By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
In the past two days, you’ve likely seen the news regarding the mad scientist creation of Virgil Griffith, his ultra wicked WikiScanner. We posted a Wikipedia manipulation article regarding Virgil and his IP matching, corporate chaos creating, wikipedia anonymous user, can opener type tool. The second article was more about Virgil and the reasons behind why he created his application.
I was excited about the development of WikiScanner because I’ve been working on a project which involved compiling a list of all Wikipedia users that made edits to the page on chiropractic. This tool helps make that work a lot easier.
While many companies that have been “outed” by Virgil’s tool have spent the last 48 hours in damage control, can you imagine how many thousands of companies may potentially be totally unaware that someone’s been making “anonymous” wikipedia edits while using computers with IP addresses that match their home or business accounts? Many people haven’t even begun to think about that.
I’d have to imagine you’d be much better off as a company discovering for yourself first what edits have been made on your company IP addresses. The other alternative is someone else finds it before you, and your company ends up on the homepage of Digg, with egg on your face.
Not long after using the WikiScanner for my own research, I began to wonder how many people even know what their IP address is. Do you? In order to make it easy for someone to check if there’s been any Wikipedia entries using their IP address, I banged out a page today and called it: WikiSleuth
The wikisleuth displays your IP address at the top of the page. Unless you’re using a proxy, the number you’ll see displayed will represent the number that gets recorded for your Internet connection, when someone is editing pages on Wikipedia.
It’s a very simple addition to the WikiScanner that Virgil created, and it relies on the WikiScanner to get its information. It just makes it easier for someone to locate the IP address for the Internet connection there currently using, which is valuable in finding out if it’s been used to edit any data.
Imagine you’re a manager of a small to medium-sized business and you maybe only have one 1-5 static IP addresses. With the wiki sleuth tool, you can easily locate what IP address you are using for Internet access, and potentially check edits for anyone that’s used that connection.
It’s real basic, but it works. Let me know if you find anything interesting. Happy sleuthing!
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