What’s wrong with BoycottNovell? An example of selective quoting and misinformation

People often ask what’s wrong with BoycottNovell (recently rebranded as “TechRights” to seem less negative, if that makes any sense). Often in sites like Reddit, Slashdot, Digg or Mixx, a link will be posted to the blog and invariably most people will react negatively. This isn’t surprising since the editor (for lack of a better term) and his collaborators are known to have gamed these websites extensively, so there’s always a latent perception of spamming and shilling coming from there. People will post comments like “oh no, it’s boycott novell again”, “who the hell voted|modded this up” and so on. Some people though will sometimes ask what’s wrong with BoycottNovell, and that’s hard to express in a single comment, especially without some supporting evidence.

So I will use an article published very recently to exemplify one of the myriad problems this blog has. This is fair, as the editor, Roy Schestowitz, (it’s actually Doctor Roy now, apparently) continually complains that people point to his past mistakes to “daemonise” him unfairly; one assumes that he has a determination to make his considerable output better over time, rather than worse. While there are hundreds of examples like this one available for topics like the XBox, Kinect, Windows 7, the Gates Foundation, Novell, etc, I refrained from using any that are too old (as in more than six months or so). In the name of fairness. Another common complaint is that, paraphrasing, people “can’t refute/rebut the facts so they shoot the messenger”. Fair enough, we’ll take the facts on here as well.

The article in question is a comparison between the sales of the competing console controllers Sony Playstation Move and Microsoft Kinect. It was published on January 12, 2011 and is titled Sony Beats KINect Despite Massive Marketing Campaign From Microsoft. It can be found here. Note the clever SEO play of the URL: “kinect-vs-move-and-truth”. Truth. Since it’s relatively short, I’ll go through it by paragraph.

As we advance through the article and my comments, please keep in mind that the author here is absolutely serious about what he’s writing. This isn’t a throwaway post; it was dented, tweeted, posted to newsgroups and Free Software Daily (and perhaps other places, incessantly) it will be added to his “Reality log” anthology and referred to as supporting material in the future, just as he has done for the past four years. Once these posts are examined closely and disassembled they tend to look rather ridiculous and banal, so please bear with me.

We begin with the title: Kinect is camel-cased as KINect to make the case that the console controller is somehow related to the failed line of mobile phones pulled from the market last year by Microsoft. When reading BoycottNovell you’ll find that they have their own strange creative spelling arcana that is often difficult to understand. For example, Dr. Roy calls Windows 7 “Vista 7”, presumably to tie the Vista OS, which didn’t do too well, to its successor, which did. He prophesied the absolute failure of Windows 7 long before it was released, and the use of the “Vista 7” thing was part of that campaign. Other examples of creative spelling include things like “MoonLie” for Moonlight, “SilverLie” for Silverlight, “AttachMSFT” for AttachMate (presumably because Dr. Roy had predicted that Microsoft would acquire Novell, which ended up not being the case). Then there’s “Vista 7 Phony” for Windows 7 Phone, “iHype” for the iPad and “iPhony” for the iPhone. Among many others. These childish monikers are not jokes; they are used solemnly and consistently throughout the blog.

The article body opens with the usual clever image, a sort of LCD snapshot that spells the word “End”. A practitioner of PR techniques, Dr. Roy uses that as a sort of statement to reinforce his message that whatever it is he’s talking about, it’s coming to an end. Marshall McLuhan, eat your heart out.

Next up is the summary:

Not even a massive marketing campaign and fake shortages could help Microsoft against its competition

We’ll come back to this in a minute. Next (note the original links in the quotes are preserved):

On Friday the third of December (2010), Sony announced that it had sold 4.1 million Move controllers. That is not bad for a product that has only been out in the market for two months and with hardly any marketing at all.

First, note the “not bad…” part – this is sufficient cause for Dr. Roy to label anyone a “booster” if it was being said about a Microsoft product.

Moving on, a quick Google search of “kinect devices sold” reveals some rather amazing sales figures. Microsoft claimed back in November that they sold 1 million Kinects in 10 days after release. Most of the articles I found reference Reuters, who are a bit more careful and clearly attribute the numbers to Microsoft. And then more recently we find articles that quote Ballmer at CES on January 6 saying he’s pushed 8 million units since its introduction in November.

Even Goldman Sachs upgraded MSFT based partly on the Kinect numbers (and their overall performance over the holidays), although they maintained the neutral rating, which makes sense. Of course Dr. Roy only informs people when Microsoft gets downgraded by someone.

I do not know if these figures are true or not. I don’t know if Microsoft refers to units shipped or actually sold, not all of the sources are clear about that. More to the point, perhaps it’s not wise to trust Microsoft to tell us how many of X and Y they’ve sold, but there you go.

But here’s the thing. A cursory look at the source being quoted by Dr. Roy reveals that it merely repeats Sony’s own sales figures. It is also dated December 3rd of last year. Now, it’s only fair that if we are supposed to trust Sony to tell us how many controllers they’ve sold since release, then we should also trust Microsoft when they say how many controllers they’ve sold as well. No? Conspicuously absent from this and all the other articles I could find about the Kinect on BoycottNovell are any direct references to Kinect unit sales. This is also fair -- no one expects Dr. Roy or anyone else to blindly repeat Microsoft’s own sales figures. But since Dr. Roy is a model of consistency and honesty, it’s rather strange to see he is using sales figures from other corporations to support the idea that Kinect is selling less gadgets than them. Well, actually not even that since he never actually quotes any figures for the Kinect therein, he merely notes that the advertising campaign has been “expensive” and that the Kinect supply was hit by what he calls “fake shortages”:

Microsoft’s marketing campaign for Kinect on the other is said to have cost half a billion dollars^*, only to lead to fake KINect shortages.

Saying that Microsoft spending money advertising Kinect leads to nothing more than shortages (fake or otherwise) is rather strange. In any case, Sony apparently launched a £2M campaign for its controller, and that’s just in the UK. Dr. Roy simplistically believes his source and agrees with the conclusion that Microsoft will spend half a billion dollars promoting the Kinect, which is just further proof that he doesn’t understand how any of this works. If anyone has any doubts about that, please read his various analysis on Microsoft financial reports. They’re hilarious.But let’s think about this for a second. In this previous article, Dr. Roy repeats the $500M idiocy (what else does one call it?):

On we move to KINect. Those who believe the $500,000,000 (estimate) marketing campaign may actually have fallen for the illusion of KINect 'success'.

BoycottNovell math: Take Microsoft’s total advertising budget for a given fiscal year, which is reported in aggregate but obviously spread across all their business units and products. Pretend they have only two products: Kinect and WP7. Finally, divide by two. Genius! This is PhD stuff right here.

Aside from being simply dishonest, since I can’t believe he is so daft as to not notice the obvious lack of logic in the argument yet uses it liberally, the whole advertising budget thing is a fallacy of relevance, a form of special pleading. Declare the product a failure, then make a big deal at the fact that the company spent $X advertising it. Double whammy and golf claps all around.

Moving on. I’ll skip the next paragraph, which merely repeats the shortage thing again, framing it in obviously biased opinion (despite that fact that, again, this article will be used as a supporting fact-based reference later). But we finally get to the reason for mentioning the shortages:

Claiming a product has or is on the brink of selling out is often a last-ditch strategic move to establish the false perception of high demand.

Ah. Obviously since we all know that the Kinect (and the Xbox itself) are failures as Dr. Roy has consistently claimed, then it’s clear that the shortages are nothing more than a clever cover-up attempt by Microsoft.

Next:

Despite Microsoft’s expensive manufactured hype […] “Playstation Move is Outselling Kinect”, according to this report

I suppose most hype is manufactured, but Microsoft is hardly alone in that area anyway. The linked report has the same problem as the first one: It also quotes Sony’s numbers, and is dated November 30th of last year. Again, we’re supposed to trust Sony, and merely assume that Microsoft has sold less units by now, despite the fact that no Microsoft sales figures are provided by Dr. Roy in the article. Which in any case would be dismissed as fake. Unlike Sony’s, eh?

It’s also hard to overstate the hypocrisy of using that particular source, since Dr. Roy and his friends are known to dismiss other websites and blogs based on the least minutiae,such as the fact that they use ASP.NET, for example. I’m not kidding. Do we expect PS3 Informer then to be particularly trustworthy when informing us about the fortunes of a product that competes directly with the Kinect? If previous behavior at BoycottNovell is any indication, if it had been related to Microsoft in any way it would have been dismissed offhand as nothing more than “shills” or “boosters”.

So, despite the dramatic article title, snide summary and biased opinions, at this point we have nothing more than two 2-month old articles that merely repeat Sony’s sales figures, invalid assertions about the cost of advertising, references to shortages, and a claim that said shortages are merely a way for Microsoft to mask disappointing sales, whose volume is never even actually mentioned.

