Sony Joins In On Wikipedia Corruption
Have you been thinking that Sony may have finally become an honest company? Had you been thinking maybe they’ve changed, maybe they’re not the same company anymore that created fake movie reviewers, installed spy-ware onto their music CDs to track your listening habits, refused to hold up their end of a warranty cause you used a third-party controller, claimed that CGI video was real gameplay, etc. I could go on and on, but this entry is about the newest tactic Sony is using. It’s a tactic that has been used by organizations such as the US Government and Electronic Arts, the tactic involves adding lies (or removing facts) to someone or something’s Wikipedia entry, which is a very popular online encyclopedia.
About a month ago, a CalTech student, Virgil Griffith, created a “Wikipedia Scanner“, and since then, many interesting things have been found out.
Electronic voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of deleting whole swaths of deleting critical material, with someone at the company’s IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s CEO’s fund-raising for President Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, “Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism.”
These voting machines by the way, which have been been hacked and manipulated in live demonstrations, are still continually being installed throughout the country.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there’s a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they’re accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he’s putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.
Our old Xbox 360-smearing friends over at Fox News are guilty of this as well:
Changes made to Wikipedia from an IP Address that resolves to Fox News, show a pattern of smearing Fox’s rivals, including Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, and CNN, while removing damaging or embarrassing information to it’s own reporters. We pored through the changes to produce a comprehensive list of what Fox News allegedly changed.”
CIA and FBI computers have also been found guilty of editing the entries for the Iraq War and Guantanamo prison. After all this new broke early in August, it didn’t come as a shock when one of gaming’s most dishonest and slimy companies, Electronic Arts, was found doing the exact same thing:
In addition to removing several paragraphs from the “Criticism†section, the user deleted references to the notorious ea_spouse debacle and spun the class action lawsuit brought on by overworked, undercompensated employees to portray the company in a good light. The new text would describe EA as having “led the industry in reforming work/life balance issues that are endemic to the software industry.†And a line tacked on at the end would add a consolatory but unattributed statement: “Since that time, many other game companies have been struck with similar lawsuits.â€Â
Related: 8.15.07 | More Deception From EA
With all of that out of the way, let’s look at what Sony was caught doing today. In another childish attempt to try and smear the Xbox 360, Sony has edited the “Halo Series” Wikipedia entry and have claimed that Halo 3 does not look any better than Halo 2.
On the Halo series page at Wikipedia, an edit originated from Sony Computer Entertainment casts aspersions on Microsoft’s Halo 3. In the Halo 3 section of the Halo page, Sony added “(Halo 3) wont look any better than Halo 2.” (See the first and second story images attached below.) Since then, the Halo page has been corrected and locked from further vandalism.
This isn’t as serious as a lot of the other edits going on, especially when it comes to real-life wars and propaganda, but this is just another thing to cite when talking about Sony’s shady business tactics, which they have used non-stop for nearly a decade now. Just for fun, let’s compare Halo 2 and Halo 3:
The Halo 3 picture is from an unfinished version of the game as well.
The edit on Halo 3’s page was made in April of this year, and it was just uncovered today. Like one of the articles above said, we have just scratched the surface of all the millions of Wikipedia edits, and more stuff like this is going to keep coming out as the weeks and months go by.
Although none of the edits are actually hurting anyone directly, it is sad to see an online community for information be hijacked and become just another propaganda arm of those who wish to keep the truth away from the masses.