Wikipedia launches 'sockpuppet' probe into edit-for-pay users

CBC News Posted: Oct 26, 2013 2:38 PM ET Last Updated: Oct 26, 2013 2:38 PM ET

The non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia is investigating claims that as many as 12,000 pages appearing on the free encyclopedia website have been edited by a public relations firm.

Wiki-PR sells itself as "the easy way to accurately tell your story on Wikipedia" and claims to know enough about the rules governing the free online encyclopedia to prevent administrators from reversing its edits.

The Wikimedia Foundation recently suspended more than 250 alleged "sockpuppet" user accounts, named for a style of marketing that specializes in reputation management, and suspected of manipulating Wikipedia pages for a price — although it's not clear if these accounts are associated with Wiki-PR.

For the most part, anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, but additions or changes tend to be published or approved by a group of administrators.

U.S.-based Wiki-PR offers to create, edit and manage pages on Wikipedia, and media reports say it's getting around the administrators.

For more on this story, listen to the Day 6 interview with freelance journalist Simon Owens, who has been writing about Wiki-PR for the Daily Dot.

October 26: There's Gold in Them Thar Trees Oct. 25, 2013 5:02 PM They say that money doesn't grow on trees. But it appears that gold does. Scientists in Australia have discovered gold particles in the leaves of eucalyptus trees that grow above gold deposits. And they might provide a natural detection system for mining companies.

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New environmental review rules anger oilsands critics

Many oilsands projects will not have their potential environmental impacts reviewed by the federal government under updated rules announced today, environmentalists warn.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency released lists Friday outlining changes to the types of resource development and infrastructure projects that will routinely require a federal environmental assessment. The federal review is intended to look at possible environmental impacts under federal jurisdiction, such as impacts on waterways or greenhouse gas emissions.

One concern that environmentalists have with the new rules is they won't require environmental reviews for a growing type of oilsands development.

In-situ oilsands developments — projects where the oil is melted directly out of the ground rather than being mined and then processed later — were not specifically addressed in the previous list of projects requiring federal environmental assessments, said Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign coordinator and energy policy analyst for the environmental group Greenpeace. And now, they are not included in the new list of projects requiring them.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency's announcement lists the types of projects that once required a federal environmental assessment that no longer do, including:

Groundwater extraction facilities.Heavy oil and oilsands processing facilities, pipelines (other than offshore pipelines) and electrical transmission lines that are not regulated by the National Energy Board.Potash mines and other industrial mineral mines (salt, graphite, gypsum, magnesite, limestone, clay, asbestos).Industrial facilities (pulp mills, pulp and paper mills, steel mills, metal smelters, leather tanneries, textile mills and facilities for the manufacture of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pressure-treated wood, particle board, plywood, chemical explosives, lead-acid batteries and respirable mineral fibres).

The government also released a list of projects that did not specifically require a federal environmental assessment before but now do, including:

Diamond mines. Apatite mines.Railway yards; international and interprovincial bridges and tunnels.Bridges that cross the St. Lawrence Seaway.Offshore exploratory wells.Oil sands mine expansions.

The government said the changes were made so that the agency’s work is focused on “major projects” that have the “greatest potential” to generate negative environmental impacts under federal jurisdiction, such as impacts on waterways, and other projects would not be “unduly burdened” with extra work.

A leak at the Primrose Lake oilsands project had released an estimated 1.5 million litres of bitumen into the environment as of the end of September. (Reuters)

The federal government heard from a wide range of stakeholders, including industry and environmental groups, before deciding what would be covered under the new rules.

Stewart said that while the government acknowledged environmental groups’ concerns, it did not make changes based on those concerns.

Most notably, he said Greenpeace is concerned about the lack of routine environmental assessments of in-situ oilsands developments. He noted that this type of project is the source of a huge bitumen leak Northern Alberta. As of the end of September, the leak near Cold Lake had already released 1.5 million litres of bitumen – a mixture of oilsands, heavy crude and water into the environment. The Alberta government has ordered the project operator, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., to drain two-thirds of a lake in an effort to stop the leak.

Stewart said 80 per cent of known oilsands deposits are so deep that they are only accessible with in-situ technology.

"Yesterday, Environment Canada released report which projected that by 2020, this type of oilsands development will be generating more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the Maritime provinces put together today,” he added.

“They’re exempting themselves from environmental oversight over what’s going to be the biggest source of new pollution in the country in coming decades.”

