User talk:AlexCypher/Archive 2019

Computer security and coruscan.com

Hi, AlexCypher. I reverted your recent edit of the computer security article, because it appears to be promotion of a pretty obscure website (and therefore of little citation value).

But looking more closely at your edit history, it looks like this is the second time that you've attempted to inject a link to this specific site into Computer security, and that of your three total substantial edit sets on the English Wikipedia, two of them had this purpose.

Also, looking at the Wayback Machine history for that site, it appears that the site first appeared on the Internet around the same time that you first linked to it (October 2018)

It also appears that user RickyGilb's only edits have been to add links to coruscan.com on other security-related pages. I've removed those links as well, on cyber self-defense and security awareness.

Most of these edits, by both users, are from around October 2018 - when coruscan.com seems to have originally appeared.

My concern is that there may be a WP:APPARENTCOI issue here. What is your relationship with RickyGilb and with coruscan.com? Royce (talk) 17:44, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Hi Royce. Your removals are unjustified and your accusations are unfounded. My contributions do not violate any Wikipedia rule.

1. You accuse me to be promotional. Every citation is, to some extent, promotional. By its own nature. If the reference I add is a company's page, I am, to some extent, promoting that company. If the reference is a paper, I am, to some extent, promoting the author of that paper.

That's normal. The point is: Is the reference relevant and helpful explaining or clarifying a concept? Is the reference opinion based or contains some evidence of what it states? You do not make any consideration about this.

2. Among all the references I added, what you removed is probably one of the the least "promotional" of all. The site you removed is not even a company, it's a project: it aims to improve security awareness by providing free resources like articles, graphs, tools, etc. for educational purposes.

3. You are accusing me of injecting links. May be you haven't realized that I am the author of a whole section in the Computer Security article and I "injected" all the links you find there, including the one you arbitrary removed. I restored the link because it helped to clarify the whole paragraph and I thought it was removed by mistake by some dumb bots.

4. You say: "the site first appeared on the Internet around the same time that you first linked to it (October 2018)".

You are wrong. The site is at least a couple of years older. Just look at the ICANN record and at when Google indexed the site. I'm surprised you use the Wayback machine as a reliable source for timing.

5. You accuse me to have relationships with other people citing the same sources. I don't, nor I have relationships with the sources themselves. I just cite what I believe is useful in supporting a claim, making sure the quality of the material is good enough.

On the other hand, I see you provide your own contributions under your real name (Royce Williams) despite Wikipedia discourages it, and you link also to your Twitter profile and to your business (techsolvancy.com). So you are promoting yourself on Wikipedia, and accusing others of being promotional. Do I need to remind you that Wikipedia is not about YOU?

But, reading what your interests are I understand why you so vehemently removed all the references to that page. You are a "password hashing enthusiast" as you say in your Twitter profile, and the page you removed provides evidence that shows how relevant the human component is, in cyber security. So, your whole work on password cracking depends on the end-user, on how unaware he/she is. If the user became more security-aware and decided to use strong passwords, your attempts to crack the hashes would simply fail. And the work you do would quickly become useless.

That's why you don't like that specific page. That's why you removed from Wikipedia not just my citation but all the references you could find, regardless who made them and why.

However, I will try to find an alternative citation for that paragraph, that hopefully won't bother you that much. In any case, I think your conduct, as an editor, is not appropriate and could even be abusive, considering how drastic your intervention has been (WP:CONDUCTDISPUTE). Not to mention the conflict of interest (WP:APPARENTCOI) between the work you do and the content you wiped out from Wikipedia.

Alex

AlexCypher (talk) 23:42, 23 December 2019 (UTC)

AlexCypher, it is possible that I jumped to the wrong conclusion. However, I believe that an independent review of the facts, conducted by a neutral and experienced third-party Wikipedian, would agree that the evidence so far supports my theory. I tried to present my case clearly and neutrally.

I agree that the Wayback Machine is not proof of site creation. It is, however, strongly correlated with site activity. Since literally no other site on the Internet links to coruscan.com (other than Wikipedia mirrors, and WHOIS and domain-registration summaries), I conclude that October 2018 represents a flurry of activity around coruscan.com that cannot be explained by any popularity of, or interest in, coruscan.com itself. In fact, it is mysterious to me how you - or anyone else - would have even heard of this site.

Your theory about a conflict of interest on my part is specious. My general editing history speaks for itself. I noticed your edit, and then noticed the pattern of the other edits, both yours and RickyGilb's; nothing more. If I was going to deceptively edit Wikipedia, there would be no reason to single out coruscan.com, because it seems unlikely that anyone (other than you and RickyGilb) would notice its absence.

Your attack on me using my real identity, and on my brief link to my own external page from my own user page, is also specious. By Wikipedia's own guidelines, a brief mention of external work is reasonable (and notably, I'm not injecting links to my site into general security articles). Also, using your own identity is perfectly acceptable. These arguments are distractions that are unrelated to this issue, and I encourage you to set them aside.

