Wow DB is an asshole. Who knew, lulz. Lulz indeed Leslie.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Daniel Brandt Is A Cyberbully ?! ORLY
http://danielbrandtisstalkingme.blogspot.com/
Wow DB is an asshole. Who knew, lulz. Lulz indeed Leslie.
Wow DB is an asshole. Who knew, lulz. Lulz indeed Leslie.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Wikipedia Deletes Daniel Brandt
BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLl fucking hilarious
From Daniel Brandt's Wikipedia article:
This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
08:46, 21 March 2008 WJBscribe (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (of no real navigational value - redirect's target gives little info, more trouble than it's worth)
08:58, 18 December 2007 Fran Rogers (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (1 revision restored)
05:42, 18 December 2007 Fran Rogers (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (There is wide acceptance from the community that the GFDL is already satisfied here. The fragile BLP issues involved do not merit keeping the old revisions, as previous deleting admins have agreed.)
17:46, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (3 revisions restored: to keep all previous logs and other issues in record)
17:45, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (deleted to make way for move)
09:36, 10 December 2007 Dominic (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (It appears the history has been properly moved to the merge target for copyright compliance; I am restoring the status quo here since (except for copyvio) summary undeletion is not the right way to dispute a deletion.)
09:14, 10 December 2007 Doc glasgow (talk | contribs) moved Daniel Brandt to Public Information Research/merged material (moving to dump to comply with GFDL)
03:13, 10 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (2,674 revisions restored: Out of policy deletion, against previous compromise and consensus,and violation of the GFDL. Restoring)
20:27, 1 December 2007 Doc glasgow (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (unneccessary redirect - privacy reasons. See me for details)
19:58, 14 June 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (2,667 revisions restored)
From Daniel Brandt's Wikipedia article:
This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.
08:46, 21 March 2008 WJBscribe (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (of no real navigational value - redirect's target gives little info, more trouble than it's worth)
08:58, 18 December 2007 Fran Rogers (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (1 revision restored)
05:42, 18 December 2007 Fran Rogers (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (There is wide acceptance from the community that the GFDL is already satisfied here. The fragile BLP issues involved do not merit keeping the old revisions, as previous deleting admins have agreed.)
17:46, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (3 revisions restored: to keep all previous logs and other issues in record)
17:45, 14 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (deleted to make way for move)
09:36, 10 December 2007 Dominic (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (It appears the history has been properly moved to the merge target for copyright compliance; I am restoring the status quo here since (except for copyvio) summary undeletion is not the right way to dispute a deletion.)
09:14, 10 December 2007 Doc glasgow (talk | contribs) moved Daniel Brandt to Public Information Research/merged material (moving to dump to comply with GFDL)
03:13, 10 December 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (2,674 revisions restored: Out of policy deletion, against previous compromise and consensus,and violation of the GFDL. Restoring)
20:27, 1 December 2007 Doc glasgow (talk | contribs) deleted "Daniel Brandt" (unneccessary redirect - privacy reasons. See me for details)
19:58, 14 June 2007 JoshuaZ (talk | contribs) restored "Daniel Brandt" (2,667 revisions restored)
Monday, August 15, 2011
Daniel Brandt Wants to Censor You
Meet Daniel Brandt. He is a self-proclaimed public interest activist and the owner of Google-Watch.org Mr. Brandt founded Google-Watch.org after his own site, Namebase.org, did not get a good Google PageRank. Promoting his site or putting more work into it apparently never entered Mr. Brandt's mind, instead he decided that the fault wasn't with his site, but rather with Google. Thus he has started a campaign that badmouths the search engine and complains that its ranking algorithms are unfair. Unfair to whom? Well to Mr. Brandt's site that's who.
Unfortunately for Google, Mr. Brandt has found an audience. Increasingly journalists that are looking for a sensational story are using him as a source. They rarely bother to check the validity of his claims, and in a few cases they don't even mention the selfish motives that started this whole campaign, instead they paint him as some kind of benevolent consumer activist who isn't out there to make a buck. Google is just a shining star, and it's fun for some people to try to tarnish them. It gets readers anyways, just like tabloids.
The first such article I read was published by Salon.com and can be found here (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch/print.html). This article isn't so bad as the others, the author does expose Brandt's motives:
Brandt is not a disinterested party; the dispute between Daniel Brandt and Google is personal. He has spent thousands of hours building a Web site that he believes is both useful and important, and Google, in its algorithmic blindness, has given Brandt a lower page rank than he thinks he's entitled to. Brandt finds it genuinely hard to believe -- and even personally insulting -- that Google won't give him more credit.
However the article does paint Mr. Brandt in a friendly light, and so it lends credibility to his cause - a cause which most if not all search engine professionals would regard as absurd.
The crux of Brandt's argument can be summed up with these paragraphs from the Salon.com article.
When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense. For some reason, though, all of NameBase's deep pages -- its pages with specific names and citations -- have a low Google page rank, which causes them to show up low in the search results. Search for "Donald Rumsfeld" in Google and in the first five pages you get a lot of .mil and .gov sites, some news stories, and some activist sites. Namebase's entry on Rumsfeld doesn't come up. (It is in Google's database, but to find it somebody would have to first wade through hundreds of results.)
Brandt sees this as Google's major flaw. "I'm not saying there aren't some sites that are more important that others, but in Google the sites that do well are the spammy sites, sites which have Google psyched out, and a lot of big sites, corporate headquarters' sites -- they show up before sites that criticize those companies."
In other words, Brandt recognizes that there has to be some order to Google's results, and that some sites might deserve to come up before others. He just disagrees with the way Google does it. In Brandt's ideal world, if you searched for "United Airlines," you would see untied.com -- a site critical of United -- before you see United's page. And if you searched for Rumsfeld, you'd see NameBase's dossier on him before the Defense Department's site on the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld."
In truth, Brandt's problem is not Google, it is that his views are not the views of the public at large.
You see PageRank is not given by Google, it is given by people - specifically people that run websites. In a way PageRank is both a direct democracy and a representative democracy. If you run a website every site you link to is getting a direct vote from you, thus representing a direct democracy. Additionally you are giving weight, through that link, to the site which can then pass that weight, in the form of a vote, on to a third site, thus representing a representative democracy. So when one webmaster links to a site they are both voting for that site and allowing that site to use weight received to vote for other sites.
Google also looks at the context of incoming links. So if someone links to Burgerking.com using the word "hamburgers" then they are voting for Burgerking.com as an authority on the word "hamburgers." Additionally they could do the same thing to McDonalds.com. If Burgerking.com gets more such "votes" than McDonalds.com then they will likely, though not always due to on page factors like page title, body text, and the rest, be ranked higher if you search for "hamburgers."
Before Google, search engines relied on the text of a page itself to rank it. This was a problem because it put too much control in the hands of a webmaster. If you wanted to rank highly you only needed to tweak your own site. PageRank changed all this, now how you rank depends on the opinions others have of you. Sure, particularly large sites can indeed influence the rankings of sites owned by the same company, but that is where the representative democracy comes in. The parent site may have gotten all of it's weight from third parties and then passed some of that on to the child site. The end result is that the origin of the weight is third parties and so the representative democracy is working.
