Congressmen alter online encyclopedia to save face
The online encyclopedia, wikipedia, has banned several ranges of IP addresses originating from U.S. House and Senate servers after biased editting, including altering of information and/or complete omission, was attributed to them.
A well summarized article of this BS can be found here.
Wikipedia allows any user to contribute to its articles, provided they provide citations to verified sources. Peer contributers can in turn edit/correct these contributions, in a sort of peer-reviewed scheme. Anyone can do this. But for those malicious, anonymous users, your IP address from your computer will be recorded, with any further malicious alterations being crosschecked against your IP. Whiiich, is pretty much what happened here-"congressional staffers" were given the thumbs up to go wild with their congressman's bios.
Doesn't take much imagination to guess what this led to. 1000's of edits were recorded, attributed to House/Senate servers, and history was made. Yay! "Turns out... I didn't accept $30,000 in bribery...it says it right there! What? How did they find out? *Gasp!*...They can do that?!"
Yep, and they did. In several instances, the entire bio was replaced with a 'preferred' bio from a .gov site. The best part? Scott McClellan, White House Spokesperson, had his name listed under the External Links section of a Wikipedia article about the female Douche. And yes, this originated from a Congress IP address. What staffer,aid, whatever, after spending tens of Ks on an education, taking internships, ascending the tree, etc, is sitting in a back office on capitol hill, giggling to himself over his latest poo-poo, wee-wee joke?
This shit just blows me away! I swear I'm going to shit myself the next time I see integrity and congressman in the same sentence.
A well summarized article of this BS can be found here.
Wikipedia allows any user to contribute to its articles, provided they provide citations to verified sources. Peer contributers can in turn edit/correct these contributions, in a sort of peer-reviewed scheme. Anyone can do this. But for those malicious, anonymous users, your IP address from your computer will be recorded, with any further malicious alterations being crosschecked against your IP. Whiiich, is pretty much what happened here-"congressional staffers" were given the thumbs up to go wild with their congressman's bios.
Doesn't take much imagination to guess what this led to. 1000's of edits were recorded, attributed to House/Senate servers, and history was made. Yay! "Turns out... I didn't accept $30,000 in bribery...it says it right there! What? How did they find out? *Gasp!*...They can do that?!"
Yep, and they did. In several instances, the entire bio was replaced with a 'preferred' bio from a .gov site. The best part? Scott McClellan, White House Spokesperson, had his name listed under the External Links section of a Wikipedia article about the female Douche. And yes, this originated from a Congress IP address. What staffer,aid, whatever, after spending tens of Ks on an education, taking internships, ascending the tree, etc, is sitting in a back office on capitol hill, giggling to himself over his latest poo-poo, wee-wee joke?
This shit just blows me away! I swear I'm going to shit myself the next time I see integrity and congressman in the same sentence.
posted by Shaun at 11:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home