (not even most administrators), who can only use them for a limited range of things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Or maybe they'll just use Tor. And then they'll defend Tor in Congress because they have a use for it. I think I'd be fine with that outcome.
  - middleclick 12y ago
    Wikipedia blocks Tor.
    - x1798DE 12y ago
      More accurately, most Tor exit nodes are either IP blocked from editing or the exit node servers block Wikipedia editing themselves to prevent their IP from incurring a block.
  - joshfraser 12y ago
    A common VPN would work just as well.
- TrainedMonkey 12y ago
  Even if that happens, there is still a lot of value in checking what kind of information manipulation happened historically.
grondilu 12y ago
Is there a rule anywhere that forbids to edit Wikipedia from your working place?? If so, Wikipedia will lose quite a lot of editors :(
- _delirium 12y ago
  No, at least not from Wikipedia's side (maybe some workplaces have such a rule). If you're editing on behalf of your employer, e.g. you're a paid PR person whose job includes editing Wikipedia, you're supposed to disclose that as a potential conflict of interest (you can still edit after disclosure). If you're just some person editing articles on their lunch break, there's no specific rule about it. However, if you're editing from a non-logged-in account, your IP address is attached to the edits, so third-party analysts can dig through the edits looking to see if they can correlate IP ranges with questionable edits, which is what's going on here. In the discussion about edits from the Norwegian parliament that happened yesterday, it seemed like it was mostly perfectly innocuous edits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    One thing to note about this is that this is just something new in the Wikimedia Terms of Use, imposed by the head office. Before the Wikimedia Foundation made the change to the terms, the self-governance mechanisms of English Wikipedia twice rejected this concept.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      The addition to the legal Terms is new, but the English Wikipedia has long had a norm that you should disclose any conflicts of interest (paid or otherwise), and there have been community processes in place to warn people who appear to be failing to do so, at least when people with undeclared COIs made edits that raised enough eyebrows for someone to notice. You could maybe fly under the radar if you never made controversial changes, but warning templates like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI go back to the early days of the encyclopedia. Some people who were found PR-scrubbing biographies for pay were also community-banned in the past, though those were case-by-case decisions.
minikomi 12y ago
How do you search for the blocks of IP's to use? Interested in setting one up for Japan, but having trouble finding the right block to use..
- kmfrk 12y ago
  You just have to know. :) Try asking someone in the Japanese Open Knowledge chapter: http://okfn.jp http://okfn.jp.
- joshfraser 12y ago
  http://bgp.he.net/ http://bgp.he.net/
- coderholic 12y ago
  A google for "japan government official website" turns up http://japan.kantei.go.jp http://japan.kantei.go.jp. We can then use the ipinfo.io API to find out which network this is on: $ curl ipinfo.io/`dig +short japan.kantei.go.jp` { "ip": "202.32.211.142", "hostname": "No Hostname", "city": null, "region": null, "country": "JP", "loc": "35.6900,139.6900", "org": "AS2497 Internet Initiative Japan Inc." } We can lookup more details at http://ipinfo.io/AS2497 http://ipinfo.io/AS2497. It looks like lots of different organization share this network, including Coca-Cola, and a bunch of universities, so filtering based on this network is going to get us what we're after. You can also go to http://ipinfo.io/countries/jp http://ipinfo.io/countries/jp and see all of the networks in Japan. There are a few that are government related, but there doesn't seem to be a main or single network that the government uses. Things are easier in the UK where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS29214 http://ipinfo.io/AS29214 (Houses of Parliament) or Ireland where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS15806 http://ipinfo.io/AS15806 (Irish Government)
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Why do you assume the website and their internet connections are in the same block? Many companies and organisations use external hosting.
danso 12y ago
Not to take away from the OP, but I find the library that it depends on, the npm package "wikichanges", to be a little more interesting: https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges Wikichanges provides a thin wrapper around Wikipedia's API to get a stream of edits. Anon listens on the WikiChanges object and filters it for a specified range of IPs, and then uses the "twit" package to tweet. OK, neither of them are particularly complex, but that's kind of what makes them cool...a lot of interesting things can be done with simple hacks and piping. A small change I would make is to remove "anonymously" as by definition, all of the detected changes come from anonymous users. A little tightening of the wordage, and the tweet can include maybe even the changelog message of the edit. A late-summer project I have in mind is just to scour all the changes made by these IP addresses, since the beginning of time. It'd be interesting to see the rate of change or the trends in behavior over time...I expect if Anon gets a little more coverage, all staffers will take the 30 seconds it takes to make a new account to mask their IP addresses. But then again, I thought people would've figured that out years ago...