Today being ranked highly in search engines is more about what people think of you than what you think of yourself. Mr. Brandt's problem is that people do not think very highly of him. It could be the fact that his leftist views are not popular. It could be that his site does not appear to be trustworthy (the rainbow color scheme doesn't present a feeling of accuracy or academia). Whatever the reason is when people think of Donald Rumsfeld they think of the Department of Defense, which he runs, they think of news stories on places like CNN.com. They do not think of Mr. Brandt's site - especially when to find information on Donald Rumsfeld you need to mine pretty deep.
The depth is another reason why Mr. Brandt's site performs poorly. PageRank is like a pizza, the more people that need to eat the smaller each slice will be. With the thousands and thousands of entries Mr. Brandt has his PageRank becomes so diluted that each individual page is poorly ranked. If he wanted to make a site that specifically focused on Donald Rumsfeld he would have more success, instead he is focusing on thousands of people. It shouldn't be any wonder that his individual content pages, if you can find them, rank poorly. The fact of the matter is that sites that focus on one topic should get ranked higher on that topic than sites that focus on a wider variety of topics.
The fact is Google is neither biased towards big business nor towards activists. Google is completely objective and how they rank is entirely dependent on the views of the public.
For instance search on Google for "International Library of Poetry" and while the first listing is for the company itself the far majority of listings, including the ones immediately below the first listing, are for sites that expose the company as a scam. Why can these activist sites be ranked so highly when others are not? It has to do entirely with public perception. If the majority of the public thinks something then it will be reflected in Google's results. In this case the majority of the public thinks that the company scams people and so the views of the public are reflected in Google's search results.
If you search for "Royal Prestige" you will find a news expose by ABC News that target's the company's questionable sales tactics. Likewise if you search for "Paypal" the first listing will be for the company's homepage but the next three listings are for sites that are "anti-paypal."
Other Issues
Bill Machrone(http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,4148,2653,00.asp), a columnist for PC Magazine and obviously not a search engine expert has also parroted for Mr. Brandt. Only he didn't explain the real motives behind Mr. Brandt's crusade. (The next issue he did print something of a correction after an email from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch) Bill mostly follows the line about Google not giving new content good rankings. This is completely false. New content on high ranking sites is not only often indexed within days, or something hours or minutes, but it is also ranked highly. This is why if you search on Google for something related to late breaking news you can often find news stories that are from that same day listed in the search results. What Google does is they detect if a site is frequently updated and then they crawl that site at more frequent intervals. It has been said that Google crawls CNN.com almost constantly. Google will then list this "fresh" content in it's search results using a guessed PageRank based on the site the content is from. Google cannot give it an actual PageRank since PageRank is entirely relative and so they'd need to reprocess it for the entire web, which is very time consuming (weeks).
What Google doesn't do is give entirely new sites high rankings, and why should they? New restaurants don't automatically become popular, they need to advertise and even then it may take awhile. This is why franchises are so popular. It's much easier to buy a McDonald's franchise (if you have the cash) than to open a no-name burger joint. So if you're a new site and you want traffic you'll need to advertise, just like if you were opening a new business. You wouldn't expect your new restaurant to succeed instantly without any promotion so why would you expect that of a new website?
This is just the way the world works, and it's the right way. Sites with more money do have an advantage, but then again sites with more money also tend to have better content. Its not necessary businesses either, places like universities often have popular websites, but they also have million dollar budgets. Sure, this is not all encompassing, but in general the more money a site has the better it is.
This isn't "Field of Dreams" if you build it they won't come. You need to advertise, you need to promote. If you do not do these things, if you're unwilling to put the time, effort, and money into making your site successful it isn't the fault of the search engines.
The Bottom Line
PageRank isn't perfect, but it is the best thing we have. If there was a way for Google to pool the opinions of everyone in the world on every website on the Internet we'd likely get better results. If Google was telepathic and could read your thoughts when you searched we'd likely get better results, but imagine the privacy issues with that one.
Google discovered a way to efficiently gather an approximation of public opinion on every web page on the Internet. It is an approximation but at this point in time anything other than an approximation would not be technically possible. Other search engines have now employed this same concept so even if Google lost popularity, whatever search engine took their place would serve very similar results.
The bottom line is that Google is nothing but a mirror of public opinion. When people think of hamburgers do they think of Burger King or McDonalds? Google can tell you. If your content isn't ranking as high as you think it should it is probably because the public doesn't agree with it or doesn't think very highly of it. If you don't like what you see when you look in the mirror, don't blame the mirror.
Unfortunately for Google, Mr. Brandt has found an audience. Increasingly journalists that are looking for a sensational story are using him as a source. They rarely bother to check the validity of his claims, and in a few cases they don't even mention the selfish motives that started this whole campaign, instead they paint him as some kind of benevolent consumer activist who isn't out there to make a buck. Google is just a shining star, and it's fun for some people to try to tarnish them. It gets readers anyways, just like tabloids.
The first such article I read was published by Salon.com and can be found here (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch/print.html). This article isn't so bad as the others, the author does expose Brandt's motives:
Brandt is not a disinterested party; the dispute between Daniel Brandt and Google is personal. He has spent thousands of hours building a Web site that he believes is both useful and important, and Google, in its algorithmic blindness, has given Brandt a lower page rank than he thinks he's entitled to. Brandt finds it genuinely hard to believe -- and even personally insulting -- that Google won't give him more credit.
However the article does paint Mr. Brandt in a friendly light, and so it lends credibility to his cause - a cause which most if not all search engine professionals would regard as absurd.
The crux of Brandt's argument can be summed up with these paragraphs from the Salon.com article.
When you type "NameBase" into Google, Brandt's site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. "My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site," he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for "Donald Rumsfeld" will bring up NameBase's page for the secretary of defense. For some reason, though, all of NameBase's deep pages -- its pages with specific names and citations -- have a low Google page rank, which causes them to show up low in the search results. Search for "Donald Rumsfeld" in Google and in the first five pages you get a lot of .mil and .gov sites, some news stories, and some activist sites. Namebase's entry on Rumsfeld doesn't come up. (It is in Google's database, but to find it somebody would have to first wade through hundreds of results.)
Brandt sees this as Google's major flaw. "I'm not saying there aren't some sites that are more important that others, but in Google the sites that do well are the spammy sites, sites which have Google psyched out, and a lot of big sites, corporate headquarters' sites -- they show up before sites that criticize those companies."
In other words, Brandt recognizes that there has to be some order to Google's results, and that some sites might deserve to come up before others. He just disagrees with the way Google does it. In Brandt's ideal world, if you searched for "United Airlines," you would see untied.com -- a site critical of United -- before you see United's page. And if you searched for Rumsfeld, you'd see NameBase's dossier on him before the Defense Department's site on the "The Honorable Donald Rumsfeld."
In truth, Brandt's problem is not Google, it is that his views are not the views of the public at large.
You see PageRank is not given by Google, it is given by people - specifically people that run websites. In a way PageRank is both a direct democracy and a representative democracy. If you run a website every site you link to is getting a direct vote from you, thus representing a direct democracy. Additionally you are giving weight, through that link, to the site which can then pass that weight, in the form of a vote, on to a third site, thus representing a representative democracy. So when one webmaster links to a site they are both voting for that site and allowing that site to use weight received to vote for other sites.
Google also looks at the context of incoming links. So if someone links to Burgerking.com using the word "hamburgers" then they are voting for Burgerking.com as an authority on the word "hamburgers." Additionally they could do the same thing to McDonalds.com. If Burgerking.com gets more such "votes" than McDonalds.com then they will likely, though not always due to on page factors like page title, body text, and the rest, be ranked higher if you search for "hamburgers."
