[regularization]

Look back to the earliest version of the history and information of various countries on Wikipedia. They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.

I was editing a page on the US massacre of civilians in No Gun Ri, Korea with some IP at CENTCOM removing my edits. I spend my off tine trying to send in facts of what happened, my taxes from my on time pay for some propaganda arm of the US armed forces to remove it.

As the US kidnaps the president of Venezuela and his wife, blockades Cuba, bombs Iran and on and on, great to know someone else is smearing Russia to further my tax dollars funding the endless war on their borders too.

[stingraycharles]

Seems like the original skepticism about a public, “everyone can edit” Wikipedia is taking shape as international information warfare intensifies.

Especially with LLMs being trained on Wikipedia (probably pretty extensively), the impact of these edits should not be dismissed.

[justin66]

> They say themselves they were from US State department or CIA histories of those countries.

Given Wikipedia’s rules and origin, it’d make perfect sense if the early articles referenced the CIA World Factbook when describing countries, if that’s what you’re talking about. There was a dearth of online, open source material to draw from 25 years ago, and on the uncontroversial basic facts the factbook would be fine as an up to date online reference until something else was available.

That would be a rather different issue than CENTCOM employees altering descriptions of the history of US government atrocities.

[hhh]

Link to the edit removing your changes?

[regularization]

They removed changes and added their own stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/214.13.2...

ARIN shows that 214.0.0.0/8 CIDR is still US Department of Defense (or Department of War as Trump and Hegseth aptly call it) but reverse DNS over 20 years later does not still point to the same CENTCOM IP.

Also to a point - US military propaganda arm was doing this over 20 years ago. After getting the gift of country articles to mostly come verbatim from CIA and US State department sheets.

[rpdillon]

> some IP at CENTCOM

How was this determined?

[regularization]

Because the IP is in the edit, and the reverse DNS went back there (and ARIN did not disagree)

More info on this in my other reply.

[rolph]

An Introduction to IP Spoofing (and How to Prevent It)

https://kinsta.com/blog/ip-spoofing/

[digitalPhonix]

That doesn’t work for an HTTP request (or any stateful communication that requires return traffic)

[rolph]

its a dated article, but the concept of IP spoof works, and has been modified to fit the state of tech, its more than just forging the return address in an IP header.

https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...

https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel

[cowboylowrez]

The term IP spoofing used to really only apply to some networking layer in my experience, placing bogus ips in headers was more likely called header forgery and happened in the application. It wouldn't make sense for wikipedia to rely on easily forged headers when they can simply examine the network connection and use that address.

Actual IP spoofing still can't really impersonate a valid tcp connection unless its all send and no read, even with your second link, both sides of the "tunnel" have to spoof the source ip in their messages so thats not likely going to happen with wikipedia unless their security gets broken somehow and in that case well all bets are off lol

[digitalPhonix]

Did you read the things you're linking?

> https://owasp.org/www-community/pages/attacks/ip_spoofing_vi...

Isn't an actual technique, it's describing the observed result if the server were to blindly trust some HTTP headers which is just the application payload in a TCP stream. It's not spoofing the IP at any network layer.

> https://github.com/ParsaKSH/spoof-tunnel

Requires mutually agreed spoofing on both sides... at which point it's not really spoofing and also clearly not applicable because Wikipedia will not agree to it. (It is useful in the context that they're using it, just not at all what you're talking about)

Without controling a router that's on the path or being able to publish a route that contains the IP address you're trying to spoof, there is no way to spoof an IP address in bidirectional communication.

[cmrdporcupine]

It's almost like both imperialist powers could be problematic and awful and we don't have to pick a side or excuse the actions of the one because the other does the same.

[ascorbic]

It's possible for both to be bad and yet one to be worse

[shevy-java]

In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.

I think this is not really connected to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a quality-control problem; even if all state-actors were not to try to ruin Wikipedia, that quality-control issue would still persist. Wikipedia needs to improve its intrinsic quality. Instead what it seems to do as of late, is make pointless UI changes. I hate this "you can hide the toolkit here" - that simply should not be on by default. I only want the content as-is, not side bars with useless things I am never going to use anyway.

[drysine]

>In general imperalism is annoying to no ends. Smaller countries get abused.

And in turn abuse even smaller nations like Georgia abused South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And these tiny nations abused their Georgian minorities