Anonymous escalated content dispute beyond imagination and outed sexual harassment allegations against Wikipedia admin

[Archer]

It is ACTUAL CRITICISM of Wikipedia, and they're already generally hostile to ACTUAL CRITICISM. Plus they have short attention spans and don't like tl:dr posts.

Serious criticism of Wikipedia does seem frowned upon at WPO - they banned me out of the blue. But that summary reads like word salad to anyone who isn't familiar with the jargon and I'm still not sure what it has to do with harassment (which seems the more important part). What sort of tabloid headline is "Content drama on article about Anonymous hacker who broke into Chinese nuclear and satellite interfaces"?

[ericbarbour]

Serious criticism of Wikipedia does seem frowned upon at WPO - they banned me out of the blue. But that summary reads like word salad to anyone who isn't familiar with the jargon and I'm still not sure what it has to do with harassment (which seems the more important part). What sort of tabloid headline is "Content drama on article about Anonymous hacker who broke into Chinese nuclear and satellite interfaces"?

Once again, you expect Wikipedia addicts to be "rational and reasonable". It happens, but not on Wikipediocracy anymore.

I've already made it clear (repeatedly) that I think Drmies is a complete bastard. On Wikipedia anyway. No idea about his real life.

This thread is about an edit squabble from 2 years ago. Just a reminder.

[Archer]

This thread is about an edit squabble from 2 years ago. Just a reminder.

My bad, OP bumped it and for some reason I didn't notice that it was old.

Generally speaking though, I take it you don't mind if users add to old threads if the addition is worthwhile, do you?

[Ognistysztorm]

Softlemonades, the editor who's been accused of being a CCP spy by Taiwanese media who caused the incident, has self-deleted their account and courtesy vanished from Wikipedia. The timing is very odd considering that there's been many high profile arrests of Russian and CCP spies in the US lately, even including NYC mayor Eric Adams.

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4703442

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... tlemonades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... c7954c93d8

[ericbarbour]

The timing is very odd considering that there's been many high profile arrests of Russian and CCP spies in the US lately, even including NYC mayor Eric Adams.

And that deserves some explanation.
https://www.newsweek.com/eric-adams-fed ... ty-1959721
https://www.newsweek.com/china-communis ... ns-1828730
https://nypost.com/2024/06/25/us-news/f ... -by-adams/

Most of this coverage seems to come from conservative and anti-CCP outlets. Newsweek itself has a long history of bad reporting and bias. But you figure it out.

[Ognistysztorm]

The timing is very odd considering that there's been many high profile arrests of Russian and CCP spies in the US lately, even including NYC mayor Eric Adams.

And that deserves some explanation.
https://www.newsweek.com/eric-adams-fed ... ty-1959721
https://www.newsweek.com/china-communis ... ns-1828730
https://nypost.com/2024/06/25/us-news/f ... -by-adams/

Most of this coverage seems to come from conservative and anti-CCP outlets. Newsweek itself has a long history of bad reporting and bias. But you figure it out.

Good question, but the timing regarding Softlemonades is even oddier, since only shy of a few days prior, Al Jazeera has aired a documentary with Chinese tycoon and convicted criminal where he showed hard evidence that former Filipino mayor Alice Guo is a Chinese spy.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/101-e ... mastermind

[ericbarbour]

To summarize:

Softlemonades was almost certainly a sockpuppet someone was using to mess around with content about famous hackers. ESPECIALLY WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

The account has been renamed to "Renamed user 0e40c0e52322c484364940c7954c93d8" to insure this history will be difficult to study in the future. Wikipedia censors itself, and badly. The account was "globally locked" on October 3.

As you see here, Softlemonades was far and away the #1 grinder on the WikiLeaks article. It is now one of the longest articles on en-WP, 422k bytes, and SL was a major reason for it. He/she/? worked very hard to make WikiLeaks and Assange look as bad as possible.

