Comment by tptacek
4 years ago
I did this for about 4 months for my own field (information security) and I was astonished by how much energy people would put in to keeping their vanity pages. There was a whole cluster of articles about a non-notable IT security person, their podcast, and their "hacking group", membership in which extended notability to all sorts of other random people. Somebody in the clique was friends with a particularly aggressive admin, which made it especially difficult to roll any of it back.
The German Wikipedia article on random/urandom still claims that entropy depletes and using urandom may allow an attacker to "calculate" the random numbers after the fact (whatever that means).
Several people tried to correct it, but since the article author considers the article "his", all discussion attempts were shut down (with gems like "the random number subsystem was programmed by T'so, so it doesn't matter what Torvalds says about the subject"), and all edit attempts were reverted as "vandalism".
This article will claim urandom to be insecure until eternity.
I mean, to be fair, that's a common belief in the industry as well! T'so held it as well!
I’m sure there’s a whole marketplace around “thought leader” promotion on Wikipedia.