The group that represents oilsands producers said developments will still face provincial environmental reviews.

“The province still has a mandate to do an assessment, so this eliminates two layers of doing the same thing — the provincial government will still do its review and it will be equally as comprehensive,” said Geraldine Anderson from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 

While acknowledging that provincial environmental assessments will still be required for some projects, Stewart calls the permitting process for in-situ oilsands development in Alberta “a rubber stamp.”

In 2012, the federal government announced a major overhaul of the federal environmental assessment program, introducing fixed timelines for major projects and reducing the number of departments and agencies that can do environmental reviews from 40 to just three.

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Montreal IT firm promises to fix Obamacare website woes

The Canadian-owned company responsible for a major part of the troubled Obamacare website faced tough questions at a hearing on Capitol Hill today and promised to fix the ongoing problems as soon as possible but couldn’t say when the site would be running smoothly.

“I have a team of people working around the clock,” Cheryl Campbell, senior vice-president of CGI Federal, testified at the Energy and Commerce Committee. “The system is improving day over day, we are continuing to work to make improvements.”

CGI Federal is a U.S. subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc., and is one of the primary contractors that helped design healthcare.gov, the website that got a rocky launch on Oct.1. The website allows uninsured Americans to shop for health insurance, check if they are eligible for federal subsidies and to enrol in a plan. It’s a signature piece of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

The website crashed on the first day and various bugs in the system have prevented some users from logging on, creating user accounts and registering for plans.

Campbell and representatives from three other contractors involved in the new online insurance marketplace got a grilling from frustrated members of Congress who demanded to know what went wrong and when it would be fixed.

Campbell said there is no “silver bullet” explanation for why the website isn’t working properly, that a combination of factors is contributing to the website's dysfunction.

She noted that another contractor, QSSI, is responsible for the “front door” into the system that her company is responsible for – the actual marketplace – and that QSSI's technology created a “bottleneck” that prevented users from creating an account.

Andrew Slavitt, QSSI’s executive vice-president, acknowledged to the committee that the system was initially overwhelmed because of “unexpected demand” but that additional capacity has now been added and it's working much better.

He said there was a decision made late in the process to require users to create an account before window shopping that affected the system’s capacity. That decision was made by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the department responsible for implementing the online insurance marketplace, Campbell added.

Each company testified that they tested their own portions of the system in advance and were confident they were ready to go by Oct.1. The end-to-end testing, making sure all the different parts worked together as one system, was only done two weeks before the website went live, the committee heard.

“It would have been better to have more time,” Campbell admitted while emphasizing that CMS was responsible for the overall testing.  “We would have loved to have had months.” She also said it was not her company’s decision to go ahead on Oct.1 with the website, CMS made that call.

Campbell said she doesn’t believe the website needs to be taken down and started again from scratch. She’s confident the problems will be fixed. She couldn’t say when exactly the website will be running perfectly but expects it to be working smoothly by Dec.15. That’s the deadline for when people have to sign up in order for the coverage plans they buy to begin Jan.1.

Thursday's hearing was the first one the committee has held on the website's problems. Members wanted Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human resources, to appear but she said she couldn't make it and will testify next week instead. Her department oversees CMS. Some members of Congress have called for her resignation because of the embarrassing rollout of the website.

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Coyotes are moose killers, study finds

The researchers found the remains of moose killed by coyotes by visiting sites where the coyotes spent more than three hours. (John Benson)

Coyotes may not have as fearsome a reputation as wolves, but a new study shows they are sometimes just as capable of hunting down and killing adult moose.

A study published Thursday in the Canadian Journal of Zoology documented four confirmed cases between January 2009 and January 2010 in which different packs of coyotes or coyote-wolf hybrids killed adult moose in an area west of Ontario’s Algonquin Park.

In one case, the moose — a 20-month old female that was likely more than 200 kilograms — was brought down by a pack of just two coyotes.

“That was impressive,” acknowledged John Benson, lead author of the report, who conducted the research while he was a graduate student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont.

On the other hand, he said, it’s not really surprising, since it’s known that when packs of wolves attack a moose, most of the work is done by only one or two individuals.

Prior to the study, most scientists had assumed that coyotes don’t kill moose, said Benson, who was unable to find any documented cases of coyotes killing adult moose, although they had been previously known to kill calves..