Before Google, search engines relied on the text of a page itself to rank it. This was a problem because it put too much control in the hands of a webmaster. If you wanted to rank highly you only needed to tweak your own site. PageRank changed all this, now how you rank depends on the opinions others have of you. Sure, particularly large sites can indeed influence the rankings of sites owned by the same company, but that is where the representative democracy comes in. The parent site may have gotten all of it's weight from third parties and then passed some of that on to the child site. The end result is that the origin of the weight is third parties and so the representative democracy is working.
Today being ranked highly in search engines is more about what people think of you than what you think of yourself. Mr. Brandt's problem is that people do not think very highly of him. It could be the fact that his leftist views are not popular. It could be that his site does not appear to be trustworthy (the rainbow color scheme doesn't present a feeling of accuracy or academia). Whatever the reason is when people think of Donald Rumsfeld they think of the Department of Defense, which he runs, they think of news stories on places like CNN.com. They do not think of Mr. Brandt's site - especially when to find information on Donald Rumsfeld you need to mine pretty deep.
The depth is another reason why Mr. Brandt's site performs poorly. PageRank is like a pizza, the more people that need to eat the smaller each slice will be. With the thousands and thousands of entries Mr. Brandt has his PageRank becomes so diluted that each individual page is poorly ranked. If he wanted to make a site that specifically focused on Donald Rumsfeld he would have more success, instead he is focusing on thousands of people. It shouldn't be any wonder that his individual content pages, if you can find them, rank poorly. The fact of the matter is that sites that focus on one topic should get ranked higher on that topic than sites that focus on a wider variety of topics.
The fact is Google is neither biased towards big business nor towards activists. Google is completely objective and how they rank is entirely dependent on the views of the public.
For instance search on Google for "International Library of Poetry" and while the first listing is for the company itself the far majority of listings, including the ones immediately below the first listing, are for sites that expose the company as a scam. Why can these activist sites be ranked so highly when others are not? It has to do entirely with public perception. If the majority of the public thinks something then it will be reflected in Google's results. In this case the majority of the public thinks that the company scams people and so the views of the public are reflected in Google's search results.
If you search for "Royal Prestige" you will find a news expose by ABC News that target's the company's questionable sales tactics. Likewise if you search for "Paypal" the first listing will be for the company's homepage but the next three listings are for sites that are "anti-paypal."
Other Issues
Bill Machrone(http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,4148,2653,00.asp), a columnist for PC Magazine and obviously not a search engine expert has also parroted for Mr. Brandt. Only he didn't explain the real motives behind Mr. Brandt's crusade. (The next issue he did print something of a correction after an email from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch) Bill mostly follows the line about Google not giving new content good rankings. This is completely false. New content on high ranking sites is not only often indexed within days, or something hours or minutes, but it is also ranked highly. This is why if you search on Google for something related to late breaking news you can often find news stories that are from that same day listed in the search results. What Google does is they detect if a site is frequently updated and then they crawl that site at more frequent intervals. It has been said that Google crawls CNN.com almost constantly. Google will then list this "fresh" content in it's search results using a guessed PageRank based on the site the content is from. Google cannot give it an actual PageRank since PageRank is entirely relative and so they'd need to reprocess it for the entire web, which is very time consuming (weeks).
What Google doesn't do is give entirely new sites high rankings, and why should they? New restaurants don't automatically become popular, they need to advertise and even then it may take awhile. This is why franchises are so popular. It's much easier to buy a McDonald's franchise (if you have the cash) than to open a no-name burger joint. So if you're a new site and you want traffic you'll need to advertise, just like if you were opening a new business. You wouldn't expect your new restaurant to succeed instantly without any promotion so why would you expect that of a new website?
This is just the way the world works, and it's the right way. Sites with more money do have an advantage, but then again sites with more money also tend to have better content. Its not necessary businesses either, places like universities often have popular websites, but they also have million dollar budgets. Sure, this is not all encompassing, but in general the more money a site has the better it is.
This isn't "Field of Dreams" if you build it they won't come. You need to advertise, you need to promote. If you do not do these things, if you're unwilling to put the time, effort, and money into making your site successful it isn't the fault of the search engines.
The Bottom Line
PageRank isn't perfect, but it is the best thing we have. If there was a way for Google to pool the opinions of everyone in the world on every website on the Internet we'd likely get better results. If Google was telepathic and could read your thoughts when you searched we'd likely get better results, but imagine the privacy issues with that one.
Google discovered a way to efficiently gather an approximation of public opinion on every web page on the Internet. It is an approximation but at this point in time anything other than an approximation would not be technically possible. Other search engines have now employed this same concept so even if Google lost popularity, whatever search engine took their place would serve very similar results.
The bottom line is that Google is nothing but a mirror of public opinion. When people think of hamburgers do they think of Burger King or McDonalds? Google can tell you. If your content isn't ranking as high as you think it should it is probably because the public doesn't agree with it or doesn't think very highly of it. If you don't like what you see when you look in the mirror, don't blame the mirror.
PAGE REMOVED AT THE REQUEST OF DANIEL BRANDT ?
oogle Watch Watch is a very small site made to refute the claims made by Daniel Brandt on his Google-Watch site. Mr. Brandt's site is too often used as a source and made to seem reputable by media publications. So I decided that someone should make a counter site, and since I know Google would never do so much as give attention to Mr. Brandt with a specific rebuttal, I took it upon myself. A few hours of easy work later and this site was born.
Mr. Brandt's site originally carried nothing more than an argument about PageRank, Google's ranking cornerstore. So this site originally contained nothing more than a counter to that argument. Mr. Brandt later expanded and now Google Watch contains a couple dozen articles. I do not have the ability, nor the desire, to refute all of the articles. For instance some talk about how Mr. Brandt (according to him) has been under surveillance by the CIA since the 60s, and how Google is big brother and other such nonsense. I really don't want to get into the conspiracy theory stuff. I hope that content speaks for itself.
So instead I will only cover the technical complaints, such as PageRank, and the privacy complaints. You can view the original PageRank counter posted below, as well as the new privacy page.
Why Daniel Brandt doesn't like Google PageRank
Google & Privacy
http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/controversial-wikipedia-corpus/english-html/main/main_0188.html ? REMOVED ? lulz WHY
Mr. Brandt's site originally carried nothing more than an argument about PageRank, Google's ranking cornerstore. So this site originally contained nothing more than a counter to that argument. Mr. Brandt later expanded and now Google Watch contains a couple dozen articles. I do not have the ability, nor the desire, to refute all of the articles. For instance some talk about how Mr. Brandt (according to him) has been under surveillance by the CIA since the 60s, and how Google is big brother and other such nonsense. I really don't want to get into the conspiracy theory stuff. I hope that content speaks for itself.
So instead I will only cover the technical complaints, such as PageRank, and the privacy complaints. You can view the original PageRank counter posted below, as well as the new privacy page.
Why Daniel Brandt doesn't like Google PageRank
Google & Privacy
http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/controversial-wikipedia-corpus/english-html/main/main_0188.html ? REMOVED ? lulz WHY
Monday, August 8, 2011
Daniel Brandt : Wikipedia Butthurt Truth
Daniel Leslie Brandt (born circa 1947 to missionary parents in China) is an American activist on the World Wide Web, particularly in relation to Google Inc. and the Wikipedia encyclopedia project.
