Welcome to another of my “I told you they were dodgy” posts. This time, it’s not about Facebook or Google (which, finally, are receiving the coverage that should have been metered out years ago), but Wikipedia.
The latest is on a Wikipedia editor called ‘Philip Cross’, a story which Craig Murray has been following on his blog.
Start with this one, where Murray notes that Cross has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.
And this one.
Both note that Cross edits Wikipedia entries on antiwar and antiestablishment figures, making them more negative and stripping away the positive, and concerns raised by other Wikipedia editors amount to naught. Cross is known to be against the UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and has devoted a lot of time to George Galloway’s page. However, he likes right-wing Times columnists Oliver Kamm and Melanie Phillips.
Matt Kennard Tweeted on May 12:
My wikipedia page is full of irrelevant and erroneous info but it is interesting that on the day I tweeted this https://t.co/fKTP7UYgft
'Phillip Cross' decided it was time to spend an hour editing my page https://t.co/OAUGGMfVfD
In other words, suggesting that someone play by the rules on Wikipedia will get you threatened with a ban from Wikipedia.
Now you get the idea, you can check out Murray’s subsequent blog posts on the subject:
Whether you believe Philip Cross is one person or not, it highlights what I’ve said on this blog and formerly on Vox in the 2000s: that certain editors can scam their way to the top and not be questioned. I know first-hand that publicly criticizing Wikipedia could get me hate mail, as had happened last decade when I was subjected to days of email abuse from one senior editor based in Canada. That time I merely linked to a piece which talked about the dangers of Wikipedia and how some editors had scammed it—all that editor unwittingly did with her emails was confirm that position (no one says that all scammers are smart) and since then, observing Wikipedia has cemented it. Interestingly, both the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia’s remaining co-founder Jimmy Wales are quick to defend Cross, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that “he” is biased. Facebook’s idea of using Wikipedia to combat “fake news” is about as moronic a decision one can make.
Now that there are voices adding to my own, and on far more serious matters than non-existent cars, I can only hope people will, at the least, treat Wikipedia with caution. If you choose to stop donating to them, I wouldn’t blame you.
Seven months after Google blacklisted our websites over false allegations of malware, I can say that the traffic to some has not recovered. And to prove that Google continues to publish libel based on its highly dubious systems, here are two screen shots from my browser tonight, which I saw when trying to access bjskosherbaskets.com, the site that hackers linked to back in April, where they placed some malware.
I’ve noted here that we were hacked back in April, and we fixed everything within hours. But good luck getting off Google’s blacklists. They claim six to seven hours, whereas our experience was six to seven days. (No surprise: it took Google four years to remove my private data from Adsense, while my dispute with them over retained Blogger data, which they promised to delete in 2010, is ongoing. Things happen very slowly in California.) Bjskosherbaskets.com, meanwhile, is finding that seven months, not seven days, are still not enough to get off a Google blacklist.
Browsers will block the site based on Google’s claims. Yet when you read why Google has blocked it, there is no reason: even the big G says the website is clean, and free from malware. It says, rightly, that it detected some more than 90 days ago, but there isn’t any now.
The question is: why does Google continue to ruin the reputation of a website whose owners have, like us, done everything they could to remedy a situation? And why is libel permissible? There are just too many breaches of ethics by this company, yet it beggars belief that it still ranks as the number-one website in the world.
At the very least, internet security companies need to stop relying on Google, whose systems are faulty, and who dedicates the grand total of two part-timers to the task of malware detection.
So, for the last 90 days Google found no problems. That’s a pretty shabby record for a known malware distributor. The short story is none of the Social Media Today sites were infected with malware, and Google’s hysteria took down over 175 sites. And how is their warning not libelous?
And:
There is no due process, no meaningful appeal, and Google won’t talk to anyone. And they get away with it because they have a giant monopoly on search and Internet services.
To close, she writes:
When a kid throws a rock through your store window, she buys you a new window. Doesn’t Google owe a whole lot of people for disrupting their businesses for a day?
So … rock, meet hard place, our brave new Google world devoid of humans, guilty until proven innocent, and no penalties for Google’s mistakes.
I won’t go on about our battle, since regular readers are more than aware of our many concerns with Google. Carla says more succinctly what I have been saying about Google’s malware procedures for a good while. They’re broken, and Google either needs to put in more effort than the two part-time guys working in that department, on whom far too much of the internet depends, or stop involving itself in a business that it’s not very good at, especially if it publishes libel regularly.
That was an interesting experiment. Although Lucire Men is still clear (for now), Google decided it would play silly buggers a few hours after we put our (clean) ad server code back on Autocade:
But why? Here’s what Google says:
which means: we can’t find anything wrong with this site since April 8, even though our last scan was on the 23rd. Really? There has been nothing wrong for 15 days, but you’ll still block our site? (Note: Google did not block this site on the 23rd.)
Let’s go to Google Webmaster Tools to see what it says there:
That’s right: nothing. There’s nothing wrong with the site.
Maybe we’ve been flagged somewhere else, then? How about Stop Badware?
Nope, we’re all fine there, too.
In fact, even Google is wrong when it says there were problems on April 8—another sign of its malware bot reading from a cache instead of fresh pages, because we say we fixed everything on April 6. Well, here’s what Google itself says about Autocade when you go into Webmaster Tools in more depth:
which correlates with the claims we have made all along: our ad server got hacked on April 6 (NZST), and we sorted it within hours that day.
We’re interested to see if the false malware warnings can carry on for a month—after all, Google will block a blog for six months even though it says it will lift a block in 48 hours after an investigation. Things take a bit longer there than they claim. There’s a case of one gentleman who has had his site blocked by Google for two months for no reason. I’m sure many, many others are being wrongly identified by Google—and there are far too many companies relying on the Californian company’s hypocrisy in identifying malware.
The Google belief that webmasters are wrongly claiming there to be false positives is looking more dubious by the day.
PS.: The last post at this forum entry is interesting: Google blocks a website based on stale data. The website where the malware allegedly was did not even exist, but it still triggered a warning at Google. The webmaster writes, ‘The site concerned doesn’t exist and more to the point, there is no DNS record for it either—so it cannot exist. / The IP which was once assigned to it is now assigned to someone else.’ That was in March. Judging by the articles online, Google’s been having problems with this particular bot since the beginning of 2013. The sooner they retire the program, the better, I say.—JY
Here’s Google’s Webmaster Tools this morning.
Apparently, now it says there has been nothing wrong at the Lucire website since April 6. Which is what we’ve been saying for six days.
Gee, we all must have imagined those attack warnings for the last six days. Google’s record now shows they never happened. As it’s Google, it must be right.
I suspect Google has its units wrong again. I remember Blogger’s two-day review turned out taking six months, so two days there meant two quarters. I understand that Google’s malware bot supposedly does a review in five hours, but maybe they confused that with five days.
This is from my good friend Alexandru Dutulescu. Where I come from, this is libellous, since it is, well, a load of bollocks. In the delusions of Googleland, presumably, this is an innocent computer error. I can’t believe how often Google gets away with this stuff just by fooling people and telling them their motto is ‘Don’t be evil.’
