You still have it? I was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and even showered every day.

But I was very irreverent, and the BSA doesn't like atheists. So I sent it back.

Which is okay, because by that time I was ready to move on to becoming a girl scout.

He appears to be emailing editors trying to get them to take his side.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall reading what he sends SlimVirgin.

Okay, I'll bet that's one he doesn't try.

Memo To Gary.

Next time you build a gaggle of NSS socks, make sure your ace in the hole one does not edit any old Film Noir related articles pepperred with the occasional WWII Journalism/Judaica BLP? Jeez. Could Stetson be any more obvious?

Well at least Stetson didn't edit Varkala or New Mexico stuff this time.

Who is this guy?.

Whoever he is, he has socked before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Soc...pyedeye/Archive

Weiss has got himself into a very difficult position. Really convincing socks for his purposes would need to segregate their editing very consistently, and they'd need to avoid any topic areas favored by already banned socks (even though those subjects are likely to be the ones the sockmaster most wants to write about). But they'd also need to diffuse their editing on a certain level, to provide plausibility when they wanted to wade into whatever controversy was their real raison d'être. So they'd have to edit mostly about one subject, but occasionally about others (but never about the ones already assigned to other socks), while also getting involved in policy discussions, all while ensuring that the edits in non-raison d'être areas heavily outweighed those in raison d'être areas, in order to ensure security and credibility for interventions into the raison d'être areas. In short, it would be really complicated and time-consuming, so only a genius without a full-time job could hope to successfully execute the strategy.

Well, that's done. Good job Alison, Lar, and Seddon.

Edit: And Thatcher also, per Alison below.

Good job, Thatcher, too

I apologize if someone has answered this already, but what is the reason it is forbidden onwiki to state a connection between these recently blocked socks and Mantanmoreland/Samiharris?
Sorry, I think I looked at JohnnyB's userpage when it just had the "indefinitely blocked" tag and not the "sock of Mantanmoreland" tag, and jumped to conclusions.

It isn't forbidden. Check their userpages.

It's not. The Stetsonharry user page, for example, states in no uncertain terms that it is Mantanmoreland.

What is a little more frowned upon is to say that the guy behind the keyboard is G.W.

Why? Gary Weiss has legally threatened a small boatload of internet denizens. Who eventually figure out that he's full of shit. Then Gary figures out that if such skirmishes actually went legal, he'd get whacked in court. Somehow Wikiepedia is still intimidated by him (but oddly enough not by the lawyer friends of Judd and Patrick, who have been successfully litigating against the Titans of Biggest Dickus Money for years now). I think it must be the psycho phone calls. That sort of visceral interaction always freaks out teenagers and aspies, so the WP reaction makes sense.

I agree. Good job to you all.

The good news is, I have to presume Weiss has reached the limits of his sockpuppeting abilities. That will either dissuade him from coming back or (more likely) make him much easier to nail next time. Hopefully this won't end up being an ongoing burden for you folks.

Well, he got a good run at it with one or two of those socks, though. There's a good reason, though, why we're all keeping quiet on the exact details of how he was caught so he can't use that information to his advantage next time. As I said earlier, he'll be back again - his ego demands it

Coupla socks, yeah.

One thing I've learned from this is that a good, perhaps the best way, to expose POV-pushers or other Wikipedia participants with dishonest agendas is to write a fair, balanced, well-sourced article on a topic that they're trying to control. It worked with Eurasian Land Bridge (that wasn't my intention when I wrote it, I was just writing an article on a topic that I found interesting and was surprised at the outlandish reaction it generated), Will Beback did it to Jossi with the Millenium '73 article, and it worked with the Robertson v. Weiss lawsuit article. In this case it exposed five Mantanmoreland socks.

For some reason, when an article is written in this situation, the editors in question can't seem to stop themselves from reacting and exposing themselves. Perhaps it's ego, NPD, or because they just can't abide seeing their long-term and determined efforts at suppressing or controlling a certain topic get undermined. It's very interesting to watch.

Watchout, Allie. He'll get his bud Nocera to start bashing Steve Jobs again in the NYT so Nocera's short friends (well since APPL went 80 to 200 they're probably not friends any more) can put up a fight.

I consider Nocera's interactions with Jobs to be further evidence of: How the fuck did Joe Nocera get to be a NYT demi-god? Has anyone actually read his material or seen his interiviews? Nocera is a retard.

I'm so very fond of that chart. I think I'll make it my desktop background.

Poor Gary's annual trips to India must be miserable, since he's learned to stay up all night editing in NY time, so as to not repeat the mistake he made in October of 2006.

Of note is Weiss' editing of the Press_TV (T-H-L-K-D) article, with both the MajorStovall (T-C-L-K-R-D) and Copyedeye (T-C-L-K-R-D) accounts. Is there any connection between Gary Weiss and Press TV or Iran, apart from Wikipedia (as there is with Varkala)?

