[Novalug] OT - Wikipedia and the art of censorship

Ross Patterson RossPatterson@Comcast.Net
Sun Aug 19 15:48:23 EDT 2007


At 15:15 8/19/2007, Pete Nuwayser wrote:
>It would have been nice if someone had linked the ability to audit
>Wikipedia to the power of open source...

Huh?  All the kid did was take database dumps and do lookups on the 
"anonymous" users' IP addresses.  There's no "power of open source" 
involved.  Sure, the information is freely available, but that's 
freedom of information (ala FOIA), not programming.  The analysis 
could just as easily have been done in Visual Basic on Windows. In 
fact, for all I know it was!

>but in spite of that, this is
>a very eye-opening article.
>
>http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2874112.ece

Indeed.  Thanks for the post!

Ross 




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