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  The npm package is by the same author as the OP, he just extracted it into a package for re-use, so, yeah!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
silverlight 12y ago
How interesting. For example, this one was recently linked via the Twitter account: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615623458 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615... Changing it from "corporate lawyer" to "attorney". I assume that someone believes the latter is more "on message" for the Congressman's campaign efforts. I imagine most of these edits are similarly innocuous and subtle, but it's interesting to see what things the folks up in Washington think are worth having an intern update to help facilitate their plans.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  Or things that some staffer was looking up anyway and changed it. Then again, there's something sinister about the minor style change to Step Up 3D's article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=614980617 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=61... Probably the anti-community center lobby trying to keep kids from learning to breakdance.
- jjcm 12y ago
  Some of the edits are far less subtle: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614523933#National_conservative_leader http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614... The addition sounds like something copy/pasted directly from a campaign flyer. The addition of titles (Congressman), the subjective language (unwavering), and lack of any citations makes it a pretty clear indicator of who edited it and for what purpose. Edit: a quick googling shows that it in fact is copy/pasted directly from his personal site: http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tommorris 12y ago
Let's not call then "anonymous". An IP address isn't anonymous. A throwaway account is actually far more anonymous.
- tritium 12y ago
  Depending, of course, upon whichever IP addresses are associated with the account.
  - tommorris 12y ago
    If you edit as a logged-in user, your IP address is only revealed if it gets checked by a CheckUser, a specific class of user who has access to the CheckUser logs. I have access to the CheckUser logs for one Wikimedia project, for instance. Those lookups are themselves logged and have to be justified, and people aren't allowed to just go on fishing trips into that data - there has to be a plausible case for why someone is going to go look for them. If you are editing in a non-controversial fashion and want to preserve your privacy, using an account is a much better way to do so than editing as an IP. If your are logged in, the only people who can see your IP are (hopefully) trusted users in response to a legitimate abuse request or one of the other criteria listed in the privacy policy and CheckUser policy. If you aren't logged in, everybody can see your IP address.
zqfm 12y ago
It's a bit concerning that https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=616543585 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=61... would be coming from someone in congress.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  Even more disturbing was the edit from the US Senate which changed Edward Snowden's page to refer to him as a "traitor" instead of "dissident": http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked-to.html http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked...
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    I'm more concerned with Senators and Congresspeople saying that in public rather than minor staffers screwing around on Wikipedia.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  143.231.249.138 has a number of goofy edits, and also seems overly concerned with Lyndon LaRouche's page. User was blocked for vandalism in 2008, 2009, 2011, seems like vandalizing the Wiki is their hobby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/143.231.249.138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/143.231.... >That IP was blocked again today for 48 hours after serially vandalizing a congressperson's entry, a personal attack on an admin, etc. Since blocking, this edit to the IP's own talk page is clearly a declaration, perhaps less than constructive. Toddst1 21:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC) >I don't know if it is a declaration, but it is lyrics to The Doors song "Light My Fire." KillerChihuahua 22:16, 14 May 2008 (UTC) >Blocked again, for 55 hrs. KillerChihuahua 20:49, 27 May 2008 (UTC) >I just blocked 143.231.249.138, an IP within the US House range, for 24 hours for disruptive editing: repeatedly removing negative yet sourced information from articles about Republican congressmen and refusing attempts to discuss. Daniel Case 14:16, 15 March 2011 (UTC) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Notifications#User:143.231.249.138_on_English_Wikipedia_.28US_House_of_Representatives.29 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Not...
msane 12y ago
According to @congresedits someone from a congress IP is editing the "David Icke" and "Bohemian Grove" articles currently, just adding the word "allegedly" in a few places. At least they have a sense of humor.
rictic 12y ago
This edit from the House of Representatives is pretty amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616095553 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616...
- kbenson 12y ago
  As someone who lives 30 minutes from there, and knows people that have waited for the event, I agree.
kelvin0 12y ago
OK, but I guess this cannot take into account edits that would be made via a VPN account?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