Brandt's current activism centers around demands for accountability from organizations he believes are operating irresponsibly, or in an unnecessarily secretive manner. In 1989, Brandt and Steve Badrich co-founded a non-profit organization called Public Information Research (PIR). Brandt launched Google Watch in 2002, a website stating his criticism of the Google search engine, and Wikipedia Watch in 2005, a similar site detailing his opinion that the Wikipedia encyclopedia lacks accountability and accuracy. Brandt also works as a book indexer based in San Antonio, Texas.
Student activism
In his college years he was an anti-Vietnam War activist while at the University of Southern California (USC). According to the Daily Trojan,
"Brandt was the editor and creator of Prevert, a monthly student activist newspaper, and the de facto leader of the student activist movement at this university in the late '60's." On October 4, 1968, he was one of three members of Students for a Democratic Society who burned what they said were their draft cards in front of television cameras following a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie at USC.[8]
When Brandt's student deferment classification was withdrawn by the local Selective Service System in December 1968 due to his public non-cooperation with his draft board, Brandt was convicted of failure to report for a pre-induction physical exam and refusal to submit to induction. Brandt appealed and his convictions were reversed on the grounds that he was entitled to student status as an undergraduate at USC.[9] Since President Carter granted amnesty to all draft resisters in 1977, this would have the effect of overturning this conviction even if it had not already been reversed, with the further implication that all civil rights have been restored despite the conviction.[10]
Political activism
Brandt states that during the 1980s, when living in Arlington, Virginia, he introduced a number of political activists and researchers to computing and how to work with databases, including former Central Intelligence Agency officers Philip Agee[11] and Ralph McGehee, as well as John F. Kennedy assassination researchers Bernard Fensterwald and Mary Ferrell.[12]
From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications. He told the New York Times that "many of these sources are fairly obscure so it's a very effective way to retrieve information on U.S. intelligence that no one else indexes."[13]
These prior efforts were the basis of his NameBase website, described as "a quirky index of names cross-indexed," focusing on "foreign policy, spy, conspiracy, media, etc."[14] Currently the names are drawn from over 800 books, serials, and other publications.[15]
Between 1990 and 1992, three members of Brandt's Public Information Research (PIR) advisory board, including Chip Berlet, resigned after complaining that another board member, L. Fletcher Prouty, was openly working with and defending Liberty Lobby and the Holocaust denial group the Institute for Historical Review, which republished Prouty's book The Secret Team.[16]
Online activism
Government cookies
In March 2002, Brandt was credited with finding persistent HTTP cookies on one of the Central Intelligence Agency's websites that could be used to track users for approximately 10 years, in contravention of federal government rules.[17][18] On December 25, 2005, Brandt found that the National Security Agency's website was using two HTTP cookies set to expire in 2035. Brandt contacted the NSA to remind them they were in violation of federal rules and the cookies were removed. The event gained international publicity.[3][4]
Criticism of Google and Yahoo!
In 2002, Brandt launched the website Google Watch through PIR, reportedly in response to Google's low ranking of deep content within NameBase.org, which is placed far below competing information.[19]
Google Watch documents Brandt's views on privacy, long-living HTTP cookies, and advertising policies within Google and Gmail. Brandt has also described the issue of "made for AdSense pages" — spam pages with content often scraped from other sites that sometimes enjoy high rankings in search engines due to optimization techniques. In addition, PIR has released Scroogle, a screen-scraping proxy that circumvents Google's tracking of user activity via HTTP cookies. Some writers have criticised the Google Watch website, such as writer Farhad Manjoo, who stated:
"… Daniel Brandt's arguments seem absurd. Because he has a personal stake in the squabble, he's pretty easy to dismiss: He doesn't like his Google rank, so it's not surprising he doesn't like Google."[19] In addition to Brandt's PIR, other privacy and civil rights organisations including the Australian Privacy Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, and Katherine Albrecht's CASPIAN, have endorsed an open letter drafted by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum requesting that Google suspend their Gmail service on account of privacy concerns, such as "the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow."
Brandt also maintains an anti-Yahoo! website, Yahoo! Watch. His principal complaint is that the Yahoo! feature Site Match embeds paid links into the main index and search results.
Criticism of Wikipedia
Brandt launched the Wikipedia Watch website through PIR on October 13, 2005,[21] in response to a user authoring a biographical article on him within the Wikipedia peer-edited online encyclopaedia project. Brandt himself has been blocked from editing Wikipedia following a lengthy and sometimes uncivil battle between him and various editors and administrators on the article and talk pages there. He has published some logs from Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat channels on Wikipedia Watch,[22] and has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English portal.[23] Several PIR domains have been placed on Wikipedia's spam blacklist.[24] On the Wikipedia Watch website, Brandt advances his view that a website whose content is copied as widely as that of Wikipedia should have higher standards of accountability, and that members of the public who contribute or edit articles should make their identities public for this reason; this includes the facilitation of article subjects bringing litigation against editors, although since this multiple wikis now have articles about him. Brandt considers Wikipedia to be a privacy risk, and stated, "It [Wikipedia] needs to be watched closely." Brandt's view is that the creation of biographical articles on Wikipedia is broadly unacceptable due to the inaccuracy of information included and a lack of accountability.[25]
Since November 19, 2005, the Wikipedia Watch site has included a page stating personal details allegedly pertaining to individual Wikipedia editors and administrators who have edited Brandt's biography or responded to his complaints, to
"discourage irresponsible editors from applying for adminship, and encourage others to be more considerate of those who would rather not have an article about themselves." Brandt states that his reasoning for maintaining the list is that, "if I ever decide that I have cause to sue, I'm not sure who should be sued." This is, according to Brandt, due to a lack of any party within the project claiming content responsibility.[26]
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded to Brandt in a letter to Editor & Publisher, stating,
"I don't regard him as a valid source about anything at all, based on my interactions with him. I tried very hard to help him, and he misrepresented nearly everything about our conversation in his very strange rant. He considers the very existence of a Wikipedia article about him to be a privacy violation, despite being a public person. I find it hard to take him very seriously at all. He misrepresents everything about our procedures, claiming that we have a 'secret police' and so on."[27] A sidebar on Brandt's site contradicts this letter: "Wales never tried to help Brandt at all, and he and Brandt have never had a conversation."[28]
In November 2006, the Associated Press reported Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 "examples of suspected plagiarism" among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he searched to illustrate the need for "Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles." According to the report "Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized. But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked."[29]
Seigenthaler Wikipedia biography controversy
Main article: John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy In May 2005, an anonymous editor added defamatory information to the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography. In December 2005, Seigenthaler criticized his Wikipedia biography in a USA Today column that generated considerable publicity.[30]
Brandt found that the IP address used by the editor was also used to host a website, with the text, "Welcome to Rush Delivery." Brandt contacted a company in Nashville, Tennessee, known by that name, and the IP address on the email they sent back to Brandt matched that in the edit history of the Seigenthaler article. Within the week, Brian Chase, a manager at Rush Delivery, resigned and personally confessed to Seigenthaler.[31]