It’s important to point out the modus operandi at BoycottNovell. Dr. Roy canvasses Google News and god knows how many blogs and website feeds every day of every week, selects the most appropriately negative samples, and uses them for his daily posting grind. Since he gets notifications when someone at Microsoft sells their house (yep, you read that right), it’s difficult to imagine that he somehow missed the news of Ballmer’s alleged sales numbers from PC Magazine or any other tech rag. So it’s likely that this article was (rather badly) crafted specifically in response to that.

The next paragraph goes into the shortage angle again, because it was mentioned by the previous Sony-friendly reference:

This persisted whilst [sic] illusion of limited supply for high demand was pushed by some blogs around Black Friday, but Michael Pachter, an expert in this area, insists that it must be fake.

Amusingly, Dr. Roy reproduces a quote from the linked article, which notes that the Sony Move has also been affected by “fake shortages”. So he uses the shortages argument against Microsoft, despite the fact that Sony seems to be guilty of the same thing. You can’t make this stuff up. Remember, in lieu of quoting Microsoft sales numbers, Dr. Roy merely tells us that they can’t be any good to begin with, if Sony Corporation says theirs are better and they were preceded by fake shortages and lots of advertising.

Then we have some faux indignation filler:

Microsoft was hiring celebrities to perform at stores so that many articles littered with famous names were generated as a result.

Corporations advertise their products. Hiring celebrities. And then that makes it on to the internets. What is the world coming to?

It is increasingly becoming apparent that Microsoft can only provide expensive and gimmickry [sic] marketing campaigns rather than substantial products.

Well, again, if we believe Sony’s own sales figures then we must believe Microsoft’s sales figures as well, which certainly don’t look like they are the weak results of a gimmicky campaign, but rather of something that seems to be selling. No?

The article finally closes with this:

It would be interesting what kind of marketing Microsoft would create for software patent lawsuits.

Anyway.

To summarize:

• Sony has sold more controller gadgets than Microsoft. The source of this fact is none other than Sony themselves.
• Both Sony and Microsoft allegedly had product shortages, but this is relevant only in the sense that they are a smokescreen for Microsoft, who are obviously not selling as many gadgets as Sony. Or rather, as many as Sony says they’re selling.
• Hype over a Microsoft product is manufactured, while hype over Sony is absolutely not.
• Microsoft’s Kinect advertising is expensive, Sony’s apparently not, or at least it’s not a negative in Sony’s case. Because their gadget is a resounding success, whereas Microsoft’s is a failure.
• Corporations advertise products. Sometimes they use celebrities for this. When Microsoft do that, it’s a gimmick.
• People who praise Microsoft are “boosters”, people who praise Sony are not.
• Sony Corporation should be trusted implicitly.
• There is no such thing as fake numbers or months-old information when one has to fill the daily post quota.

Facts? That’s for the peasants. Let them eat links.

For completeness, I went back to see what BoycottNovell had been publishing about the Kinect. As promised, no more than 6 months or so in the past. Some of the older articles about the XBox 360 are just hilarious in the stern seriousness of their apocalyptic predictions and hyperbolic claims. But here’s a sampling of the most recent ones that reference this Kinect thingy:

http://techrights.org/2010/08/08/kinect-fails/
Microsoft's KINect is the next KIN-Like Disaster (and Why Kinect Patents Are All That's Left)

“It is an overpriced (and over-marketed) piece of of junk which is disliked by many in the media before it’s even launched.”
”Truth be told, the mangers of such projects have left the company. They named "Kinect" (or "Natal") as something that might actually succeed, but it doesn't look like it”

http://techrights.org/2010/08/13/goodbye-to-the-xbox/
Failure of Microsoft’s KINect Could Kill Xbox 360

“Last week we showed that "KINect" may end up in Microsoft’s pile of dead products, just like KIN. “KINect” (formerly known as “Natal” but rebranded tactlessly) has been receiving bad reviews and it’s the only thing capable of saving the Xbox brand”
”As argued by Goblin from OpenBytes”

Note the “last week we showed” bit. Opinions magically become facts. As well as references to his friends’ blogs, which enjoy even less credibility, if that is at all possible.

http://techrights.org/2010/08/19/kinect-made-even-worse/
Microsoft is Already Down-Speccing KINect, Loses an Exclusive

”Based on recent coverage [1, 2], Microsoft’s KINect is likely to become somewhat of a failure, maybe as much of a failure as KIN although that's hard to beat.”

“Recent coverage” == the stuff he said last week.

http://techrights.org/2010/09/08/games-management-exodus/
Microsoft's Director of Game Platform Strategy Quits, Could Further Pollute Amazon

”Xbox 360 is a lost cause and this departure helps support this claim. Given the shoddy hardware (now downgraded) and bad demos of Kinect, there is no imminent turnaround.”

http://techrights.org/2010/09/21/defective-overhyped-kinect/
Microsoft KINect Has Problems and It’s Behind the Competition (Buttonless)

“Microsoft says it expects Kinect sales to top 3 million units by the end of the year, but that's just nonsense because they usually end up missing their optimistic targets/projections, which are intended to be self-fulfilling prophecies.”

“Sony takes jab at Microsoft, says 360 is reliant’ on shooters,”argues one gamers’ site amongst others. Unlike One Of Our Competitors, We Don't Rely On Shooters is another angle. A New Sony Website Jabs At Microsoft's Kinect”

Of special note here is the quoting of Playstation- and Sony-friendly blogs… imagine if someone did the same with Microsoft-friendly sources.

http://techrights.org/2010/11/10/losing-money-on-kinect/
KINect’s Fate Could be Similar to KIN's

More convenient quotes from his friends and clever "questions" as to whether the thing will even be released, and will Microsoft make any money on it? Stay tuned!

http://techrights.org/2011/01/06/failed-business-in-hardware/
Microsoft's Hardware Ventures an Embarrassment

“On we move to KINect. Those who believe the $500,000,000 (estimate) marketing campaign may actually have fallen for the illusion of KINect 'success'.”

This is the same article referenced above in regard to the advertising budget thing. Here, Dr. Roy actually quotes a Sony employee badmouthing the Kinect. When Microsoft does that, it’s “libel” and “smears”. And a quote by collaborator “Goblin” of course. A well-known expert in the gaming industry.

It’s hard for me to understand how someone can spend so much time and energy raging over a $150 gadget for a gaming console that they’ve never or will ever use. It’s just mind boggling. Even scarier is the tone of solemn, absolute certainty used in most of these articles.

And hey, just to pour a bit of salt on the wound, let’s see what Dr. Roy has published in the past about Sony, just in case someone thinks he’s always been a big fan and it’s fine to quote their employees and “boosters” when they talk smack about the competition:

http://techrights.org/2009/01/23/sony-is-astroturfing-busted/
Quick Mention: Sony is AstroTurfing, Just Like Microsoft
”Makers of exploding batteries and deadly CD-ROM DRM are still up to no good.”

http://techrights.org/2010/09/17/astroturf-as-common/
Symantec, Warner and Sony Music Are AstroTurfing in Blogs, Just Like Novell and Microsoft

http://techrights.org/2010/03/29/bait-and-switch/
Links 29/3/2010: Sony’s Bait and Switch

http://techrights.org/2008/01/14/sony-patent-standard/
Sony Battled by Patent, Battles Against Standards

At BoycottNovell, they report and you decide.

Dr. Roy is quite adept at manufacturing innovative angles to use against the targets of his sophomoric rage, and these are invariably presented as well-researched, fact-filled and supposedly balanced articles. The reality is obviously quite different, once a little attention is paid. Which is rather amusing because he’s always reminding us to beware of nasty people and organizations that publish articles which omit information (like sales figures from the other side?), present a too-rosy picture of the situation (“not bad for a product…”) or don’t actually analyze the sources they’re quoting (Sony claims they sold lotsa gadgets and fan sites repeated that, news at 11).

One can take this level of analysis and apply it to almost everything published in BoycottNovell, and 9 times out of 10 Dr. Roy will come out on the wrong side of reality. I have no doubt whatsoever of that. Of course, good luck getting much done, the blog has a rather high grind rate. By the time you’re done analyzing an article published on Tuesday and push it on Wednesday, Dr. Roy has already slogged through 20 more. Of course, he doesn’t need to check facts, that would be too ghetto. Or for that matter, face up to the fact that the vast majority of what he writes is nothing more than badly researched and heavily editorialized opinion. Usually sourced from the same 4 different sites run by his friends.

Where are you getting your information and opinion from? I hope it’s not BoycottNovell. Perhaps it’s time to reassess the validity of some of the other things they say there, especially the systematic attacks on people and projects in the FOSS community that fail to meet their ideological standards.

(Disclaimers: I don’t own an XBox, a Kinect, a Playstation or a Move controller. In fact I don’t play anything more complex than FreeCell. I don’t have a long or short position on MSFT or SNE, not even on my 401K. I do like to dance in the rain, pet small rabbits and eat cheezy puffs)

^“As a scientist..._„

– 2009-06-01

^“ pages in BN don't lie ... File corrections if you find mistakes _„

– 2009-06-06

Just another day at BoycottNovell

Can't sleep, MicroClown will
eat me

Summary: Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, Mushroom, Mushroom... Snake! Microsoft, Microsoft...