As to the lack of activity on my own talk pages, feel free to look at their entire history; it is an open book.

I have no experience with conflict resolution on Wikipedia, but if you believe that we should invoke an independent review of this issue, we can do so. I will cooperate fully. But to be very clear, I stand by my original assertion, which is that links to coruscan.com cannot be explained by notability, and that your editing history and that of RickyGilb - editing almost nothing for years, other than a single paragraph and links to coruscan.com (a site that the Internet appears to be totally unaware of in any way, and absent from any forum, site, link, or meaningful search result) - are consistent with self-promotion and with sock puppetry, respectively.

In other words, even if you and RickyGilb both happen to be innocent of any conflict of interest, then even solely on the test of notability alone, there is no reason to link to coruscan.com from Wikipedia.

To confirm, you are explicitly denying that you have any connection with coruscan.com, with what appears to be its principal owner (Pierfranco Fasola), or with user RickyGilb?

Royce (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

I concede that my mistake was to restore a link that had been removed. I now know that I shouldn't have. But I did it in good faith, thinking that some bot removed it automatically, without considering the content.

I also agree that I do not have a long editing history, but this is because I do not have the time for editing Wikipedia. Nor it is my intention to create a long editing history with one-click edits, reversing other people additions. But I do care about the few contributions I make, I try to make them accurate, decently written and with adequate references. It's already unusual for me spending so much time on this trivial issue, which does not bring any value to Wikipedia. And - as nobody else has ever bothered talking to you on Wikipedia in the last 8 years - I really wonder if I should spend my time replying to your comments. Probably not.

In any case, I'm not attacking you personally. What I am just saying is that you use Wikipedia for promoting yourself, and at the same time you're very quick accusing others of being promotional. That's all I am saying. Why you do not provide your contributions under a pseudonym as most of us do? Why do you use your real name, when Wikipedia discourages it? Because you want to promote yourself, obviously.

You quotes the guidelines, which do not forbid using real names, but you forget to quote what Wikipedia is not:

"Wikipedia is not a […] means of promotion[…] a vehicle for propaganda, advertising and showcasing. This applies to articles, categories, templates, talk page discussions, and user pages."

So, it does apply to user pages as well.

About the WayBack machine, you say: "It is, however, strongly correlated with site activity." You're wrong, again. It depends on whether the site allows bot access or not. It might be not correlated at all with site activity.

As for the sites that link to the resources I cite, I do not check them before making a citation. In any case you cannot check them as you do. That works only for the sites that do not have 301 redirects and fully allow crawlers.

As for the test of Notability I fully agree: "Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable". The citation I chose for the "human component" paragraph, contained inside third-party verifiable references that the reader could indeed verify. On the contrary, a magazine article often expresses the view of the author and do not always contain verifiable references inside. So, I believe the citations I chose to support my text would pass the Notability test, certainly the one you removed.

On the other hand, you bring up the Notability principle but you do not mention the Tautology principle, which basically states that if something is true and valid, and there evidence it is so, it remains true and valid regardless of who says it, or where it is said. On this account alone your compulsive removals of valuable content is questionable.

I am not saying that your intention is to "deceptively edit Wikipedia", I'm just saying that if something strongly goes against your interest and believes you don't think twice before wiping it out from Wikipedia. You did it once (in my case) and you probably have done it before with others. Again, I do not have the time to go though your contribution history to find where else you did that, but if I go through it, date by date, I'm sure I'd find elements to prove my point.

But the point I wanted to make with that paragraph, and the related citation, is that today the human component of cyber risk is huge, and there are many researches that support this claim. I know you do not like this, because you come from a very different perspective, but you won't be able to silent me nor others that write on Wikipedia about this. Nor you have the right to censor content that goes against your interests and personal beliefs.

When I wrote that section in the Computer Security article, and in particular the "human component" paragraph, I looked for a citation that could summarize all these researches in a kind of infograph, easy to understand. I did not find many, and I chose what I thought was the best one, which unfortunately got you upset to the point to chase that page all across Wikipedia to have it removed.

Anyway, I have found a new citation for the "human factor" paragraph, in the End-User section that might be a good replacement for the one you don't like. It's easy to read, contains some references inside, and summarizes quite well the point.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3504813/the-human-factor-of-cyber-security.html

Needless to say, I do not have any relationship with that resource.

In the next few days, should I not find anything better, I'll probably add this reference to that paragraph. Should you remove that too, I wont spend any other time finding another one. I have a life, it's not my intention to waste it fighting with you over a citation.

If you don't like it I would appreciate if you spend your time (not mine) finding a better one.

That would be a real contribution to Wikipedia.

AlexCypher (talk) 18:47, 27 December 2019 (UTC)