References
^ Chasnoff, Brian (December 11, 2005). S.A. man is chasing the secret authors of Wikipedia. San Antonio Express-News ^ Jesdanun, Anick (December 28, 2005). NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers. Associated Press ^ a b Goldenberg, Suzanne (December 30, 2005) US intelligence service bugged website visitors despite ban. The Guardian ^ a b Velshi, Ali (December 29, 2005). "New Information About NSA Domestic Spying Program Emerges", The Situation Room, CNN ^ Thatcher, Gary (July 31, 1989). Cloak-and-Dagger Database: Software Sniffs Out Secret Agents. The Christian Science Monitor p. 8. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 11, 2005) A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank. New York Times ^ Daily Trojan, January 12, 1971. ^ Kneeland, Douglas E. (October 5, 1968). Muskie Urged Raid Halt; Muskie Confirms He Appealed To Johnson to Halt the Bombing. The New York Times ^ United States v. Brandt, 435 F.2d 324 (9th Cir. 1970). ^ Proclamation 4483 -- Granting pardon for violations of the Selective Service Act, August 4, 1964, to March 28, 1973. archives.gov. Retrieved November 6, 2006. ^ Hand, Mark (January 3, 2003). "Searching for Daniel Brandt". CounterPunch ^ McCarthy, Jerry (January-March 1994). Mary Ferrell Profile. NameBase NewsLine, cited on Spartacus Educational ^ Gerth, Jeff (October 6, 1987). Washington Talk: The Study of Intelligence; Only Spies Can Find These Sources. New York Times ^ Dedman, Bill (ed.). Power Reporting: Beat by beat: Military. via PowerReporting.com, accessed 19 April 2006. ^ http://www.namebase.org/unique.html PIR website, "Why is namebase unique?", retrieved 15 April 2006. ^ Dan Brandt, "An Incorrect Political Memoir," Lobster, No. 24 (December 1992); Chip Berlet, "Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected", Cambridge, Massachusetts: Political Research Associates, 1991.[1] ^ Associated Press (March 20, 2002). CIA Caught Sneaking Cookies via CBS News ^ Aftergood, Steven (March 19, 2002). CIA cookies exposed and eliminated. Secrecy News ^ a b Manjoo, Farhad (2002-08-29). Meet Mr. Anti-Google. Salon.com. Archived from the original on 2005-03-09. See http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case3., Brandt's response ^ Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (April 19, 2004). Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail. via privacyrights.org ^ Alexa traffic details. ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/findchat.html - Wikipedia-Watch: The Wikipedia Hive Mind Chat Room] ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html - Wikipedia-Watch: Plagiarism by Wikipedia Editors] ^ See the spam blacklist for a current listing of sites.The relevant policy prohibits automated insertion of links by bots, as well as widespread placement of marginally-relevant links. See Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming ^ Public Information Research. http://wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch, Retrieved on April 2006 ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html - Wikipedia-Watch:The Wikipedia Hive Mind ^ DeFoore, Jay (2005-12-01). Wikipedia Founder, Readers Respond to Seigenthaler Article. Editor & Publisher. Membership required. ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/wikitort.html - Wikipedia-Watch: Can You Sue Wikipedia?] ^ Jesdanun, Anick (November 3, 2006). Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages. Associated Press. ^ Seigenthaler, John Sr. (2005-11-29). A False Wikipedia 'biography'. USA Today. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (2005-12-15). In search of the Wikipedia prankster. CNET News.com.
Bibliography
"Google Libraries and Privacy" by Daniel Brandt, Web Pro News, 1 December 2005 "An Incorrect Political Memoir" by Daniel Brandt, Lobster, December 1992
External links
Sites run by Daniel Brandt
http://www.cia-on-campus.org - CIA on Campus http://www.google-watch.org - Google Watch http://www.namebase.org - NameBase http://www.scroogle.org - Scroogle http://www.wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch
Media coverage
"Conspiracy Researcher says Google's no good" by Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com, 30 August 2002 with http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case3 Brandt's response (down the bottom) "Paranoid or Prescient? Daniel Brandt is concerned about Google Print" by Jim Hedger, Concept, 2003 "Scraping Google to see what's happening" by John Battelle, Searchblog, 11 January 2005 "Anti-Google campaign by Lenz?" by Nathan Weinberg, Blog news Channel, 15 May 2005 "What's in a Wiki?" by Philipp Lenssen, Blog News Channel, 30 October 2005 "Who owns your Wikipedia bio?" by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 6 December 2005 "Caught red handed" Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 2005 Persondata NAME Brandt, Daniel Leslie ALTERNATIVE NAMES SHORT DESCRIPTION Activist DATE OF BIRTH 1947 PLACE OF BIRTH China DATE OF DEATH PLACE OF DEATH Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt"
Brandt's current activism centers around demands for accountability from organizations he believes are operating irresponsibly, or in an unnecessarily secretive manner. In 1989, Brandt and Steve Badrich co-founded a non-profit organization called Public Information Research (PIR). Brandt launched Google Watch in 2002, a website stating his criticism of the Google search engine, and Wikipedia Watch in 2005, a similar site detailing his opinion that the Wikipedia encyclopedia lacks accountability and accuracy. Brandt also works as a book indexer based in San Antonio, Texas.
Student activism
In his college years he was an anti-Vietnam War activist while at the University of Southern California (USC). According to the Daily Trojan,
"Brandt was the editor and creator of Prevert, a monthly student activist newspaper, and the de facto leader of the student activist movement at this university in the late '60's." On October 4, 1968, he was one of three members of Students for a Democratic Society who burned what they said were their draft cards in front of television cameras following a speech by Senator Edmund Muskie at USC.[8]
When Brandt's student deferment classification was withdrawn by the local Selective Service System in December 1968 due to his public non-cooperation with his draft board, Brandt was convicted of failure to report for a pre-induction physical exam and refusal to submit to induction. Brandt appealed and his convictions were reversed on the grounds that he was entitled to student status as an undergraduate at USC.[9] Since President Carter granted amnesty to all draft resisters in 1977, this would have the effect of overturning this conviction even if it had not already been reversed, with the further implication that all civil rights have been restored despite the conviction.[10]
Political activism
Brandt states that during the 1980s, when living in Arlington, Virginia, he introduced a number of political activists and researchers to computing and how to work with databases, including former Central Intelligence Agency officers Philip Agee[11] and Ralph McGehee, as well as John F. Kennedy assassination researchers Bernard Fensterwald and Mary Ferrell.[12]
From the 1960s onwards, Brandt collected clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence matters. In the 1980s, through his company Micro Associates, he sold a database of citations of these clippings, books, government reports, and other publications. He told the New York Times that "many of these sources are fairly obscure so it's a very effective way to retrieve information on U.S. intelligence that no one else indexes."[13]
These prior efforts were the basis of his NameBase website, described as "a quirky index of names cross-indexed," focusing on "foreign policy, spy, conspiracy, media, etc."[14] Currently the names are drawn from over 800 books, serials, and other publications.[15]
Between 1990 and 1992, three members of Brandt's Public Information Research (PIR) advisory board, including Chip Berlet, resigned after complaining that another board member, L. Fletcher Prouty, was openly working with and defending Liberty Lobby and the Holocaust denial group the Institute for Historical Review, which republished Prouty's book The Secret Team.[16]
Online activism
Government cookies
In March 2002, Brandt was credited with finding persistent HTTP cookies on one of the Central Intelligence Agency's websites that could be used to track users for approximately 10 years, in contravention of federal government rules.[17][18] On December 25, 2005, Brandt found that the National Security Agency's website was using two HTTP cookies set to expire in 2035. Brandt contacted the NSA to remind them they were in violation of federal rules and the cookies were removed. The event gained international publicity.[3][4]
Criticism of Google and Yahoo!