An analysis and visualization of 24 hours (roughly) worth of activity flowing forth from the proprietor of boycottnovell.com. Items are listed in reverse (newer to older) chronological order as they appear in feeds, Google Groups, etc.

^“ ...easy/Like Sunday morning... _„

– The Commodores

Blog ¶

I'd assume each of these consume between thirty or forty minutes, on average. The size in bytes was calculated by simply pasting the text into an editor and counting the characters, so it's relevant only in the aggregate sense, I suppose. If the post includes a clever quote by Stallman for example (or an evil one by Bill Gates) it still takes time to select it, paste it, etc. Most posts also have the usual completely unrelated image at the top, so that needs to be selected and so on.

#18 is the daily "links" post ^[1], and must take a significant amount of time due to the way links are classified. #20 technically does not count as content, obviously, but as parallel time spent on IRC (see further below). #23 is just embedding (although again, everything takes time).

It's possible obviously that some of these were drafted previous to the day they were published, but time is time, regardless of which day it happens to be wasted invested in.

	Title	Link		Size (bytes)
1	Patents Roundup: More Resources In Re Bilski	11/16/bilski-case-resources/	News, blogs, and video about the Bilski case	3,571
2	Microsoft Sued Again for Patent Violation, Settles with Former Softie, as Before	11/16/swpat-msft-sued-by-former-employee/	Another Microsoft lawsuit starts; another case of Microsoft settling after being sued by former employees for patent violations	1,502
3	Revisionism from Microsoft's Partner, Likewise	11/16/server-room-revisionism/	An example of disinformation about history being spread by those to whom open, royalty-free standards are a foe	4,377
4	Xbox 360 (Live) Users Banned, Buyers Flee	11/16/microsoft-customers-permanently-banned/	Almost one million customers of Microsoft are permanently banned and sales of Xbox 360 drop considerably	4,577
5	Windows, Cisco Do Not Support Vista 7 [sic]	11/16/microsoft-cisco-vista-7-support/	Not just Cisco but Microsoft Windows Mobile too is proving to be problematic for Vista 7 [sic] users	1,425
6	Microsoft DRM Cracked Within Hours	11/16/windows-marketplace-crack/	Windows Marketplace has its copy protection mechanism broken almost immediately; future of Windows Mobile seems grim	1,538
7	Confirmed: Vista 7 [sic] Fails to Sell PCs, Mostly Replaces Vista	11/16/most-expensive-service-pack-ever/	Vista 7 [sic] turns out to be the most expensive service pack ever; Sales do not proceed as hoped and planned, reveal reports from the mainstream press	3,718
8	Microsoft Won't Secure Firefox/Chrome Users, Shows More Negligence	11/16/microsoft-onecare-activex/	ActiveX required by Microsoft's OneCare; investigation into Vista 7 [sic] vulnerabilities a case of "too little, too late"	4,149
9	Microsoft's Use of Bribes for Search, Only 4% of Microsoft/Razorfish Clients Used Microsoft Search	11/16/microsoft-search-disaster/	Microsoft's attempt to just buy market share meets barriers; Highly damaging truths about Razorfish customers are revealed	3,160
10	GNU/Linux, Google, and Apple Transform Microsoft; Seattle Mayor's Office May Ditch Windows	11/16/msft-market-losses-persist/	How Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself in the face of new reality; losses persist regardless	2,494
11	Microsoft Pays comScore More Money, Gets Bogus Endorsements	11/16/award-and-outcome-comscore/	Award and outcome - new case study courtesy of Microsoft and comScore	3,723
12	More Marshall Projects (MoU), This Time in China	11/16/cht-exclusion-of-competition/	The Marshall Law of Microsoft comes to CHT, more attempts at exclusion of competition are noted	1,812
13	OpenSUSE 11.2 is Open to Microsoft Lawsuits Because of Mono	11/16/opensuse-non-ms-ecma-parts/	OpenSUSE 11.2 (GNOME) has Mono installed by default, including non-ECMA parts like Winforms	932
14	Bill, Nathan, Steve, and Other Con Artists	11/16/elitist-critique/	People's assorted perspectives on Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs	1,616
15	Reader's Article: Corporate Media Ownership Shifts	11/16/corporate-media-ownership-shifts/	Media channels that Microsoft is associated with to get acquired by Microsoft's partner, Comcast	3,560
16	Why Are Critics of Criminal Activity Portrayed as "Bad Guys"?	11/16/love-thy-criminals/	Analysis of a culture where those who believe in the law are being discouraged and daemonised	3,990
17	Survey: Vista 7 [sic] Disliked by Sub-notebooks Buyers, GNU/Linux Emerges as a Winner	11/16/customers-reject-vista-7/	As expected, customers reject Vista 7 [sic] Starter Edition and Microsoft is restructuring for coming change	3,631
18	Links 16/11/2009: New HPC Figures, ZevenOS 2.0 Released	11/16/new-hpc-figures/		(n/a)
19	Power of GNU/Linux in One's Hand (Video)	11/16/pyacceleremoter/	An accelerometer-based remote controller for mplayer on GNU/Linux machines.	(n/a)
20	IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: November 16th, 2009	11/16/irc-log-16112009/		(n/a)
21	What Microsoft Does to GNU/Linux in Russian Schools	11/16/russia-linux-retaliation/	As Russia prepares to move to GNU/Linux Microsoft is sitting on its veins [6]	1,662
22	Apple is Too Hot, Microsoft Can Leave the Internet Flat	11/16/marvels-of-proprietary-software/	A reminder of the marvels of shiny proprietary software and hardware	1,105
23	Eben Moglen (SFLC) Explains Genesis of Intellectual Monopoly	11/16/genesis-of-patents/	Eben Moglen gives a talk titled "Patents at a Crossroads: Bilski and Beyond"	(n/a)
24	Microsoft Exposes .NET Patent Trap to More Potential Copyright Issues	11/16/mono-more-vulnerable/	.NET leaves Mono vulnerable to more allegations of plagiarism and the patent issues stay standing	1,530
25	Microsoft Colludes Against Google	11/16/microsoft-assured-damage/	Microsoft goes for a sort of mutually-assured destruction as a weapon against Google - a tactic which by no means helps anyone but itself (surfers, Google, and authors to suffer from Microsoft bribes for publishers)	1,419

[Update] An additional 2 articles were published after I pushed this out at 8:00 PM PST, bringing the grand total to 25. More than 1 full post per hour. Some of the text below has been updated to reflect that.

Usenet ¶

Individual messages posted to COLA. Note these are technically from November 15th, but a 20-40 post volume for a single day is quite common in any case, and the crapflood for the 16th had not started yet when I wrote this.

I figure each of these take about 10 minutes each, on average — including the amount of time needed to actually extract the links and quotes from wherever he gets them. There doesn't seem to be much automation, even considering many of these simply parrot what's posted in the blog.

	Title	Link
1	Sub-notebooks Owners Hate Vista 7 [sic]	msg/9b4563d6205a17ed
2	Microsoft's Advertising So Terrible That Even Microsoft Employees Overwhelmingly Reject It	msg/35050243c682ae83
3	Microsoft 'Resolves' Flaws Using Lawyers, Intimidation	msg/9278204d291b1752
4	Microsoft's Patent Troll a "Fool" Masquerading as Something Else	msg/77ecbf95f97d7811
5	NVIDIA on Intel's Crimes, Otellini as a Criminal	msg/b182430186c8d3cc
6	Microsoft Windows Possibly Ditched by Seattle	msg/d7c932d5c1281237
7	Phones, Cisco Products Do Not Support Vista 7 [sic]	msg/ccaf878f523bafe5
8	Vista 7 [sic] Disaster: Fails to Sell More PCs — Even Worse Than Vista	msg/0e4431bdcf26ad9d
9	Microsoft Lied About Vista 7 [sic] 'Security'	msg/60b6fa9bc20938b3
10	Microsoft Moves to India, Executive Pay Broken	msg/7d26ba8c6f3be9a5
11	Microsoft Assaults Almost 1 Millions of Its Customers	msg/ee716f7d61d44fe1
12	Loads of Bilski Coverage: Software Patents Still at Risk in the US	msg/fe0ce7cb073b31e8
13	Microsoft's Xbox Sinks to 4th Place Even in Very Own Home Ground	msg/6c04aae68788aa4d
14	Microsoft Sued for Patent Violations Again, Settles	msg/f5611b2ddbf5592a
15	Attacks on Legal Sharing Harms Artists	msg/ef9689023ab50100
16	Google Still Struggles to Resurrect Orphaned Works	msg/aac24c7ef77debd5
17	ACTA Exposed, Now Under Attack by Politicians	msg/44f5d6fb1e20e091
18	Windows Marketplace Cracked	msg/9f9703698ad54c20
19	Hope Reborn for Monopoly-Free Media Standards	msg/4e7523a4e0b3c94b
20	Proprietary Software Skype Thrown Out for Being "Garbage"	msg/ba46cb41be50ba0f
21	Apache's Ethos and How Trolls Are Kept Out	msg/48944ef96095aec6
22	Mozilla Thunderbird 3 in (P)review, Firefox 3.6 Got Faster	msg/6a9cdb40e7d4e611
23	Openness Grows in Norway and German Authorities	msg/c972ae51d49be9c3
24	MySQL a Real Threat to Microsoft's with 46% Market Share in Emerging Markets	msg/36001484124da98e
25	OLPC Reaches Decent Numbers with GNU/Linux	msg/79e170de0fed2e5f
26	CrunchPad GNU/Linux Tablet Arriving Soon	msg/477885bdd961b299
27	Embedded Market Goes with Linux	msg/9196b145f117ab9e
28	FreeNAS Picks ZFS, OpenBSD Goes "Live"	msg/6938c7b59433eab9
29	Latest KDE4 for Ubuntu is Already Here, Linux Mint Helena Almost Here	msg/50423bafa24ec390
30	Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala is "Better Than Ever"	msg/fd1954f37c253b1e
31	Talks Brewing About Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6	msg/5ac100179b0a2c36
32	Mandriva One 2010 Receives Another Great Review	msg/5d56c9ed4cce4799
33	A Look at Compiz-Fusion in Gentoo and Puppy Linux	msg/1ac276c15304e534
34	The Power of GwenView and New Concept for Software Management in GNU/Linux	msg/2ba7a04bd722f5df
35	Another Top Game Comes to GNU/Linux, Windows Games Run Fine Also	msg/eabe46355dcda129
36	Cisco Uses GNU/Linux Server to Challenges Titans	msg/0366b290d95d5902
37	Smart Man Chooses to Bank with GNU/Linux	msg/a5c97e4eb74d2d2d
38	Wayland Display Server for Linux Examined	msg/ee0060cc3b218267

