Log

Well, I should have known better than not to consult Wikipedia on the stuff I mentioned in article on QuakeAID, OfficialWire and their parent company BAOU, Inc.. Fun reading material.

One and the same

Also in my latest post I said someone at OfficialWire was probably behind wikipediaclassaction.org. Turns out I was indeed right. A whois on http://www.baou.com reveals this administrative contact:

Administrative Contact:
  Management, Domain  email@baou.com
  PO Box 998
  Long Beach, NY 11561-0998
  US
  +1.8668712289    Fax: +1.8777656948

and this registrar:

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.

Whois on http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org reveals this:

Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Registrant Organization:WikipediaClassAction.org
Registrant Street1:PO Box 998
...
Registrant City:Long Beach
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:11561-0998

Same registrar, same PO Box, same address, same company.

…only after four months

Baou Inc's grudge against Wikipedia started with the QuakeAID fiasco mentioned above. Another news report about Wikipedia told of misinformation being spread on Wikipedia.org about a journalist by the name of John Seigenthaler. The 'news' article on OfficialWire about this case claims:

After four months, Seigenthaler was finally able to get Wales to remove the offending piece from Wikipedia and from the other online 'resources' that simply copy from Wales' pool of data, but not before it had been read by tens of thousands of people, who may or may not have repeated, copied or stored the nonsense.

This might be accurate, but it makes it sound like it took Wikipedia four months to remove the false information. So which is it? Did it took four months to remove the information from Wikipedia, or from BOTH the sites? In that case, how long did it take to remove the information from Wikipedia? Also, according to this blog post, Siegenthaler's original piece doesn't say how long it took to remove the offending information from Wikipedia after Seigenthaler contacted them, only that the information had been up there for four months in total.

Yet another re-cap

So.. let's see. OfficialWire is trying to start a classaction suit against Wikipedia.org because they believe they're spreading misinformation and cannot be held accountable, except that OfficialWire itself is spreading misinformation too? Strange.

PS

Fun quote from the OfficialWire's contact page: As hard as it may be to believe, some people disagree with us sometimes. If you are one of them feel free to Email us if you'd like. We get a lot of hate mail and answer very little of it.

Doesn't really surprise me much.

Someone is trying to start a class action lawsuit against Wikipedia.org. For those who are unaware of what a class action lawsuit is; it's a lawsuit filed by one party that represents a group of people or companies. In this case people who feel "they've been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia. Somehow, this lawsuit sounds like some vindictive action against WikiPedia by either someone that got his poor little pride hurt or a traditional encyclopedia that's feeling threatened in his business.

The strange thing is, they're doing just about the same themselves, in my oppinion. From the wikipediaclassaction.org website:

the Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., nor any of the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible and therefore accountable for the content.

First of all, this is untrue. If I'd post information to Wikipedia, I'd feel responsible for that content just as I do with everything I post to the internet. Second of all, who cares if they don't consider themselves accountable? Since when does the law require the accused to consider themselves accountable?

They believe themselves to be above the law.

This is nothing more than a sneer remark ment to sound dramatic.

OfficialWire

Now, let's take a little closer look to some of the things on wikipediaclassaction.org. For instance, the link to the "Recent news articles have exposed the growing problem with Wikipedia's methods.". The link points to the OfficialWire 'news' site. A very reputable *cough cough* news site if I do say so myself. A closer look at one of their articles (One Man's Personal Quest Against Earthquake Charity):

"While many tens of thousands of people are busy helping the victims of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunamis, one man has chosen to spend his time and energies in other ways. This is the tale of how Christian Wirth (shown here) has contributed."

Wow! Impartial news reporting at it's best. And this for a site that calls itself 'Officialwire'.

Anyway, the story is about some guy/girl who added a link to QuakeAID.org to the Tsunami-relief page on Wikipedia. Christian Wirth did not consider this a correct Tsunami-relief organisation, since it is not listed as a non-profit organisation in the US. A valid claim, if you ask me, since the main articles in Wikipedia are targeted at the US. QuakeAID started fighting back (instead of helping the victims of the tsunami, I suppose?). But guess what. This so called 'news article' on OfficialWire says this:

At this stage, let me explain that Baou Trust, parent of OfficialWire, provides considerable funding for QuakeAID.

Gee, who would've guessed?! The news articles about Wikipedia on OfficialWire (all negative naturally) are nothing more than a (see if you can spot the irony in this) personal crusade against Christian Wirth and Wikipedia!

Oh, also make sure to check the products sold by the same parent company (Baou) of OfficialWire: http://www.cafepress.com/baou/457250. "BOMBING for PEACE is like FUCKING for VIRGINITY". Sounds like someone a fourteen year old would come up with.

Accountability

Back to the wikipediaclassaction.org website. They claim they have problems with Wikipedia because the organisation nor the contributors can be held accountable, right? So, where is the name, address and e-mail address of the person behind wikipediaclassaction.org? There's only the wikipediaClassaction.org address with a PO-box and some useless telephone numbers. What person, organisation or lawfirm is behind this lawsuit? How credible are they? My guess would be OfficialWire or someone working there, and they are hardly credible.

Recap-time

Claim: Wikipedia spreads lies and can't be held accountable, so they should be sued.

Claimed by: An faceless organisation (protecting some indivual or other organisation; presumably OfficialWire (they link back to wikipediaclassaction.org), perhaps John Seigenthaler) that spreads lies (" They believe themselves to be above the law.") and links to news articles that are nothing more than slander and baseless claims against Mr. Wirth and wikipedia because he/they, for good reasons, went against an organisation with close ties to OfficialWire.

Sounds like a winner to me!

I'm getting a little bit sick of all the Firefox VS IE bullshit floating around the Internet. Firefox has been boosted as the more secure browser by various open source advocates and groups. Lots of other people seem to love to hate the people that hate IE; lately they've been claiming things like "Firefox has had more security advisories than IE in the last [year, month, week, days, minutes], so it must be just as insecure or even worse!"

What these people fail to realise is that the number of security advisories are not an indication of the security of a product. If you don't have the IQ to extract meaningful facts from statistics, please shut up. Just because security flaws where found in Firefox does not make it a less secure browser. In fact, finding flaws is one of the idea's behind Open Source software.. we're supposed to find the flaws so we can fix them BEFORE they become a security problem.

When discussing the security of a certain product, please keep the following in mind:

• How many actual exploits for the bug are in the wild? (i.e. actually being used against users
• What's the impact of the bug
• What's the impact of the exploit?
• Do not blame security problems in third-party products on the product it was based on. (PHP IS NOT INSECURE!)
• What are the definition being used? Is a critical flaw in Firefox the same as a critical flaw in IE?
• Consider that not all known flaws in a product are reveiled. Closed source companies would rather keep security flaws quiet if there's no exploit in the wild. Open Source products would rather quietly fix the flaw and make a tiny little note about it in the changelog.
• A denial-of-service attack is not a security problem!
• Take a look at the target demographics for the product. People using Firefox are usually more computer-savvy than IE users and are therefor less likely to get a virus.

So. Is Firefox more secure than IE? I'm not even gonna awnser that. There are just too many variables to consider to make any useful statement. Anybody that does otherwise shouldn't be trusted because they obviously don't understand what they're talking about.

If you, however, were to ask me about the security of Outlook….