In 2002, Brandt launched the website Google Watch through PIR, reportedly in response to Google's low ranking of deep content within NameBase.org, which is placed far below competing information.[19]
Google Watch documents Brandt's views on privacy, long-living HTTP cookies, and advertising policies within Google and Gmail. Brandt has also described the issue of "made for AdSense pages" — spam pages with content often scraped from other sites that sometimes enjoy high rankings in search engines due to optimization techniques. In addition, PIR has released Scroogle, a screen-scraping proxy that circumvents Google's tracking of user activity via HTTP cookies. Some writers have criticised the Google Watch website, such as writer Farhad Manjoo, who stated:
"… Daniel Brandt's arguments seem absurd. Because he has a personal stake in the squabble, he's pretty easy to dismiss: He doesn't like his Google rank, so it's not surprising he doesn't like Google."[19] In addition to Brandt's PIR, other privacy and civil rights organisations including the Australian Privacy Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, and Katherine Albrecht's CASPIAN, have endorsed an open letter drafted by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum requesting that Google suspend their Gmail service on account of privacy concerns, such as "the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow."
Brandt also maintains an anti-Yahoo! website, Yahoo! Watch. His principal complaint is that the Yahoo! feature Site Match embeds paid links into the main index and search results.
Criticism of Wikipedia
Brandt launched the Wikipedia Watch website through PIR on October 13, 2005,[21] in response to a user authoring a biographical article on him within the Wikipedia peer-edited online encyclopaedia project. Brandt himself has been blocked from editing Wikipedia following a lengthy and sometimes uncivil battle between him and various editors and administrators on the article and talk pages there. He has published some logs from Wikipedia Internet Relay Chat channels on Wikipedia Watch,[22] and has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English portal.[23] Several PIR domains have been placed on Wikipedia's spam blacklist.[24] On the Wikipedia Watch website, Brandt advances his view that a website whose content is copied as widely as that of Wikipedia should have higher standards of accountability, and that members of the public who contribute or edit articles should make their identities public for this reason; this includes the facilitation of article subjects bringing litigation against editors, although since this multiple wikis now have articles about him. Brandt considers Wikipedia to be a privacy risk, and stated, "It [Wikipedia] needs to be watched closely." Brandt's view is that the creation of biographical articles on Wikipedia is broadly unacceptable due to the inaccuracy of information included and a lack of accountability.[25]
Since November 19, 2005, the Wikipedia Watch site has included a page stating personal details allegedly pertaining to individual Wikipedia editors and administrators who have edited Brandt's biography or responded to his complaints, to
"discourage irresponsible editors from applying for adminship, and encourage others to be more considerate of those who would rather not have an article about themselves." Brandt states that his reasoning for maintaining the list is that, "if I ever decide that I have cause to sue, I'm not sure who should be sued." This is, according to Brandt, due to a lack of any party within the project claiming content responsibility.[26]
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded to Brandt in a letter to Editor & Publisher, stating,
"I don't regard him as a valid source about anything at all, based on my interactions with him. I tried very hard to help him, and he misrepresented nearly everything about our conversation in his very strange rant. He considers the very existence of a Wikipedia article about him to be a privacy violation, despite being a public person. I find it hard to take him very seriously at all. He misrepresents everything about our procedures, claiming that we have a 'secret police' and so on."[27] A sidebar on Brandt's site contradicts this letter: "Wales never tried to help Brandt at all, and he and Brandt have never had a conversation."[28]
In November 2006, the Associated Press reported Brandt's claim to have uncovered 142 "examples of suspected plagiarism" among the 12,000 Wikipedia articles he searched to illustrate the need for "Wikipedia to conduct a thorough review of all its articles." According to the report "Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized. But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked."[29]
Seigenthaler Wikipedia biography controversy
Main article: John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy In May 2005, an anonymous editor added defamatory information to the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography. In December 2005, Seigenthaler criticized his Wikipedia biography in a USA Today column that generated considerable publicity.[30]
Brandt found that the IP address used by the editor was also used to host a website, with the text, "Welcome to Rush Delivery." Brandt contacted a company in Nashville, Tennessee, known by that name, and the IP address on the email they sent back to Brandt matched that in the edit history of the Seigenthaler article. Within the week, Brian Chase, a manager at Rush Delivery, resigned and personally confessed to Seigenthaler.[31]
References
^ Chasnoff, Brian (December 11, 2005). S.A. man is chasing the secret authors of Wikipedia. San Antonio Express-News ^ Jesdanun, Anick (December 28, 2005). NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers. Associated Press ^ a b Goldenberg, Suzanne (December 30, 2005) US intelligence service bugged website visitors despite ban. The Guardian ^ a b Velshi, Ali (December 29, 2005). "New Information About NSA Domestic Spying Program Emerges", The Situation Room, CNN ^ Thatcher, Gary (July 31, 1989). Cloak-and-Dagger Database: Software Sniffs Out Secret Agents. The Christian Science Monitor p. 8. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 11, 2005) A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank. New York Times ^ Daily Trojan, January 12, 1971. ^ Kneeland, Douglas E. (October 5, 1968). Muskie Urged Raid Halt; Muskie Confirms He Appealed To Johnson to Halt the Bombing. The New York Times ^ United States v. Brandt, 435 F.2d 324 (9th Cir. 1970). ^ Proclamation 4483 -- Granting pardon for violations of the Selective Service Act, August 4, 1964, to March 28, 1973. archives.gov. Retrieved November 6, 2006. ^ Hand, Mark (January 3, 2003). "Searching for Daniel Brandt". CounterPunch ^ McCarthy, Jerry (January-March 1994). Mary Ferrell Profile. NameBase NewsLine, cited on Spartacus Educational ^ Gerth, Jeff (October 6, 1987). Washington Talk: The Study of Intelligence; Only Spies Can Find These Sources. New York Times ^ Dedman, Bill (ed.). Power Reporting: Beat by beat: Military. via PowerReporting.com, accessed 19 April 2006. ^ http://www.namebase.org/unique.html PIR website, "Why is namebase unique?", retrieved 15 April 2006. ^ Dan Brandt, "An Incorrect Political Memoir," Lobster, No. 24 (December 1992); Chip Berlet, "Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-fascist Overtures To Progressives, And Why They Must Be Rejected", Cambridge, Massachusetts: Political Research Associates, 1991.[1] ^ Associated Press (March 20, 2002). CIA Caught Sneaking Cookies via CBS News ^ Aftergood, Steven (March 19, 2002). CIA cookies exposed and eliminated. Secrecy News ^ a b Manjoo, Farhad (2002-08-29). Meet Mr. Anti-Google. Salon.com. Archived from the original on 2005-03-09. See http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case3., Brandt's response ^ Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (April 19, 2004). Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail. via privacyrights.org ^ Alexa traffic details. ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/findchat.html - Wikipedia-Watch: The Wikipedia Hive Mind Chat Room] ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html - Wikipedia-Watch: Plagiarism by Wikipedia Editors] ^ See the spam blacklist for a current listing of sites.The relevant policy prohibits automated insertion of links by bots, as well as widespread placement of marginally-relevant links. See Wikipedia:Spam#External link spamming ^ Public Information Research. http://wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch, Retrieved on April 2006 ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html - Wikipedia-Watch:The Wikipedia Hive Mind ^ DeFoore, Jay (2005-12-01). Wikipedia Founder, Readers Respond to Seigenthaler Article. Editor & Publisher. Membership required. ^ http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/wikitort.html - Wikipedia-Watch: Can You Sue Wikipedia?] ^ Jesdanun, Anick (November 3, 2006). Wikipedia Critic Finds Copied Passages. Associated Press. ^ Seigenthaler, John Sr. (2005-11-29). A False Wikipedia 'biography'. USA Today. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (2005-12-15). In search of the Wikipedia prankster. CNET News.com.