Twitter/identi.ca ¶

Individual 'tweets' posted to Twitter and identi.ca. I assume the mirroring of posts is automated to a certain extent, but it still takes time to make the "news" fit into the 140-character limit, so let's give these about 5 minutes each, maybe. Again, there is a lot of repetition here. I've omitted "retweets" and replies from this list, and these are also from November 15th to match the Usenet ones to a certain extent.

	Text	Link
1	#Microsoft Imitates #Google Revenue Model on the Desktop: Adverts Come to #Vista7 Desktops http://ur1.ca/fta2	5734352463
2	#Microsoft Breaks the #Law , Teaches World That 'Evil' #GPL is 'Viral' http://bit.ly/3DI3qi	5734911886
3	Smart Man Chooses to Bank with #GNU #Linux http://bit.ly/3rEgde	5751324358
4	#Wayland Display Server for #Linux Examined http://bit.ly/1e7GUh	5751362494
5	#Cisco Uses #GNU #Linux Server to Challenges Titans http://ur1.ca/fuil	5751393836
6	Another Top #Game Comes to #GNU #Linux http://bit.ly/1kanKr	5751425140
7	New Concept for Software Management in #GNU #Linux http://bit.ly/4l5brH	5751468455
8	A Look at #CompizFusion in #Gentoo and #Puppy #Linux http://bit.ly/4crTss	5751669744
9	Talks Brewing About #RedHat Enterprise #Linux 6 http://bit.ly/4njpRl	5751728020
10	#Mandriva One 2010 Receives Another Great Review http://danlynch.org/blog/2009/11/mandriva/	5751760025
11	#Ubuntu #GNU #Linux 9.10 #KarmicKoala is "Better Than Ever" http://bit.ly/14R2nG	5751836109
12	#Linux #Mint Helena Almost Here http://bit.ly/3oDU8e	5751897124
13	#Embedded Market Goes with #Linux http://ur1.ca/fuke http://ur1.ca/fukf	5752258469
14	#OLPC Reaches Decent Numbers with #GNU #Linux http://ur1.ca/fukk http://ur1.ca/fukl	5752341265
15	#CrunchPad #GNU #Linux #Tablet Arriving Soon http://ur1.ca/fukq	5752420742
16	FreeNAS Picks ZFS, OpenBSD Goes "Live" http://ur1.ca/fuks #bsd http://ur1.ca/fuku	5752461200
17	#MySQL a Real Threat to Microsoft's with 46% Market Share in Emerging Markets http://ur1.ca/fukw	5752507599
18	#Mozilla #Thunderbird 3 in (P)review, #Firefox 3.6 Got Faster http://ur1.ca/ful5 http://ur1.ca/ful7	5752712542
19	Openness Grows in #Norway and #German Authorities http://ur1.ca/fula http://ur1.ca/fqlp	5752765162
20	#Apache's Ethos and How Trolls Are Kept Out http://bit.ly/4maD3w	5752783873
21	Hope Reborn for Monopoly-Free Media Standards http://ur1.ca/fulf	5752825893
22	Proprietary Software #Skype Thrown Out for Being "Garbage" http://bit.ly/4Y2mq	5752864806
23	#ACTA Exposed, Now Under Attack by Politicians http://ur1.ca/fumc http://ur1.ca/fumd	5753332362
24	#Google Still Struggles to Resurrect Orphaned Works http://ur1.ca/fumg http://ur1.ca/fumh	5753369653
25	Attacks on Legal Sharing Harms Artists http://ur1.ca/fuml http://ur1.ca/fumm http://ur1.ca/fqip	5753420854
26	#Microsoft Sued for #Patent Violations Again, Settles http://ur1.ca/fumo http://ur1.ca/fump	5753464511
27	Survey: #Vista7 Disliked by Sub-notebooks Buyers, #GNU #Linux Emerges as a Winner http://ur1.ca/fvaf	5761775475
28	Why Are Critics of Criminal Activity Portrayed as 'Bad Guys'? http://bit.ly/NXr1r	5762228864
29	Reader's Article: Corporate Media Ownership Shifts http://bit.ly/22YQr5	5762515525
30	Bill, Nathan, Steve, and Other Con Artists http://bit.ly/2OZVU7	5762849692
31	#OpenSUSE 11.2 is Open to #Microsoft Lawsuits Because of #Mono http://bit.ly/4nFFy7	5763106481
32	More Marshall Projects (MoU), This Time in China http://bit.ly/zFeip	5763610483
33	#Microsoft Pays #comScore More Money, Gets Bogus Endorsements http://bit.ly/1aulCI	5764037706

IRC ¶

Schestowitz was active on his IRC channel for most of that 24 hour period (almost 17 hours). This is useful only as a measure of time, really. He also has another IRC channel called #boycottnovell-social ^[5] which uses Freenode resources (evidently) but is apparently used to deal with more private topics that are not supposed to be logged. People other than his inner cadre don't seem to be allowed to use it, so it's impossible to determine how much time was spent there. ^[4]

• First entry @ 12:14 AM
• Announces he has "lots of posts to do tomorrow" @ 1:17 AM
• Bids adieu at 3:01 AM
• Back on the grind @ 10:26 AM (7.5 hours later)
• Announces he's done with his 19 posts @ 5:28 PM
• I don't think I ever posted 20 items in such a small amount of time @ 6:52 PM

He posts comments fairly continuously until 11:59 PM when the log gets cut off. After that, he published five more articles.

The remains of the day ¶

Now, consider all the other stuff one does during the day, like reading email, talking on the phone with your significant other, doing tech support for family members, cleaning up the house, taking a crap, fixing the leaky faucet in the kitchen, raking the leaves in the back yard, chatting with friends online, updating your gothy MySpace page, watching TV, changing the oil on the truck, etc. With the possible exception of taking a crap (which is of the utmost importance), I don't know how much of that I would get done, if any.

The output volume summarized here is a bit high, but it's not far from the median. I'm not exaggerating — simply counting the number of unread items in Google Reader, and only counting posts to BoycottNovell, Schestowitz can literally out-blog the whole of Planet GNOME on any given day. And that does not include Usenet or microblogging.

The level of activity seems to have risen in the past few months, probably because the spamming interaction with social media web sites has tapered off a bit from its previous highs (as of November 2009) during the last three years:

Digg

Dugg:	15,962
Comments:	13,444
Submitted:	6,733

Propeller

Propped:	28,356
Comments:	648
Submitted:	25,112

Twitter

Tweets:

8,972

 

Sup?

Whether or not other activity can be attributed to Schestowitz — directly or indirectly — that's a lot of time. A veritable crapload of time. One has to wonder just how long a 27-year old's savings ^[2] last, even considering such profitable ventures as working at Burger King. ^[3] But that's another issue. He also recently celebrated (if that's the correct term) his 3- year reign of error, as well as his 8,000th post to go along with that. Yay.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow will be exactly the same more or less. Groundhog Day.