The culture that characterizes Wikipedia encourages deception, behind a shield of anonymity, due to its lack of accountability. Inherent in the culture is susceptibility to gamers and tricksters such as Weiss, because they engage in the same deceptive tactics that Wikipedia encourages.

For the record, I believe this was the impetus for the sock puppet investigation and the following checkuser (this was Pacific Time):






I'm aware that Jonas does not mind, and he is open about his IP address.

Nice one!! You just spammed Jonas Rand's IP address all over the place

Assuming, of course, you're not Jonas himself

Janey does slip there early in Nov 2008, but you're right.

A lovely chart. We're very powerful processors of visual information, which is how we kept up with computers at chess for so long (and "Go" for even longer).

Long before Weiss decided to advocate for securities fraud (which is what brought him to my attention), he was an advocate of Jewish issues, particularly with regard to the Israel/Arab situation.

Until we busted him on it, he anonymously wrote this blog, dedicated to criticizing media outlets he perceived as too pro-Palestinian. In addition, his infamous Mantanmoreland account extensively edited the article on Iran's President Ahmadinejad, and even managed to get him added to the Wikipedia category of Anti-Semitic People while it existed (probably a title Ahmadinejad would find fitting).

Back when he was writing for Forbes, his first column dealt with allowing India to build nuclear power as the alternative was to build a gas pipeline through Iran.

So, yeah, he's got "ties" to Iran.

But I'm looking through his work on Press TV and it's more than a little fanatical.

By the way, if you want to have some fun, read this usenet thread (from the soc.culture.jewish.moderated group), where Weiss was busted for sockpuppeting there back in 2004. Scroll down to message 198 to start, where the subject changes to "Question for Garyw BW". I suspect many here will find his reaction VERY familiar.

i'd forgotten about Gary's now-defunct (after the exposer got exposed by our favourite straight shooting Utah Eagle WordScout!) "Mediacrity" blog until recently, then looked for links between its targets and corresponding BLP's on Wikipedia. Ian Williams of UN fame does not have a BLP, but a couple of Gary's NYT targets on Mediacrity do. Did not see any obvious GW turding up of those BLPs right away though, lol.

I just hope Ian Williams has not encountered too much weirdness in the last few years after the UN refused to support Gary's mail order Indian bride's lack of journalistic talent.

Actually, the 2007 and 2008 months did look strange to me, especially 2008. A drop in activity and he suddenly stopped editing 2300-0200 or so. No noticeable change in 2009 though.

I believe this sock bully is back as the so far nice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Figureofnine


I got some shite treatment for this Weisster awhile back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Coo...d_short_selling

Like I said before, to draw out a Weiss sock all one needs to do is add one of Cade Metz' Register articles as a source to some otherwise innocuous information in the short selling, Byrne, Weiss, Overstock, or FTCC articles and wait for one of Weiss' socks to remove it. He'll do it even though he probably reads Wikipedia Review.

Here's a quick tidbit for dedicated Weiss-watchers (Piperdown, I'm looking at you).

As you may recall, we figured out Weiss's link to the DTCC thanks to an inadvertent IP edit he made from a computer on that organization's network (see it here). Of course he denies this in his uniquely over-the-top way, but for those who know how to read edit histories, it's really hard to come up with another realistic explanation.

Anyway, I just found another example of this sort of thing, which Weiss won't be able to deny:

Looking at the history of the article on TheStreet.com, you see this minor edit by an IP address belonging to TheStreet.com.

Five minutes later, Johnnyb256 makes this edit.

Looking over the history of that article, there very few instances where two distinct editors touch the article on the same day, and with the exception of a reversion, no other instance I can immediately see where it happens within the same hour, much less five minutes. I think it's reasonable to conclude that Weiss made both edits, obviously from TheStreet.com's network.

What makes this interesting is the fact that, unlike DTCC, Weiss can't very well deny having a professional relationship with TheSteet.com.

The only question is: if his weekly column gig didn't start until April of this year, what was Weiss doing at TheStreet.com six months earlier?

ps: for the uninitiated, it's worth pointing out that TheStreet.com is the thing a majority of skewed journalism related to illegal naked short selling has in common: they all spent time at this one place. Weiss is a perfect fit with the culture there.

So we're a decade on, Herb Greenberg is still fellating hedge fund manager's stock portfolios in the media with the sad desperation of a 1973 42nd st tranny hooker, Gary Weiss is still writing moronic one-pagers in obscurity for enabling friends who are asking themselves why, Patrick Byrne is running a profitable business, Stormy Simon is still living the Secret of My Success americandream, and Jimmy Wales is still wondering why in the fuck he left porn to run Wikipedia.

Wot else is new under the sun? Nuttin.

Well, that the company is indeed making an annual profit is new. Congrats. Those are some of the thinnest profit margins I've seen in long time, but I suppose that's the nature of the overstock business itself. "Needless Markups" is going to continue to have THAT as a business model. Damn if I know how they manage to stay in business in this economic climate. But they're private so we can't exactly tell how much they're hemorrhaging, till they fall over.