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources lists a coyote's diet as mainly rabbits, hares and deer in the winter and “small” mammals, wild berries, birds, amphibians and grasshoppers in the summer.

However, Benson, who is now a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, suspected coyotes around Algonquin Park might be capable of bringing down adult moose. In that area, the coyotes are large, the wolves are small and relatively rare (making up only seven per cent of the joint wolf-coyote population), and about 30 per cent of the joint wolf-coyote population are hybrids. In addition, some known coyote packs have hunting territories where there are lots of moose and very few deer.

Benson had the chance to test his hypothesis during a project to research the habits of coyote-wolf hybrids. As part of the project, Benson and Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources wildlife researcher Brent Patterson trapped coyotes and coyote-wolf hybrids from 10 different packs and placed GPS tracking collars on them — a task that wasn’t easy.

“They’re incredibly smart so you have to be incredibly careful,” Benson recalled. “We’d boil the traps to remove all the [human] scent. We never touch them with bare hands. You basically try to make the area look exactly the way it did when you found it. Still, sometimes they sort of sense that something is wrong and don’t get trapped.”

Once the animals had been equipped, if the GPS showed they spent more than three hours in a given area, it was a sign that they may have made a kill, and the researchers went to see what the kill was.

In addition to the four confirmed wolf kills, there were another five cases where moose appeared to have been killed by coyotes or hybrids, but that couldn’t be confirmed. While three out of the four packs that made the confirmed kills contained at least one coyote-wolf hybrid, Benson said that wasn't enough evidence to say whether the hybrids are more likely than coyotes to kill moose.

This eastern coyote hybrid killed an adult moose in central Ontario with his mate (an eastern coyote) and their three pups. Three out of the four confirmed moose kills were by coyote packs that included at least one hybrid. (John Benson)

It's unlikely that coyotes are making much of a dent in the moose population, the researchers reported. For one thing, all the adult moose that the coyotes killed were either inexperienced young adults between one and two years old or very old moose (more than 20 years old). In addition, a moose-tracking study taking place in the same area and at the same time as the coyote-tracking study showed that the moose population is actually growing.

Benson said he would be most interested to see whether the coyotes in Ontario are unusual or whether those in other parts of North America also kill moose.

One question raised by the findings is whether humans ought to fear coyotes the way we fear the “big, bad wolf.”

Benson points out that coyotes and wolves avoid humans whenever possible — one of the things that made trapping them very challenging.

“It’s good to have a healthy respect and fear, when you’re out in the woods, of any wild animals,” he said. “But it’s rare that a wolf or coyote attacks a human. So I don’t think our finding here really changes that a whole lot.”

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3D printer items seized in U.K. might belong to printer, not gun

Police thought they'd made a major discovery, but they may have jumped the gun.

British officers said Friday they had seized what appeared to be gun components made on a 3D printer — then, hours later, cast doubt on the find after technology experts said photos released by police appeared to be of parts for the printer itself.

The Greater Manchester Police force initially said officers found what appeared to be a plastic magazine and trigger, along with a 3D printer, in a raid targeting criminal gangs.

The force said forensic specialists were examining the parts "to establish if they could construct a genuine device."

Police said that if the gun were viable it would be the first such seizure in Britain.

After some observers pointed out that the images released by police resembled printer parts, the force toned down its language, saying detectives were attempting to "establish exactly what these parts can be used for and whether they pose any threat."

"We need to be absolutely clear that at that this stage, we cannot categorically say we have recovered the component parts for a 3D gun," said Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood.

"What we have seized are items that need further forensic testing by national ballistics experts to establish whether they can be used in the construction of a genuine, viable firearm. "

After police released photos of the items like the one above, which they originally said was a 3D printed gun clip, some people expressed doubt that they were gun components, saying instead that they resembled parts of the actual 3D printer. (Greater Manchester Police/Associated Press)

A man was arrested for questioning and then released. He told Britain's Press Association news agency that he owned the premises raided by police — a model shop — and used the 3D printer to make plastic decorations and models. He said the suspected gun magazine was a spool holder and the "trigger" was another printer part.

Earlier this year a Texas company said it had successfully test-fired a handgun created with a 3D printer, and posted blueprints for the weapon online. Such printers can be paired with a home computer to manufacture objects using layers of high-density plastic.

Authorities worry the technology could allow anyone to manufacture guns that would pass unnoticed through metal detectors.

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