So... how was your Sunday?  §

 

^“ Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present. _„

– Roger W. Babson

^“ Obsessiveness [is] a must _„

– BoycottBoy [sic]

Notes ¶

1. ^{^} This is possibly the only truly consistently useful thing on that blog.
2. ^{^} IRC Log (2008-09-03)
   «As long as my savings in the bank last and I enjoy this hobby, I intend to continue. I can get around to things like family later on»
3. ^{^} (2009-01-25) "Blog entry".
   «I worked at Burger King for a year (as a teenager)»
4. ^{^} If someone wants to go into that channel and log it, that would be great. Technically since they're using Freenode they have to follow the organization's guidelines and can't simple exclude people. The only reason someone could be prevented from logging into a registered channel is lack of nick registration, and the only reason for being kicked from one is repeated disruption. We're talking important shit in here doesn't cut it. If that's a problem then I suppose they can host their own IRC server.
5. ^{^} (2009-03-23) "What’s New at Boycott Novell | Boycott Novell".
6. ^{^} "On its veins"???

BoycottNovell minion nymshifts again after embarassing episode

Summary: Notorious Slashdot troll and nymshifter creates yet another sockpuppet account in BoycottNovell and gets down to work for Roy Schestowitz

It was brought to my attention over the weekend that a new mysterious and rather vigorous commenter on BoycottNovell was doing the "perception management" rounds. Intrigued, I ran a few of his posts through one of my Slashdot acquaintances that have a more intimate knowledge of his posting patterns and what do you know, it seems we have a good match.

^“ And he asked him, "What is thy name?" And he answered, saying, "My name is Legion: for we are many." _„

– Mark 5:9

Background, of course ¶

For those who are not familiar with this unique phenomena, William Hill started out doing some rather nasty ^[1] "advocacy" on Slashdot many years ago using the handle "twitter" (no relation to the microblogging service). Eventually the community got fed up with him, sending his two main accounts (as in you know, you gotta have two accounts) down to the karma doldrums, which he promptly blamed on "M$" and black helicopters. His response was to organize a 16+ sockpuppet shilling feast, at which he failed completely, becoming the funniest meme since "FIRST POST" on Taco's turf, and even transcending Slashdot itself. ^[2] Eventually laughed out of there (and a few other places, including the Baton Rouge LUG for posting things like these), Hill then skidded — perhaps predictably — right into the only place where he could pour his grief out and find a few like-minded extremists like him, and he's been there ever since, helping Schestowitz out with perception^[3] management.

He still posts to Slashdot occasionally (and trolls anonymously too), even re-activating one of the sockpuppet accounts he supposedly promised he would never use again.

Schestowitz' response to this gift from heaven was to alternatively denounce and defend and praise him, possibly unwilling to completely sever a relationship that perhaps has its advantages. ^[4]

One has to wonder what propels people like Hill into spiraling down this kind of self-destructive vicious cycle. Hill is apparently so far gone that he believes Microsoft threatens his life, he thinks riding on the same train as Microsoft employees must be "sickening", that people in Seattle are "confrontational" (because, you know, that's where Microsoft is at), recounts how he went into an Apple store to demand they make "GNU/Linux" run on their hardware, calls 11-year old kids "paytards" because they happen to use Microsoft software... Is this FOSS advocacy? Is this the kind of person the FSF wants out there making their points for them? I mean, seriously?

It's irritating that M$ perpetuates the "on line predator" myth after studies have conclusively show it's bullshit except for bullying, which M$ knows all about.

And this jewel:

... "all non-free software, regardless of quality, is immoral"

Hill is disliked even among Schestowitz' friends, some of whom he has repeatedly attacked for not being "pure" enough. ^[5] And when his shenanigans come up, he tends to get defensive — hilariously even whining when they suggest that perhaps his OCD-like use of the "M$" thing is counter-productive at best and possibly the reason his submissions to Slashdot are rarely accepted, and have to be edited when they are. In response to that Hill claims the Slashdot editors are "tamed", of all things. ^[6] He has "ignored" so many people so many times (isn't that funny?) there that eventually he'll end up talking to himself and Schestowitz.

All this predictably came to a head last October 15th, when during the course of a FLOSS Weekly program where Jono Bacon interviewed Schestowitz, the matter of massive spamming on behalf of BoycottNovell came up, along with poor twitter:

"... a guy with 16 accounts that used to troll Slashdot and hangs out on your IRC channel"

Four days later Hill comes into Schestowitz' IRC channel and lets it rip:

Hi, jono ... I saw where you called me a spammer ... Fuck you.

The rest of that conversation is bizarre at best. To quote a comment here:

Fascinating. "twitter" goes apeshit and demands an apology from Jono for Jono's not having accused him of what he already admitted to. The mind boggles.

In reality though, I believe (and this is just my opinion of course) that Hill was essentially engaging in damage control vis-a-vis being associated with Schestowitz. Eventually I suppose these things do come back to bite you in the ass.

And getting to the point ¶

So anyway, someone alerted me to this brand-new but seemingly well-informed poster on BoycottNovell that goes by the handle your_friend. According to my secret contact ^[7], the probability that Hill is behind those posts is very high. Quoting (with permission, thanks!) from the response to my email, which referred to comments I copied from here as well as this one:

    From: [edited]<[edited]@gmail.com>
    To: Verofakto Blog <vindicareg@gmail.com>
    Subject: Re: Second opinion needed
    Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:33:13 -0800

    [my snippage]

    There's no science to this, really, though maybe I just think it's easy
    because [edited] also made it look easy. The "cadence" of people's comments
    rarely change. That pattern of Halting. Phraeses. Separated. By. Periods. is
    easy enough to spot, and if you add the usual hyperbole claims [snip]
    Key phrases like "intentional waste", "non-free software", "name calling",
    "big dumb companies", "malicious" and 
    consistent misspellings like "coppies", "dissasters" [snip] and the constant 
    butchering of it's/its are usually dead givaways as long as they show up 
    consistently. That's how all his [Slashdot] sockpuppets were identified.

    [snippage]

    Here's one:

    "It is a toy at best and a malicious spy at it's worst."

    [comment is on the first link]

    It's/its as usual. You would need ideally a few more posts but I'm
    pretty sure that's [him]. Again, it's the *totality* of the thing :)

    [snip]

    ROFL, but you'll know for sure when he slips up and actually types "M$" inst
    ead of "Microsoft". He used to do that with new socks and eventually he
    would give it up. I think he feels personally diminished somehow whenever he 
    uses the correct name.

More importantly, if that is indeed him, he is now engaged in arguing with people who are defending themselves from attacks by Schestowitz, a pattern that has been seen many times before.

I loathe nymshifters! ¶

The question here, I think, would be whether or not this is being done with some kind of blessing by Schestowitz. I find it hard to believe that he would pay so much attention to certain accounts that are troublesome to him and must be monitored and eliminated, yet he would manage to completely miss this new and mysterious one. Is there an agreement whereby Hill adopts yet another identity now that he's managed to insult pretty much everyone in sight and embarrass Schestowitz? And if that's the case then why is he even allowed to post?

I'm not counting on Schestowitz to respond to this of course, that's not the point. But perhaps someone among his crowd of regulars can bring up the topic and ask if, since he has the IP address and email for that account, Hill, twitter and your_friend are the same person. I could even go into a formal corpus comparison between Hill's known accounts and this fresh new identity if need be.

Because, after all, Schestowitz has claimed time and time again that these "nymshifters" have damaged him beyond repair... wouldn't it make sense to apply the same moral standards to his crew?  §

 

^“ I loathe people who have multiple accounts. It's cheating. _„

– 2008-10-17

^“ Nymshifters are not worth attention _„

– 2009-06-05

Notes ¶

1. ^{^} See also this. There are thousands more like those.
2. ^{^} See this or this for example. There are a few more on that SockDisclosure article.
3. ^{^} Comment by "Will Hill", look at the URL he used.
4. ^{^} Not only in the sticky Uriah Heep sense, but collaboration-wise as well: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. Here for example we see some of his wisdom quoted, as here and here. Schestowitz even delegates some of the clever GIMP'ing to his pal.
5. ^{^} It's a long and boring read, but see the threads here, here, here, here, here and many, many others. The overriding theme in all these is if you suggest that GNU/Linux and free software and Richard Stallman are anything other than perfect, you must be employed by Microsoft and you should burn.
6. ^{^} In an amusing twist, Schestowitz quotes Hill's musings on IRC liberally in this article, yet also manages to replace all the instances of "M$" with "Microsoft". Should one assume then that Schestowitz has also been tamed?
7. ^{^} God, I'm so funny (see crossed-out text there).

Common behavioral symptoms of autism and/or Asperger’s syndrome

I just thought this is amazingly on the money. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it probably doesn’t matter anyway, so just ignore this.

• a difficulty conceptualizing the other person's perspective and priorities
• limited skills in persuasion
• a tendency to be confrontational and rigid
• reluctance to change a decision and admit a mistake
• an aversion to being interrupted
• a compulsion for completion
• a tendency to punish rather than praise
• a tendency to avoid demands
• a lack of knowledge of alternative strategies ^[1]

And:

• superficially perfect expressive language
• formal pedantic language
• odd prosody, peculiar voice characteristics ^[2]

Then add obsessive compulsion and clinical topical fixation to the above? I’m just sayin’, is all.