If this relates to the CCP, there is a possible reason: the WikiLeaks Advisory Board included two prominent Chinese dissidents, Wang Dan and Wang Youkai. Softlemonades did no editing on Wang Dan's article, but other sock accounts certainly did. SL mucked with the rather short Wang Youkai article. To make them look as bad as possible, and most of all, to connect them to WikiLeaks, which I gather makes them "suspect" in governmental circles. ANY critic of China becomes a target on Wikipedia in a similar manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=400415101
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1152452182

[Ognistysztorm]

To summarize:

Softlemonades was almost certainly a sockpuppet someone was using to mess around with content about famous hackers. ESPECIALLY WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

The account has been renamed to "Renamed user 0e40c0e52322c484364940c7954c93d8" to insure this history will be difficult to study in the future. Wikipedia censors itself, and badly. The account was "globally locked" on October 3.

As you see here, Softlemonades was far and away the #1 grinder on the WikiLeaks article. It is now one of the longest articles on en-WP, 422k bytes, and SL was a major reason for it. He/she/? worked very hard to make WikiLeaks and Assange look as bad as possible.

If this relates to the CCP, there is a possible reason: the WikiLeaks Advisory Board included two prominent Chinese dissidents, Wang Dan and Wang Youkai. Softlemonades did no editing on Wang Dan's article, but other sock accounts certainly did. SL mucked with the rather short Wang Youkai article. To make them look as bad as possible, and most of all, to connect them to WikiLeaks, which I gather makes them "suspect" in governmental circles. ANY critic of China becomes a target on Wikipedia in a similar manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=400415101
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1152452182

That's an extremely interesting observation which I and so many others had missed! There's the feeling that we're looking at the tip of the iceberg in re CCP infiltration of Wikipedia. SL's writing style often leave out apostrophes (') which made me think that they're probably a patsy in Spain or LATAM who're doing "UPE" under the direction of CCP agents, just like how North Korea used two dupes from Vietnam and Indonesia to kill Kim Jong-nam.

Actually the suspicion that SL is a CCP agent may be right on something. About six to seven months before SL removed the contents on the page, and about a month after Cyber Anakin hacked Chinese systems to "avenge himself" because of a COVID-19 infection, his posts about the hacks were shared on a Chinese-language VPS forum, where people expressed shocks about it.

https://hostloc.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=988585

这狗东西正义不正义先不说，可他已经是在杀人了啊。我看他DAY3的行动已经入侵了人家农场施肥系统甚至煤矿的安全、通风设备管理系统。他小手一抖轻则农场减产，重则煤矿的安全、通风设备被动了那是要死人的。

政企官网他瞎搞那我完全吃瓜无所谓的事。去动煤矿这类高危行业的安全操作管理系统真的是过分了。

Let's not talk about whether this hacker is righteous or not, but he is already killing people. I see that his action on Day 3 has hacked people's farm fertilization system and even the safety and ventilation equipment management system of coal mines. As long as he's hacking, at best farms production gets seriously affected, while in severe cases like coal mine safety, and related ventilation equipment, fatalities are possibility.


The official website of the government and enterprises he fooled around does not matter for me. But it's excessive to hack high risk systems such as coal mine safety management systems.

这种没办法治吗

Is there anything that can done about it?

没办法，政企普遍都不关注网络安全建设。何况网上查人还跨国太难了，成本也非常高。在他没做出什么危害重大安全的行为之前真没啥办法。

It can't be helped that Chinese political enterprises are generally not concerned about building cybersecurity. Not to mention that it's too difficult and costly to check and trace people online and cross-country. Before he did not do anything that makes him a major security threat, there really is no way.

NB啊，这小伙子

This young man is so pro or based!

[Ognistysztorm]

I want to ask that is there a tool to see which timezone any particular users like SL are most active in terms of Wikipedia contribs?

[ericbarbour]

No, there's only the charts on the user edit count page. Look at the "Time Card". And remember it's in UTC. If you don't know where the user was operating from, it's not much help.