118 points by wodow 12y ago

kitd 12y ago

A bit OT, but I found IFTTT the most interesting part of this announcement. https://ifttt.com/ https://ifttt.com/

tgb 12y ago
Can you explain? I don't see the relevance.
- frogpelt 12y ago
  I'm having trouble too. But I think the idea that kicked this whole thing off was @parliamentedits created by Tom Scott using IFTTT. So, maybe that's what kitd means.
  - kitd 12y ago
    Yes, that's it. Maybe I'm just behind the times but I'd never heard of IFTTT before and it looked intriguing.

wodow 12y ago

If this kind of thing becomes popular, I expect editing activity will get pushed out to the home ISPs of officials and their staff.

ejr 12y ago
Bringing work home has not been a popular option in these spheres as far as I know, so the staff may become excluded. The officials themselves may be doing the edits if that's the case.
_delirium 12y ago
They could alternately just create accounts, and continue to edit from work. Non-logged-in edits have IP addresses attached, but edits by logged-in users are pseudonymous; you wouldn't know if a user was editing from the Danish Parliament any more than you know whether I'm posting this HN comment right now from the Danish Parliament. The IPs are logged internally for a period of time, but those logs are available to only a small number of users (not even most administrators), who can only use them for a limited range of things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser
higherpurpose 12y ago
Or maybe they'll just use Tor. And then they'll defend Tor in Congress because they have a use for it. I think I'd be fine with that outcome.
- middleclick 12y ago
  Wikipedia blocks Tor.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    More accurately, most Tor exit nodes are either IP blocked from editing or the exit node servers block Wikipedia editing themselves to prevent their IP from incurring a block.
- joshfraser 12y ago
  A common VPN would work just as well.
TrainedMonkey 12y ago
Even if that happens, there is still a lot of value in checking what kind of information manipulation happened historically.

grondilu 12y ago

Is there a rule anywhere that forbids to edit Wikipedia from your working place?? If so, Wikipedia will lose quite a lot of editors :(

_delirium 12y ago
No, at least not from Wikipedia's side (maybe some workplaces have such a rule). If you're editing on behalf of your employer, e.g. you're a paid PR person whose job includes editing Wikipedia, you're supposed to disclose that as a potential conflict of interest (you can still edit after disclosure). If you're just some person editing articles on their lunch break, there's no specific rule about it. However, if you're editing from a non-logged-in account, your IP address is attached to the edits, so third-party analysts can dig through the edits looking to see if they can correlate IP ranges with questionable edits, which is what's going on here. In the discussion about edits from the Norwegian parliament that happened yesterday, it seemed like it was mostly perfectly innocuous edits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024417
- x1798DE 12y ago
  One thing to note about this is that this is just something new in the Wikimedia Terms of Use, imposed by the head office. Before the Wikimedia Foundation made the change to the terms, the self-governance mechanisms of English Wikipedia twice rejected this concept.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    The addition to the legal Terms is new, but the English Wikipedia has long had a norm that you should disclose any conflicts of interest (paid or otherwise), and there have been community processes in place to warn people who appear to be failing to do so, at least when people with undeclared COIs made edits that raised enough eyebrows for someone to notice. You could maybe fly under the radar if you never made controversial changes, but warning templates like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Uw-coi and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COI go back to the early days of the encyclopedia. Some people who were found PR-scrubbing biographies for pay were also community-banned in the past, though those were case-by-case decisions.

minikomi 12y ago

How do you search for the blocks of IP's to use? Interested in setting one up for Japan, but having trouble finding the right block to use..

kmfrk 12y ago
You just have to know. :) Try asking someone in the Japanese Open Knowledge chapter: http://okfn.jp http://okfn.jp.
joshfraser 12y ago
http://bgp.he.net/ http://bgp.he.net/
coderholic 12y ago
A google for "japan government official website" turns up http://japan.kantei.go.jp http://japan.kantei.go.jp. We can then use the ipinfo.io API to find out which network this is on: $ curl ipinfo.io/`dig +short japan.kantei.go.jp` { "ip": "202.32.211.142", "hostname": "No Hostname", "city": null, "region": null, "country": "JP", "loc": "35.6900,139.6900", "org": "AS2497 Internet Initiative Japan Inc." } We can lookup more details at http://ipinfo.io/AS2497 http://ipinfo.io/AS2497. It looks like lots of different organization share this network, including Coca-Cola, and a bunch of universities, so filtering based on this network is going to get us what we're after. You can also go to http://ipinfo.io/countries/jp http://ipinfo.io/countries/jp and see all of the networks in Japan. There are a few that are government related, but there doesn't seem to be a main or single network that the government uses. Things are easier in the UK where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS29214 http://ipinfo.io/AS29214 (Houses of Parliament) or Ireland where you have http://ipinfo.io/AS15806 http://ipinfo.io/AS15806 (Irish Government)
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Why do you assume the website and their internet connections are in the same block? Many companies and organisations use external hosting.

danso 12y ago

Not to take away from the OP, but I find the library that it depends on, the npm package "wikichanges", to be a little more interesting: https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges https://github.com/edsu/wikichanges Wikichanges provides a thin wrapper around Wikipedia's API to get a stream of edits. Anon listens on the WikiChanges object and filters it for a specified range of IPs, and then uses the "twit" package to tweet. OK, neither of them are particularly complex, but that's kind of what makes them cool...a lot of interesting things can be done with simple hacks and piping. A small change I would make is to remove "anonymously" as by definition, all of the detected changes come from anonymous users. A little tightening of the wordage, and the tweet can include maybe even the changelog message of the edit. A late-summer project I have in mind is just to scour all the changes made by these IP addresses, since the beginning of time. It'd be interesting to see the rate of change or the trends in behavior over time...I expect if Anon gets a little more coverage, all staffers will take the 30 seconds it takes to make a new account to mask their IP addresses. But then again, I thought people would've figured that out years ago...