Anyway, next real post hopefully coming up over the weekend.

References

• Atwood, Tony (1998). The complete guide to Asperger's syndrome. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006. ISBN:1843104954.

Notes

[1] Atwood, pp. 119-120
[2] ibid pp. 36

Further reading

http://www.geocities.com/autistry/gould.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070407104458/http://www.aspennj.org/guide.html

An analysis of the BoycottNovell spam problem on Digg, Reddit, Mixx and other social news web sites

Summary: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

The following accounts on Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Propeller, Twitter and many other websites are dedicated almost exclusively to spreading content published by Roy Schestowitz through his BoycottNovell (BN) blog as well as Usenet. They are all operated by the same person:

• CyberPhoenix
• AstralKnight
• DiamondWakizashi
• BoycottMicrosoft
• BoycottWindows
• NastyMicrosoft

Continue reading below for evidence and additional details.

[Update] As of mid-September 2009 or so, activity from all these accounts seems to have ceased. Occasional monitoring of some of the targeted web sites has not turned up additional aliases engaging in the same behavior. If I may be so bold, it looks like this worked as expected =)

^“ And he asked him, "What is thy name?" And he answered, saying, "My name is Legion: for we are many." _„

– Mark 5:9

   Contents

• 1 Aliases
• 1.1 CyberPhoenix
• 1.2 AstralKnight
• 1.3 DiamondWakizashi
• 1.4 BoycottMicrosoft
• 1.5 BoycottWindows
• 1.6 NastyMicrosoft
• 1.7 komrad
• 1.8 Other sightings
• 2 Reactions to SpamBoy
• 3 Gaming culture?
• 4 Motivation
• 5 Identity
• 5.1 Someone who is trying to discredit Schestowitz and/or BN
• 5.2 Some unknown dude that just appeared out of nowhere
• 5.3 Roy Schestowitz in drag
• 5.4 One of his cadre (the BoycottBoys)
• 5.5 The '7' guy from comp.os.linux.advocacy
• 5.6 Mark Fink
• 6 Collusion?
• 7 Conclusion
• 7.1 Moar?
• 8 Revisions
• 9 Notes

Aliases ¶

This person has many "nyms" or aliases, so we could call him CyberAstralNastyBoycottPhoenixKnight, but for brevity we'll just refer to him ^[1] as SpamBoy.

We'll begin with the first and oldest known alias and work our way up from there.

CyberPhoenix ¶

The CyberPhoenix alias has been active, as far as I can tell, since mid-2007. His activity can be traced initially to Digg, where he submitted hundreds and hundreds of articles over the span of a few months. Here are a few examples:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Abusive_Monopolist_Deal_Fails_Novell_Layoffs_Rumored_to_be_in_the_Works
http://digg.com/linux_unix/IBM_Gives_Away_Symphony_Takes_On_Abusive_Monopolist_s_Office
http://digg.com/linux_unix/DISGUSTING_Full_BBC_iPlayer_To_Remain_Abusive_Monopolist_Only
http://digg.com/xbox/Abusive_Monopolist_continues_Japanese_360_push_in_face_of_poor_sales
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Abusive_Monopolist_s_real_motive_for_pushing_Open_XML
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Is_Abusive_Monopolist_trying_to_stomp_out_advances_in_Javascript
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Abusive_Monopolist_aims_patent_guns_at_Red_Hat
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Vile_Monopolist_wading_through_3_522_comments_on_fake_open_standard_OOXML

As you can see, there's a bit of a... uh, pattern there.

This account was deleted on 2008-10-05, probably for TOS violations. ^[2] This Digg aggregator/analysis tool shows that the account did indeed exist, how many stories were pushed to the front page with it and the date it was deleted.

At around the same time, SpamBoy targeted Mixx, where he's managed to avoid banning so far. Using the Mixx activity history on his account, we can see that his first submission was to an Inquirer story on November 26, 2007. Since there are 20 submissions per page plus 18 on page 177: 176 x 20 + 18 = 3,538

So for the last 21 months, SpamBoy has submitted an average of 168 articles per month to Mixx, or just over 5 per day. That does not include his parallel submissions to Digg at the time, at least until his account was deleted, and it does not include other activity that we'll get to in a bit. I should point out that not all of the Mixx submissions point to Schestowitz' material of course, but most of them do one way or another (he has a few interesting ones there).

The current modus operandi on Mixx seems to be to submit stories that point to a domain called "tweetme", which in turn point to the Digg submissions of the BoycottWindows alias (see below), which then point to his (now suspended) BoycottMicrosoft blog on my.opera.com, which finally end up linking to BN. For example, this submission goes to this tweetme page, and then to this Digg page which in turn links to my.opera.com — although again that blog no longer exists (we do have a screenshot of it though, see the section for that alias below). Of course not all of his Mixx spam is so convoluted. Many submissions go directly to the dead Opera blog, while some link directly to BN.

I'm not sure if this is a retarded attempt at obfuscation or some sort of social web extension/mashup voodoo or what, but at least he ensures maximum coverage I suppose.

On Reddit, a CyberPhoenix account has been active for about a year. Although the activity tabs of the profile are empty, using Google to search Reddit yields a comment in this story. Quote:

ASUS needs to replace the Abusive Monopolist tainted Xandros pseudo-Linux with a REAL Linux distro.

^{(permalink) (screenshot)}

On Reddit it's possible to delete one's own comments and submissions (even an account). The comment is obviously gone from the profile but it remains in the story, so I guess that might be a glitch of some sort. There are probably more that Google can't find, including many submissions as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6n6lb/ubuntu_buys_microsofts_proprietary_codecs_for_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6t3ee/mono_is_too_controversial_for_debian/
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6leot/novell_and_mono_the_kiss_of_death_to_free_software/
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6wkye/no_mono_in_fedora_10_cambridge_live_cd/
http://www.reddit.com/comments/88moh/conficker_and_gnu_linux/

Note the third link was recently re-submitted with the AstralKnight account. Funny that, eh?

On other sites

On Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/~CyberPhoenix/ (comments)
Propeller: http://www.propeller.com/member/cyberphoenix/ (seems inactive, not sure if it's the same person)
There is also a Twitter account, but that's definitely not SpamBoy.

AstralKnight ¶

The AstralKnight alias appeared around January of 2009 almost simultaneously on Digg, Twitter, Reddit and Propeller. The Digg account (dead link obviously) was used extensively as well, and also probably deleted for TOS violations on 2009-05-25. Below are some of his submissions:

http://digg.com/microsoft/Low_quality_MSN_Canada_website_hacked
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_Mafia_s_Phony_Browser_Self_Remedy
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_blocking_third_party_codecs_free_software_formats
http://digg.com/tech_news/ODF_Gains_Despite_Microsoft_Crimes_Smears_FUD
http://digg.com/microsoft/What_if_Microshaft_left_EU_today
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microshaft_set_to_violate_EU_rules_again_over_low_quality_IE
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_Minion_Benefit_Down_by_a_Staggering_1_4_billion
http://digg.com/microsoft/Desperate_Microsoft_Mafia_enters_debt

[Update] This account was deleted or blocked for TOS violations by Reddit on 2009-08-31. The wording below was modified to reflect that.

On Reddit, the account was active for about 5 months. Again using the history feature we see that he submitted just over 1,000 stories (last page here). This account was interesting because it was used almost exclusively to submit posts made by Roy Schestowitz to the USENET group comp.os.linux.advocacy, or COLA. Since Schestowitz' submissions to COLA can be described without equivocation as a veritable crapflood (that's just a two-hour period of a single day), our friend SpamBoy (the subject of this article, not the other one) had his work cut out for him, volume-wise.

Additionally, with the AstralKnight account SpamBoy perfected (or perhaps continued) his technique of pasting idiotic prefab comments as responses to people who complained about his flamebait. Literally hundreds of times over. Ready? Click here(dead link now, click here for a screenshot of Google cache). Now compare to his comments on Mixx. On Digg he did the same thing. For example, see the first comment here, and compare to, say, this or this. Or just look at this screenshot, taken before the account was deleted.

The other thing that SpamBoy did with the AstralKnight alias on Digg and Reddit was to "spin" whatever Schestowitz had posted on a given day by linking to the principal source of the article on BN. For example, the first link in the group above is just a regurgitation of this. That way he could at least keep up the appearance of not linking directly to BN. Of course that takes time and effort, so he eventually gave up on it.

There's also a Twitter account with this alias. Apparently the only thing he's been doing with that the past few weeks is post links to his submissions page on Reddit with the text " The latest news about Microsoft crimes and quality open source alternatives ". I suppose the 140-char limit eventually got to him.

Then we have Propeller, where SpamBoy has operated an account for about 5 months, with more that 350 submissions at this point (none of which seem to have been voted up). These submissions point almost exclusively links to his Reddit submissions, which in turn as we already saw are links to Schestowitz' USENET posts.

