as per modus operandi (SOP on any RFA of a TeamSlimJayJzgGaryCrum friend, see WP:DICKNIXON, ca. 1972), everyone of Weiss's investigators is getting the once over.

Look's like Ben woke up to poop on toast. That can't taste very good.

I'm not going to link to any of it, wordplay and letting you do your own sleuthing is so much more fun than being spoon fed.

I'm guessing Ben isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he appears to have meant well on Fozziebear's public investigations.

Predictable on both sides, but still amusing. Like the over-the-top responses to sock allegations to make such things seem absurd by the usual mongos and nevards. Nevard, being a New Zealouser and all, I expect better from kiwis.

I think PoopOnToast had a good right to be suspicious about User:Bentheadvocate possibly being a banned bad boy sock coming out of the drawer, but Ben's done something:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=188856503

Involving an ID verifcation of some extent. Anyone familiar with how much cred that carries?

Ben got the once over from Poop because Ben posted some arguments on the anti-Gary side of the Fozzie sandbox, and Poop is doing his duty to weed out the 'Bad guys' in the latest installment of Sheriff Jimmy's ShootOnSight Wild West Show.

"Committed Identity". Just for everyone's information, does that really ensure one person, one account?

It's an encrypted passphrase so one person should be able to know the key and decrypt it, well in theory anyway. I've never played around with that stuff much myself.

Yeah, it's like one of those games where you write a secret word on a piece of paper, and can reveal it later when the right event occurs. It's a cryptographic hash, so for a phrase of any length it's basically impossible to decode, but the original author could prove the phrase by publicly revealing it later. Of course, for all we know the pass phrase says "Mary had a little lamb."

I don't think there's ever been an example of someone proving their identity this way later on, has there?

Personally, I'd assume that if someone is clever enough to understand the necessary encryption and decryption concepts involved, that person is also clever enough not to use the words "password," "secret," or his/her own username spelled backwards as a password. Thereby making the act of impersonation vastly more difficult...

So the only useful purpose of a "committed identity" would probably be to allow others to successfully challenge someone who claims to be that person later on, but actually isn't. And (presumably) to prove that you are the proper account-holder when that happens. It doesn't necessarily mean anything in this context, though I could always be missing some vital concept here... Either way, I haven't heard of such an incident ever occuring on WP.

It's difficult to say what the deal is with User:Bentheadvocate... In this edit, he seems to show no ability at all to creatively deal with the classic "non-concurrency problem," which of course could be easily dealt with by having two computers, a remote-control session, or a single computer with a virtual machine that has a separate IP address, among many other possibilities. But you can't draw any conclusions from the naivete of the statement, can you? He could always be trying to deceive people by pretending to be naive.

Ultimately though, it's likely he's exactly who and what he says he is... but that's probably not going to help him much if he's going up against the cabalistas.

Precisely. It does nothing to guarantee that you do not have multiple accounts, that you are who you say you are (verified identity), other than allowing you to show "I operate this account, or am sufficiently familiar with it that I know the passphrase used to generate this hash".

Well, I think Ben's most important contribution was this little bit of speculation.


You can laugh, as I did, but as it turns out it is a very good defense to use on Wikipedia in cases of sock investigations. You are almost guaranteed a "sorry for your troubles" from everyone involved! I am anxiously awaiting this defense in the epic Mantanmoreland sock case.

If it were me, I would claim that I was dating a supermodel that demanded to use proxies to edit wikipedia in between our multiple hour love making sessions, but I guess I'm a bit odd.

I just posted about this in another thread:
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...st=&#entry78075

The system was instituted back when those four (was it four?) admin accounts got hacked. All the admins who asked to be resysopped could prove their identity well enough, but there was a concern that some might not be able to. Thus, we got this hash system.

Then, of course, what you said happened. The people who used "fuckyou" as their password didn't see any need to make a hash verification, while those who used the hashes were generally those who have decent strength passwords anyway. And then you have me. I won't reveal what I did to protect its integrity, but I should have little problem ever regaining control of my account if I need to.

Why am I talking about this anyway?