Brown's Graffiti Networks project

[firstfrost]

One of my wikis was colonized by an encrypted bit of an ISO from Brown University, from this project: http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/

It's definitely "using your powers for evil", but I find it strangely intriguing anyway.

Comments

[kelkyag]

That's a fascinating project, and I would totally kick it off of my site and leave a nasty note for the coordinators. Unless maybe they asked first and it could be corralled out of the way, but then I'm also partially at fault for whatever mischief their network is propagating (which I imagine they won't or can't tell me about, as that would defeat the purpose and/or they might not know at all depending on where this is in development).

Given that many wikis keep histories, they can probably keep using the history pages on sites where their content has been taken off the active pages for extra bonus evil. I wonder what fraction of wiki admins would be willing to chop pieces out of the change logs to get this off their site entirely.

Totally unrelated, I am intrigued by the "Vizier II" project photo. Yay, more cuttlefish?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I did end up purging the wiki history, because in addition to the several pages that had been put in, there was clearly something going on in the history of one of the category pages (dozens of changes, I think it was being used for indexing or something).

Vizier II is for treiza, but I've been kind of lame at getting him any more started than those tentacles. :)

[kelkyag]

Which wiki software do you use? How difficult is cleaning up page history data?

There's a lewd remark to make here about tentacles, but I haven't got the panache to make it fly. :)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I use a fairly old version of MediaWiki, because I haven't gotten around to upgrading to php5. There's a utility to delete *all* the history, but not one to delete a single page. I gather that more recent versions of mediawiki make that more plausible. (And I should really get around to updating...)

[treiza.livejournal.com]

hurray for tentacles!

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

We should write them a letter of smiting, because that's just not acceptable.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the project page now starts with an apology. That wasn't there this afternoon.

[merastra.livejournal.com]

Ok, that's pretty naughty of them. How did this graffiti show up? Does it show up in the history pages?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

It shows up as a page full of random ascii, with the title of a normal English word (I forget what they were, things like "Swirling"). There's a paragraph at the top saying that it's part of the Graffiti project, with the URL, and saying to treat it the way you would treat other unwanted spam pages. It shows up in the history the same way any other new page would.