And finally, he also has an account on OSNews, created quite recently. Apparently he pissed people off to the point that his comments were deleted.

On other sites

Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/~AstralKnight (no activity)
Mixx: http://www.mixx.com/users/AstralKnight (yes, another Mixx account)

DiamondWakizashi ¶

This is an alias that SpamBoy uses only to post comments to BN. Usually something along the lines of "Novell is Microsoft's bitch" and brainy stuff like that. It's easy to tie this alias to the rest. If the writing style isn't a dead giveaway, he also makes the classic nymshifter mistake of linking to content created with his other aliases — in this case his suspended blog on my.opera.com. Another? Here he is linking to something "funny" he spammed Reddit with not 24 hours before.

BoycottMicrosoft ¶

Apparently not satisfied with his righteous work so far, SpamBoy decided to get even more creative. This account was created around the beginning of June 2009 on my.opera.com as a sort of nexus for some of the others. It was very active, but (un)fortunately it's now been suspended, likely also for TOS violations. The link between this alias and the others is easy to establish. For example, the CyberPhoenix profile on Mixx has his home page set to that (screenshot), in addition obviously to linking to it repeatedly in his submissions (this being the first one). We already saw DiamondWakizashi link to it as well. Here is AstralKnight linking to it as well (screenshot). Of course you're probably wondering what it is that BoycottMicrosoft did on his Opera blog. Up until a week or so the Google cache of that page was available, but unfortunately it's gone now (probably because the Opera server was returning a 404 on the page). Fortunately I managed to snag a screenshot. For just $9.95 (plus shipping and handling) you get a Windows logo doctored to look like a swastika and plenty of links to BN.

BoycottWindows ¶

Created as a sort of add-on to the BoycottMicrosoft one, on Digg, Twitter and Reddit (now deleted, also for TOS violations). It was used exclusively to submit links to the now defunct Opera blog, which in turn as we mentioned linked to BN. He uses the same clever swastika logo there and everything. All of his tweets point to his Digg submissions.

The Reddit account was deleted after complaints were filed, but it's still possible to find articles submitted (also includes a comment) with it — of course all linking to the Opera blog. Interestingly, a Reddit user might have been responsible for the suspension of the Opera blog. This is a screenshot of the Google cache view of the original page showing his activity. Here is an example of the kind of multi-section spamming for which he was banned. But a simple thing like a ban does not stop a man on an important mission like this one, so there's more.

NastyMicrosoft ¶

This one is just a flat-out spam machine on Digg, Twitter and Reddit. It does nothing but link to BN and vote up submissions by BoycottWindows on Digg. As can be seen in this screenshot, the account is essentially the same as BoycottWindows. I'm surprised it hasn't been deleted as well. The pattern of copypasta replies can be seen here (screenshot).

I think SpamBoy just got tired of pretending he was doing anything other than promoting BN (especially the idiotic obfuscation he tried to pull off with his Opera blog and Twitter) and decided to create another alias to save himself some time.

komrad ¶

An account on FSDaily that is dedicated almost exclusively to posting links to BN. Of all the users on that website, komrad has the best karma in town. But since he does not link to other accounts or post comments, there is no evidence of this being tied to SpamBoy, other than the fact that coincidence is usually not that elastic. How many devoted fans with OCD can Schestowitz possibly, after all? There's also a Twitter account, but that's just one of those scummy "make millions licking envelopes from home" spammers. Then again, maybe there isn't that much of a difference between the two.

Still, the komrad account is rather old, so I might be more inclined to believe that this is one of his more established collaborators instead.

Other sightings ¶

Some potential dopplegangers spotted around the 'net doing the usual diligent perception management work.

• A rather interesting account called No More Microsoft Software Ever! (aww) that was brought to my attention seems to be pushing the stock BoycottBoy talking points on the ZDNet forums with uncharacteristic zeal. See for example the thread attached to this article. Looking at some of those posts I think we might have a winner. If not SpamBoy himself, this guy definitely gives off a lot of BN minion mojo. Curiously, an individual message posted with this account that I had previously linked to from here was deleted.

Reactions to SpamBoy ¶

It's not hard to imagine that SpamBoy's activities are generally described as spam (right!). But it's just not the spam itself. It's the idiotic way he goes about his business that tends to rub people the wrong way. Other than his canned responses, he uses phrases like "low-quality garbageware", "Novell is Microsoft's bitch .....LOL!!!", "Abusive monopolist", etc. It's like reading something written by an incoherent mental ward escapee that has to use a limited vocabulary and a collection of canned text paragraphs in order to communicate. Couple that with the pattern of accusing anyone that complains about his spamming of being "astroturfers" ^[12] and you start getting the idea.

On Digg the response was basically limited to people berating him in the comments, but Reddit is a bit more democratic, so there have been several well-received complaints about his spamming, at least one of which possibly resulted in the deletion of the BoycottWindows account and/or the BoycottMicrosoft blog on Opera:

• I am so tired of boycottnovel submissions
• Petition to ban Roy from spamming /r/linux with his website's garbage. It's overly negative, rarely correct, and he's a sore on all social networks.
• /r/Linux is trying to get their moderators to ban Roy (AstralKnight/NastyMicrosoft/BoyCottWindows). This is a petition for the mods of Proggit to do the same.
• I'm starting to think this guy dislikes Microsoft.
• Different username for AstralKnight
• List of paid BN spammer astralknight's aliases and sites that he posts to
• Boycott Novell's very own AstralKnight banned from Digg, will Reddit soon follow?
• AstralKnight is spamming my posts, replying with the same copy-pasta every time. Please ban!
• Reddit, what does "Report" do? Or, how to get a spammer banned?
• AstralKnight spams Linux advocacy links
• Developers: Annoyed with BoycottNovell's trolling of /r/linux? Threaten to rewrite your apps in mono. Let's show BN that developers aren't impressed by their trolling damaging their reputations
• Who in the hell is upvoting Astralknight?

That's a lot of grief. Someone even got desperate enough to request a GreaseMonkey script to filter the spam (assuming one is using Firefox):

• Anyone skilled enough with Greasemonkey to make a script that hides AstralKnight et al's submissions?

Finally, the complaint that probably ended up causing the removal of the account:

• Hey AstralKnight, and you please fuck off and stop clogging up the /r/linux new section with all your shit?

Even over at Mixx people noticed what was going on and linked to this page:

• CyberPhoenix "outed" as social news 'spammer'

Those who complain about all this are dismissed as being "the usual haters". And they might all even work for Microsoft, of course.

Those who think SpamBoy is being "abused" because he "tells the truth" and so on are usually not aware of the extent of his spamming, or are "advocates" (I use that term loosely) who believe it is their God-given right to crap all over everything and disrupt any community or newsgroup if it furthers their righteous battle against the evil empire.

Gaming culture? ¶

Something that stands out with the first three of SpamBoy's aliases is their apparent association with the gaming culture, something that I figured out rather quickly simply by looking at Google search results. CyberPhoenix has to do with some card game called Yu-Gi-Oh!, AstralKnight seems to be related to either something called Tohou Project or a Nintendo game called BomberMan 64 and DiamondWakizashi might be out of something called "Naruto". ^[3] Besides the obvious lack of originality of course, this perhaps indicates that SpamBoy might be one of those angry acne-ravaged teenagers that live with their parents and have way too much time on their hands. Then again, I might have this all wrong. So it was interesting to find this I guess, although that doesn't seem to be in character.

Motivation ¶

It would be fair to argue that since not absolutely all of his endless submissions to social bookmarking sites point to something Roy Schestowitz writes, promotion of his apparent advocacy role model and authority figure isn't his primary motivation. However, the sheer volume of links to either BN or COLA posts by Schestowitz pretty much dwarfs everything else. By far. So it might be helpful to think about it this way. In order to be SpamBoy, you need to:

1. Be a rather enthusiastic FOSS enthusiast.
2. Hate Microsoft. I don't mean figuratively, but literally.
3. Be positively enthralled by anything and everything Roy Schestowitz writes.
4. Have a massive amount of free time on your hands.
5. Possess a near-limitless reservoir of stamina to keep this crap up for at least two years (so far).

You can easily go 2 for 5 here most of the time. Maybe 3 for 5. But 5 for 5? That's special. Really special. Still, it's not just a matter of declaring SpamBoy a shill. His principal objective might not be the promotion of a specific person or website. It might very well be that he has simply picked one (with a high level of daily output) specifically to carry out his saturation assault on the web in the name of freedom or whatever. And given the available evidence so far, it would also be misleading to just claim that he is in cahoots with Schestowitz, although he's the single obvious beneficiary of SpamBoy's activities. ^[9] But we'll examine that in more detail below.

Identity ¶

So who the hell is this person? Let's run through some possibilities.