Bibliography
"Google Libraries and Privacy" by Daniel Brandt, Web Pro News, 1 December 2005 "An Incorrect Political Memoir" by Daniel Brandt, Lobster, December 1992
External links
Sites run by Daniel Brandt
http://www.cia-on-campus.org - CIA on Campus http://www.google-watch.org - Google Watch http://www.namebase.org - NameBase http://www.scroogle.org - Scroogle http://www.wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch
Media coverage
"Conspiracy Researcher says Google's no good" by Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com, 30 August 2002 with http://www.google-watch.org/gaming.html#case3 Brandt's response (down the bottom) "Paranoid or Prescient? Daniel Brandt is concerned about Google Print" by Jim Hedger, Concept, 2003 "Scraping Google to see what's happening" by John Battelle, Searchblog, 11 January 2005 "Anti-Google campaign by Lenz?" by Nathan Weinberg, Blog news Channel, 15 May 2005 "What's in a Wiki?" by Philipp Lenssen, Blog News Channel, 30 October 2005 "Who owns your Wikipedia bio?" by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 6 December 2005 "Caught red handed" Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 2005 Persondata NAME Brandt, Daniel Leslie ALTERNATIVE NAMES SHORT DESCRIPTION Activist DATE OF BIRTH 1947 PLACE OF BIRTH China DATE OF DEATH PLACE OF DEATH Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Brandt"
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Daniel Brandt Wiki Google Yourself
Please get in touch with Daniel and give him a kind word about his efforts.
http://josephevers.blogspot.com
http://www.cia-on-campus.org - CIA on Campus
http://www.google-watch.org - Google Watch
http://www.namebase.org - NameBase
http://www.scroogle.org - Scroogle
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[http://pastebin.com/4jvd02As Docs dump on most of the people associated with Public Information Research]
[http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/controversial-wikipedia-corpus/english-html/main/main_0188.html Dump of his TOW article. It's best to learn about your enemies.]
[http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch Meet Mr. Anti-Google]
[http://blogoscoped.com/forum/15687.html Brandt being called on his own bullshit]
[http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=CVOiog8AAADNno2-soK8T6WXa8h5teKC Some Web 1.0 newsgroup postings]
[http://www.qrz.com/db/KM6E Ham operator docs]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2CJN5A6CMCV1W/ref%3Dcm_psrch_profile Amazon profile]
[http://vlex.com/vid/united-america-daniel-leslie-brandt-36746649 United States of America, Appellee, v. Daniel Leslie Brandt, Appellant., 435 F.2d 324 (9th Cir. 1970)]
| Daniel Leslie Brandt | |
| Born | 12/23/1947 |
| Height | 6'0" |
| Weight | |
| Ham Radio Call Sign | KM6E |
| Ham Radio Class | Amateur Extra |
| Address | 7791 Woodchase Apt 1508, San Antonio TX 78240 (street view), 129 Wickes St, San Antonio TX (street view) |
| Company | "Public Information Research", also maybe works in "textiles" |
| Company Address | PO Box 680635 San Antonio, TX 78268-0635 (Translation: >I run my business from home.) |
| Phone | +1.2105093160 or +1.2105093161 or +1.5122280837 |
| E-mail Addresses | pir@lavabit.com, jevers.ceo@gmail.com, dbrandt@crl.com, namebasepir@yahoo.com |
http://josephevers.blogspot.com
http://www.cia-on-campus.org - CIA on Campus
http://www.google-watch.org - Google Watch
http://www.namebase.org - NameBase
http://www.scroogle.org - Scroogle
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org - Wikipedia Watch
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[http://pastebin.com/4jvd02As Docs dump on most of the people associated with Public Information Research]
[http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/meyers/controversial-wikipedia-corpus/english-html/main/main_0188.html Dump of his TOW article. It's best to learn about your enemies.]
[http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/29/google_watch Meet Mr. Anti-Google]
[http://blogoscoped.com/forum/15687.html Brandt being called on his own bullshit]
[http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=CVOiog8AAADNno2-soK8T6WXa8h5teKC Some Web 1.0 newsgroup postings]
[http://www.qrz.com/db/KM6E Ham operator docs]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2CJN5A6CMCV1W/ref%3Dcm_psrch_profile Amazon profile]
[http://vlex.com/vid/united-america-daniel-leslie-brandt-36746649 United States of America, Appellee, v. Daniel Leslie Brandt, Appellant., 435 F.2d 324 (9th Cir. 1970)]
Daniel Brandt, Joseph Evers, Wikipedia : No1currs
Pop-quiz hot shot, you want to take down ED but you don't have Visual Basic so you can't backtrace their DNS numbers, what do you do? You call this man (no really, his number is 210-509-3160, call him). Daniel Leslie Brandt is a master at the art of doxing people who use their real name on the internet, and similar in look and personality to Sherrod DeGrippo, he has excelled in the fine art of being able to dish it out, but not take it. The resident e-detective of The Wikipedia Review, Brandt has a wide range of experience in internet stalking and e-psychiatry. According to rumors on the internets, Wikipedia plans to file a lawsuit against Brandt for violating the privacy of Wikipedia admins by unearthing private information posted by those admins through the simple means of a scroogle search, and re-publishing it on other websites.
JosephEvers.blogspot.com is a blog dedicated to exposing the fat nerds behind Encyclopedia Dramatica throughout its various incarnations. Written by Daniel Brandt, professional internet investigator, the purpose of the blog is to expose supposed criminal activity or whatever, but credibility is sketch at best considering it commonly gets dox wrong even with users who use their real name in their username. The blog is considered comical at best.
Currently the blog boasts a lol roster consisting of a .jpg from a magazine of someone who may live in the same town as one of ED's admins, one person who works at the data center where bandwidth is provided, and a colo-jockey. None of these people have anything to do with Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Sherrod DeGrippo was known to be scared shitless of this blog to the point where nobody was allowed to talk about it on any of her websites or IRC (and even further) on pain of e-death. If you did happen to mention the site or its author and were not immediately pwnt from the server, her faggot tattletale admin staff would go crying to her on the super secret mailing list. In under a minute the hambeast would be in the channel, spamming your PMs talking about the upcoming lawlsuits she has in the works and other lies to get you to just shut up about it. Being the Internets, this of course caused a Streisand effect of tsunami-like proportions, putting Girlvinyl's dox in the hands of all those whom she had been cyberbullying for the previous 7 years. The backlash led to the eventual downfall of ED.com and the inevitable erecting of the far superior ED.ch.
His Stance on Wikipedia
Daniel Brandt really, really hates his Wikipedia article, and has invested at least 100 hours in getting it deleted, although he had only limited success until early 2007, when the page was deleted in a tortuous process. As a lame excuse for keeping it, wikipedoes frantically argue that Daniel Brandt is a notable figure, even though nobody really knows who the fuck he is. His exploits have included wondering how Essjay could really be who he claimed to be, wondering why Slim Virgin had magical abilities like round-the-clock editing for days on end, showing that wikipedians shamelessly cuntpaste shit from all over the place, and trying to get them to remove his article.