jrochkind1 12y ago
The npm package is by the same author as the OP, he just extracted it into a package for re-use, so, yeah!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

silverlight 12y ago

How interesting. For example, this one was recently linked via the Twitter account: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615623458 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616585674&oldid=615... Changing it from "corporate lawyer" to "attorney". I assume that someone believes the latter is more "on message" for the Congressman's campaign efforts. I imagine most of these edits are similarly innocuous and subtle, but it's interesting to see what things the folks up in Washington think are worth having an intern update to help facilitate their plans.

x1798DE 12y ago
Or things that some staffer was looking up anyway and changed it. Then again, there's something sinister about the minor style change to Step Up 3D's article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=614980617 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616433636&oldid=61... Probably the anti-community center lobby trying to keep kids from learning to breakdance.
jjcm 12y ago
Some of the edits are far less subtle: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614523933#National_conservative_leader http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616939061&oldid=614... The addition sounds like something copy/pasted directly from a campaign flyer. The addition of titles (Congressman), the subjective language (unwavering), and lack of any citations makes it a pretty clear indicator of who edited it and for what purpose. Edit: a quick googling shows that it in fact is copy/pasted directly from his personal site: http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html http://www.huelskamp.org/meettim.html
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

tommorris 12y ago

Let's not call then "anonymous". An IP address isn't anonymous. A throwaway account is actually far more anonymous.

tritium 12y ago
Depending, of course, upon whichever IP addresses are associated with the account.
- tommorris 12y ago
  If you edit as a logged-in user, your IP address is only revealed if it gets checked by a CheckUser, a specific class of user who has access to the CheckUser logs. I have access to the CheckUser logs for one Wikimedia project, for instance. Those lookups are themselves logged and have to be justified, and people aren't allowed to just go on fishing trips into that data - there has to be a plausible case for why someone is going to go look for them. If you are editing in a non-controversial fashion and want to preserve your privacy, using an account is a much better way to do so than editing as an IP. If your are logged in, the only people who can see your IP are (hopefully) trusted users in response to a legitimate abuse request or one of the other criteria listed in the privacy policy and CheckUser policy. If you aren't logged in, everybody can see your IP address.

zqfm 12y ago

It's a bit concerning that https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=616543585 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616915051&oldid=61... would be coming from someone in congress.

chimeracoder 12y ago
Even more disturbing was the edit from the US Senate which changed Edward Snowden's page to refer to him as a "traitor" instead of "dissident": http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked-to.html http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/us-senate-ip-address-linked...
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  I'm more concerned with Senators and Congresspeople saying that in public rather than minor staffers screwing around on Wikipedia.
fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
143.231.249.138 has a number of goofy edits, and also seems overly concerned with Lyndon LaRouche's page. User was blocked for vandalism in 2008, 2009, 2011, seems like vandalizing the Wiki is their hobby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/143.231.249.138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/143.231.... >That IP was blocked again today for 48 hours after serially vandalizing a congressperson's entry, a personal attack on an admin, etc. Since blocking, this edit to the IP's own talk page is clearly a declaration, perhaps less than constructive. Toddst1 21:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC) >I don't know if it is a declaration, but it is lyrics to The Doors song "Light My Fire." KillerChihuahua 22:16, 14 May 2008 (UTC) >Blocked again, for 55 hrs. KillerChihuahua 20:49, 27 May 2008 (UTC) >I just blocked 143.231.249.138, an IP within the US House range, for 24 hours for disruptive editing: repeatedly removing negative yet sourced information from articles about Republican congressmen and refusing attempts to discuss. Daniel Case 14:16, 15 March 2011 (UTC) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Notifications#User:143.231.249.138_on_English_Wikipedia_.28US_House_of_Representatives.29 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee/Not...

msane 12y ago

According to @congresedits someone from a congress IP is editing the "David Icke" and "Bohemian Grove" articles currently, just adding the word "allegedly" in a few places. At least they have a sense of humor.

rictic 12y ago

This edit from the House of Representatives is pretty amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616095553 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=616911728&oldid=616...

kbenson 12y ago
As someone who lives 30 minutes from there, and knows people that have waited for the event, I agree.

kelvin0 12y ago

OK, but I guess this cannot take into account edits that would be made via a VPN account?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]