Vengeance against Jennifer Lawrence
The fight between the hackers and the Hollywood celebrities has now moved beyond the iCloud Hacks, or so, it seems. Despite best efforts including threats to Google to remove photos leaked during the iCloud Hacks scandal, the hacker/s seem to be adamant on demeaning the Hollywood celebrities privacy in any which way. Jennifer Lawrence who was the victim of the first tranche of the iCloud Hacks leaks and featured in other parts as well has now been attacked on Wikipedia.
An unknown individual today defaced Jennifer Lawrence’s Wikipedia page by uploading one of the ‘NSFW’ pics that had been previously leaked during the now famous iCloud Hacks. As per news reports, an unknown individual who may be one of the iCloud hackers uploaded a NSFW pic on Wikipedia at 21:52 UTC on Tuesday.
Wikipedia Response
The said Wikipedia page showed the inappropriate content for about 20 minutes before the Wiki admin noticed something was amiss and the page was brought back to its original state with the original photo uploaded by Gage Skidmore from an appearance Lawrence made at Comic Con in 2013. The page was returned to its normal state after no less than 20 minutes. The reports further state that the anonymous uploader made two attempts to edit the Jennifer Lawrence Wiki page and publish the compromising image. His/her first attempt was more successful and lasted for 14 minutes before the image was deleted. The second attempt only lasted for about 4 minutes.
Wikipedia is one of the largest online knowledge resource base in the world and is referred to by almost everybody for knowledge and research. Though it is available for editing to anybody with a verified email, using it anonymously to debase the actress was uncalled for.
Wikipedia policy gives the Jennifer Lawrence Wiki page semi protection because of vandalism and hate speech activities and only confirmed editors can make changes as of now. As per Wikipedia, only those users with a Wikipedia account older than four days and made at least ten edits can make changes in the page as of now. The semi-protection has been set to expire on March 25, 2015. . Post the defacement, some legitimate edits users made today added some of the comments the actress made to Vanity Fair concerning the iCloud Hacks images she had taken for private use.
Sock Puppet
A Wikimedia Foundation representative explained to Kate Dries from Jezebel that the abuse was carried out by someone appearing as a legitimate editor but with multiple accounts set up particularly for improper use; this form of abuse (the general rule is “one editor, one account”) is called sock puppetry.