His Story
Daniel Brandt has been, in a way, trolled. Not by us, but by the ruthless hivemind of teenaged aspies at Wikipedia. Some comments from the hivemind include "[at Brandt] Stop whining you fucking baby". Noone cared about Brandt's reputation, instead they pelted his name with unfunny bullshit. Various versions of his article are still available on the Wikipedia to this day.
His Stance on Google
Brandt also hates Google, another Cthulhu of the Internet. Long before he set up Wikipedia Watch, he made this nice site about Google's nefarious activities. Even better, he has set up this Google proxy, which stops them from feeding your computer cookies and keeping secret records of your IP address and searches. It used to do even better things, like comparing rankings from Yahoo and Google, but the Yahoo bit vanished in mid-2007. In his typical hypocritical fashion, all of his blogs are hosted on Blogspot, a website owned by Google.
Associates
Family
There is currently no known public information regarding Brandt's family. However, judging by his pseudo-elusive personality, we can assume he cut off all communication with them years ago.
Friends
John Loftus
John Loftus may suspect you are a terrorist.
John Loftus was a narc for the army and advisor for Brandt's company. His claim to fame was doxing an alleged terrorist on Faux News, only to discover that the home was occupied by an innocent family. He has also written several books regarding the Juden and the supposed conspiracies against them, along with claims to have trained Israeli soldiers. There is no reason to believe anything he spews out of his fat mouth, as he is a likely schizophrenic.
Dennis Brutus
Dennis Vincent Brutus was a batshit insane activist and board member for Public Information Research. He spent most of his life trying to fight the South African government, making little success, and ultimately being jailed for it. While attempting to escape, he was shot down and put back in his proper place. In 2009, he was old, poor, and was finally finished off by cancer.
Stephen Badrich
Stephen Page Badrich was the secretary and treasurer for PIR, and quite possibly Brandt's lover. The discovery of the address the two once shared lead many to question Brandt's sexual orientation. He has yet to comment.
Peter Scott
Peter Scott, looking a bit old.
Peter Dale Scott was an advisor for PIR. Most of his early life was spent writing the predecessors to emo poetry, but later turned into a self-described author of "deep politics". His books are about the government's agenda behind 9/11, and CIA activities they don't want you to know about. He rejects the label "conspiracy theorist".
Carl Oglesby was an advisor for PIR, and like all of Brandt's friends, is a writer, an activist, and a conspiracy theorist. He was head of Students for a Democratic Society (a semi-organized group of anti-Vietnam hippies) in the 60's. During his time with SDS, he gave a few speeches that made no impact on the war, and most likely took LSD. After being kicked out in 1969, he decided to live the rest of his life like it was still the late 60's and published several books about the JFK assassination.
JosephEvers.blogspot.com is a blog dedicated to exposing the fat nerds behind Encyclopedia Dramatica throughout its various incarnations. Written by Daniel Brandt, professional internet investigator, the purpose of the blog is to expose supposed criminal activity or whatever, but credibility is sketch at best considering it commonly gets dox wrong even with users who use their real name in their username. The blog is considered comical at best.
Currently the blog boasts a lol roster consisting of a .jpg from a magazine of someone who may live in the same town as one of ED's admins, one person who works at the data center where bandwidth is provided, and a colo-jockey. None of these people have anything to do with Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Sherrod DeGrippo was known to be scared shitless of this blog to the point where nobody was allowed to talk about it on any of her websites or IRC (and even further) on pain of e-death. If you did happen to mention the site or its author and were not immediately pwnt from the server, her faggot tattletale admin staff would go crying to her on the super secret mailing list. In under a minute the hambeast would be in the channel, spamming your PMs talking about the upcoming lawlsuits she has in the works and other lies to get you to just shut up about it. Being the Internets, this of course caused a Streisand effect of tsunami-like proportions, putting Girlvinyl's dox in the hands of all those whom she had been cyberbullying for the previous 7 years. The backlash led to the eventual downfall of ED.com and the inevitable erecting of the far superior ED.ch.
His Stance on Wikipedia
Daniel Brandt really, really hates his Wikipedia article, and has invested at least 100 hours in getting it deleted, although he had only limited success until early 2007, when the page was deleted in a tortuous process. As a lame excuse for keeping it, wikipedoes frantically argue that Daniel Brandt is a notable figure, even though nobody really knows who the fuck he is. His exploits have included wondering how Essjay could really be who he claimed to be, wondering why Slim Virgin had magical abilities like round-the-clock editing for days on end, showing that wikipedians shamelessly cuntpaste shit from all over the place, and trying to get them to remove his article.
His Story
Daniel Brandt has been, in a way, trolled. Not by us, but by the ruthless hivemind of teenaged aspies at Wikipedia. Some comments from the hivemind include "[at Brandt] Stop whining you fucking baby". Noone cared about Brandt's reputation, instead they pelted his name with unfunny bullshit. Various versions of his article are still available on the Wikipedia to this day.
His Stance on Google
Brandt also hates Google, another Cthulhu of the Internet. Long before he set up Wikipedia Watch, he made this nice site about Google's nefarious activities. Even better, he has set up this Google proxy, which stops them from feeding your computer cookies and keeping secret records of your IP address and searches. It used to do even better things, like comparing rankings from Yahoo and Google, but the Yahoo bit vanished in mid-2007. In his typical hypocritical fashion, all of his blogs are hosted on Blogspot, a website owned by Google.
Associates
Family
There is currently no known public information regarding Brandt's family. However, judging by his pseudo-elusive personality, we can assume he cut off all communication with them years ago.
Friends
John Loftus
John Loftus may suspect you are a terrorist.
John Loftus was a narc for the army and advisor for Brandt's company. His claim to fame was doxing an alleged terrorist on Faux News, only to discover that the home was occupied by an innocent family. He has also written several books regarding the Juden and the supposed conspiracies against them, along with claims to have trained Israeli soldiers. There is no reason to believe anything he spews out of his fat mouth, as he is a likely schizophrenic.
Dennis Brutus
Dennis Vincent Brutus was a batshit insane activist and board member for Public Information Research. He spent most of his life trying to fight the South African government, making little success, and ultimately being jailed for it. While attempting to escape, he was shot down and put back in his proper place. In 2009, he was old, poor, and was finally finished off by cancer.
Stephen Badrich
Stephen Page Badrich was the secretary and treasurer for PIR, and quite possibly Brandt's lover. The discovery of the address the two once shared lead many to question Brandt's sexual orientation. He has yet to comment.
Peter Scott
Peter Scott, looking a bit old.
Peter Dale Scott was an advisor for PIR. Most of his early life was spent writing the predecessors to emo poetry, but later turned into a self-described author of "deep politics". His books are about the government's agenda behind 9/11, and CIA activities they don't want you to know about. He rejects the label "conspiracy theorist".
Carl Oglesby was an advisor for PIR, and like all of Brandt's friends, is a writer, an activist, and a conspiracy theorist. He was head of Students for a Democratic Society (a semi-organized group of anti-Vietnam hippies) in the 60's. During his time with SDS, he gave a few speeches that made no impact on the war, and most likely took LSD. After being kicked out in 1969, he decided to live the rest of his life like it was still the late 60's and published several books about the JFK assassination.
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