Wikipedia Edits Forecast Vice Presidential Picks 152
JimLane writes "The Washington Post reports on the findings of Cyveillance, a company that 'normally trawls the Internet for data on behalf of clients seeking open source information in advance of a corporate acquisition, an important executive hire, or brand awareness.' Cyveillance decided 'on a lark' to test its methods by monitoring the Wikipedia biographies of Vice-Presidential prospects. The conclusion? If you'd been watching Wikipedia you might have gotten an advance tipoff of Friday's announcement that McCain was selecting Sarah Palin. 'At approximately 5 p.m. ET (Thursday), the company's analysts noticed a spike in the editing traffic to Palin's Wiki page, and that some of the same Wiki users appeared to be making changes to McCain's page.'" The article goes on to say that watching Wikipedia pages for the Democratic VP hopefuls would have tipped Obama's choice of Biden, as well. NPR also has coverage (audio).
What's This? (Score:5, Interesting)
Leaks to Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's This? (Score:4, Interesting)
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
Re:What's This? (Score:5, Interesting)
So if an event is expected it may pay off to monitor the Wikipedia traffic to the related pages and by that forgo the official announcement.
This poses some interesting prospects. Like if it was possible for party A to beforehand predict that a certain alternative was going to be selected by party B and therefore making that selection problematic.
Only way around this is of course to make sure that the inner circle doesn't use the web for a while before official announcements are done.
And this does of not only apply to politics but also to a lot of other events. Like potential inside affairs when it comes to buying/selling on the stock market. Pattern analysis evolves, and it may not even be necessary to actually listen in to a certain message, just measure the amount of traffic to a certain node to make a statistically based deduction. So even if you encrypt your information it may be traced and therefore provide valuable information.
At least we do live in interesting times!
IP addresses for Biden's office and Alaska's gov. (Score:1, Interesting)
why I don't believe in conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Invariably someone will slip up and do something to give the game away and such traffic analysis will give the game away. All that is required is that someone look.
This is especially true for government conspiracy. For the most part, too many people have to be involved, and too many people are looking.
Re:Let me ask a question (Score:1, Interesting)
Cyveillance are slimy (Score:4, Interesting)
I get lots of hits from cyveillance addresses to my web servers, and the hits from the cyveilance robot are masquerading as IE users, and they don't even bother to try and retrieve robots.txt...
If you contact them about it they will offer to remove your address range from the spider, but this is also a lie, after contacting them and supplying address ranges for them to stop spidering they simply started spidering from a different source address, this time the whois record for the ipblock shows nothing unless you directly query cogent's whois server which again reveals the ranges are registered to cyveillance. This looks like a very poor attempt to hide their actions. Their spider also has a very recognizable pattern, so it would be easy to pick up anyway.
When i attempted to contact them again, they simply ignored all of my mails.
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
prediction markets; race and polls (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cyveillance are slimy (Score:3, Interesting)
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
Bullshit. If the web were to work that way, it would kill it.
You don't want them spidering your public website, then don't make it public.
If I were you, I would fuck with them. Pollute their data. You've obviously been able to figure out which accesses are there's - use that knowledge to feed them disinformation. If you are lucky, you might even able to manipulate their clients in a way that can end indirectly making you money.
Re:It's interesting, but not predictive. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps, although his campaign raised $4 million over the Internet [reuters.com] in the 24 hours after the announcement. Their previous single-day fund-raising record was under a million. So at least he seems to have figured it out. :-)
Re:prediction markets; race and polls (Score:3, Interesting)
The February Scientific American had an article [sciam.com] that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.
Well the basic idea behind the Iowa Electronic Markets is that people, anyone, can bet money (a limited amount) on who they think will win an election. Basically, polls ask people who they want to vote for, but arguably you'd have a better idea of the outcome of an election if you ask people not who they want to vote for but who they think will win. It's called the wisdom of crowds. Show a certain amount of people a jar full of pickles and they'll tell you about how many pickles are in, the more people you ask the more precise the results get (if I'm not mistaken under ideal conditions with a lack of a bias in their judgment 100 times more people should get it 10 times more precisely, that's like coherent averaging).
That's the idea behind the IEM. With a twist, instead of just asking people who they think is gonna win, they make them bet on it, as becoming more interested in it makes them be more serious about it. And in case you're wondering, Obama is so winning [uiowa.edu]!
Re:What's This? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
Except that they used to literally analyze traffic - if you see a lot of cars in a parking lot overnight, it means people are working late hours and that, presumably, something is happening. If you see triple the usual amount of cars parked outside the Department of Defense, it may be something to phone home about.
Re:Reverse Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
>Republicans did this about 10 years ago, by pretending to be really annoying Democrats, calling people at inopportune hours, etc.
[CITATION NEEDED]
Searching republican "false flag" robocalls [google.com] brings up hundreds of good hits on it.
Here's the first hit [talkingpointsmemo.com] describing a series of MORE THAN 20 harrassing calls, pretending to be from the Democratic candidate. The Republicans act like jackasses making harrassing robocalls, trying to trick people into thinking the Democrat is the evil jackass, so that people will get annoyed and vote Republican.
Republicans have done it countless times across the country. Here's the Slashot story [slashdot.org] on it. It cites it happening in 53 Congressional districts in 2006. So these false flag tactics are a common Republican ploy. The only problem with the original post is that it said "Republicans did this about 10 years ago". Republicans still do it. I hardly expect them to stop just for the 2008 election.
If you, or anyone you know, gets annoying robocalls "from Democrats", they are likely from Republicans. They also like to run bogus phone "polls". They will ask wildly biased questions like "Candidate X voted against a law to protect children from pedophiles, does this make you more or less likely to vote for candidate X?" Where of course candidate "X" is the democratic candidate. By inserting "facts" about their opponent into "questions", they make it sound like innocent neutral information from an innocent neutral source, to hide the fact that they are actually wildly biased and distorted accusations being flung by a Republican smear campaign.
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