Someone who is trying to discredit Schestowitz and/or BN ¶

Given the negative reception SpamBoy has almost everywhere, I suppose we have to take this into account. Entertained primarily by him and his collaborators, obviously. I could possibly buy this is if the alleged attack wasn't so exhaustive and CyberPhoenix had not preceded the other aliases, because he started out actually not linking to BN. An ineffective and obnoxious advocate perhaps, but one nonetheless. The level of effort and time that would have to be put into this is beyond comprehension — and there are many other less complicated and less expensive ways to discredit people, especially someone like Schestowitz.

Some unknown dude that just appeared out of nowhere ¶

I suppose this is possible but unlikely because SpamBoy seems to be at least slightly familiar with FOSS advocacy, even if he happens to completely slaughter it by way of his methods and the material he tends to promote. It's also unlikely that someone would suddenly meet the 5 point criteria mentioned in the Motivation section above.

Roy Schestowitz in drag ¶

I doubt this, but I had to include it because it's been a constant accusation from people who have run into SpamBoy on his various target sites. I don't have a particularly high opinion of Schestowitz, but I think this would be too gutter — even for him. It would also mean that he's actually fabricating time out of thin air, considering the volume of activity he engages in under his own name every day.

One of his cadre (the BoycottBoys) ¶

Also unlikely since there would be some indication of this somewhere, because as a group they don't tend to be particularly bright. ^[5] Also, none of them (with a single possible exception ^[6]) seem to match an informal corpus analysis of SpamBoy's work. Unless there's a member of the club I still haven't had the pleasure of spotting.

There is some indication that SpamBoy might be at the very least logged into Schestowitz' IRC channel. See for example the reaction time to this, although I'm not sure about the GMT offset of the IRC log's timestamps.

The '7' guy from comp.os.linux.advocacy ¶

If you've ever had the misfortune of spending any amount of time on this newsgroup, you have probably run into this person. He literally goes by the handle '7'. Now, COLA is not exactly the most interesting collection of human beings on the internet ^[7], but '7' is among the worst by far. Of special interest here is the habit of replying with prefab tripe to just about every comment. For example:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/a5bffbf75a3f2113
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/47e912dd98eae2a0
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/dce137948a2d75c0
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/41285003d4616e3c
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/ad9c62903f2aedcd
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.advocacy/msg/aba2c3979c022be8

Or this as well. And I'm not the first person to notice it.

There are also some similarities from a corpus perspective. I mentioned the use of repeated interstitial CAPS for emphasis and the pattern of using !!! to end sentences. The way his comments are structured also indicates a possible match.

Another coincidence is the fact that besides Schestowitz' posts to COLA, AstralKnight also spams Reddit with a lot of idiotic comments by '7' there. For example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8vygj/antitrust_microshaft_slowing_intel_atom_sales/
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8ymwk/windummy_netbook_inventory_piling_up_at_retailers/
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/96pz2/os_troll_comparison_issues_resolved/
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/96pyo/micoshaft_and_trolls_et_al_will_now_define/
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8mgx5/microshaft_recommends_linux_in_an_abject_failure/
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/8n3wb/when_will_del_ship_3d_translucent_linux_desktops/

You'd think he would post links to comments by people other than '7' and Schestowitz, but no, that's not the case as far as I can tell.

That said, I would be less than honest if I didn't mention that if we entertain the idea that he is indeed SpamBoy, his corpus outside of COLA posts that is not comprised exclusively of trollish canned templates does not seem to match this person's alleged meatspace identity. There are comments made early in the life of the AstralKnight account on Reddit and many of his Mixx submissions that simply don't fit with the stuff a middle-aged Brit would be concerned with, like gun control or Zionism. This also breaks down with the gaming angle mentioned before to a certain extent, although I suppose it's possible to be a failed inventor and a fan of Japanese children's games (one of my co-workers is a respected Java architect and book author with published CS and engineering papers, yet he spends large amounts of time playing military-style shooter games online when he's at home).

So is SpamBoy the same person as '7'? I think there's a high probability of that being the case, but so far it's impossible to prove, and it will likely be less so once this is published. Still, if someone has some evidence that would tie him to these aliases, I'll be more than happy to revisit this. His "outing" on COLA might be incorrect, for example. ^[8]

Mark Fink ¶

The Mark Fink fiasco prompted some people to theorize that the person behind that alias was also SpamBoy. There are many similarities between 'Fink' and '7' once we compare their posts to Ubuntu mailing lists and COLA (respectively). Not enough to completely nail it, but enough to generate suspicion.

There is one curious factoid that might be interesting though. If we look at the FinkGate timeline, there is a one year gap (almost to the day) between the two appearances 'Fink' made on the Ubuntu mailing lists. SpamBoy's original CyberPhoenix Digg account was deleted on October of 2008, and although he seems to have been active on Mixx the whole time, it's interesting that 'Fink' made his second appearance a few months after SpamBoy redoubled his spamming efforts with the AstralKnight alias. Coincidence?

Of course it's possible that Fink is '7' but has no relation whatsoever with SpamBoy. Or that SpamBoy is Fink but has nothing to do with '7'. The possibilities are endless when there are so many personalities.

Sometimes the scraps of available evidence are more interesting insofar as what they don't show.

Collusion? ¶

Regardless of SpamBoy's identity, the elephant in the room here is obviously the fact that his main online activity involves disseminating everything Roy Schestowitz publishes. It is also a fact that Schestowitz is quite aware of his activities going back to the end of 2007. ^[4] So it's more than fair that we examine the possibility that SpamBoy might be working with/for him in some fashion. I already mentioned the possibility that SpamBoy is just evangelizing in his own slimy way and simply happened to pick Schestowitz as his primary content provider. The question to ask here is whether or not there is any type of collusion. ^[10]

I'm not the kind of person who automatically assumes the worst, even in cases where the worst might be the thing I would enjoy seeing happen. I've already made it clear that I don't believe SpamBoy is associated directly with BN. A few weeks ago I received a private message through Reddit with a link to one of Schestowitz' IRC logs. As you can see there, Schestowitz removes AstralKnight's Twitter subscription ^[11] from his IRC channel after noting that his tweets are "stupid".

When I initially saw this I thought that was a good move, since having SpamBoy's infantile mutterings all over his logs was detrimental at best. Along with previous evidence of him being aware of SpamBoy but denying any knowledge or association with him, this helped reinforce my belief that SpamBoy was indeed working completely on his own without any contact whatsoever.

But then something crawled up my frontal lobe and made me do a second take on that conversation. That looks forced. I read that a few times and all I saw was this:

"Hey there everybody I'm disavowing this guy.... ready? OK here I go... HIGH FIVE, I just banned him! Did everyone see that? I totally just did!"

There are obviously two ways to interpret this. Either he's just being honest and just wants to disassociate himself from SpamBoy, or he wants something he can point to and say " see, I have nothing to do with this dude, I even called him stupid ".

Why make such a big show out of that? I have a hard time believing that Schestowitz did not recognize the "micoshaft windummy!!!" style of his friend '7' from COLA, which is what those tweets pointed at. Yet he still called them "stupid". Why not just remove the thing from his Twitter script and be done with it?

Further, I have an even harder time believing that SpamBoy would have continued his worship of Schestowitz after being called "stupid" — yet to this day he is still spamming the internet with Schestowitz' effluvia.

So I kept thinking about the style of "damage control" he used during FinkGate. After Fink craps all over the ubuntu-devel mailing list, insults half the regulars there by claiming they worked for "M$" and/or Novell, and actually contacted someone's boss to try to have them fired because of their alleged support for Mono, this is what Roy Schestowitz said to him:

I liked what you do, but try to distance yourself from the site to give it credibility. Make it look like a personal gripe while the site keeps it polite.

In light of this, the alleged booting of AstralKnight's tweets from his IRC channel with such fanfare takes on a different light, in my opinion. If he had just removed the subscription from the script without announcing it to the world, I wouldn't have ended up putting two and two together. I'm not a cynical person, but this just smells a tad rotten.

Now, I'm not implying that Schestowitz unleashed SpamBoy on the internet. But what I do suspect is that he knows exactly who SpamBoy is, and he has no problem with what's being done (essentially) in his name, as long as he gets a bigger audience in the end. After all, he is obsessed with his traffic figures, how many GB his blog serves every month and how long it will take him to be "bigger than Groklaw". ^[13]

Let's look at some more interesting bits. Despite claiming (repeatedly, actually) that he doesn't know who AstralKnight is, Schestowitz seems to think poor SpamBoy is just a misunderstood soul:

look at the abuse AstralKnight gets [...] The shills want him down

Remember he is not talking about the CyberPhoenix alias here, which I suppose he can be forgiven for encouraging since at that time SpamBoy had not yet started his reign of terror. No, this is the Digg account that did nothing but submit links to his articles, cleverly spinned versions thereof, or his posts to COLA.

Here for example he says he doesn't know who AstralKnight is again, yet as that guy on IRC correctly points out, Schestowitz had been consistently voting up SpamBoy's Digg submissions — that second one in fact just a day after he removed his tweets from the IRC logs. Maybe it's because it just happens to link to a comment of his in COLA. And then there are things like these:

The submitter gets abused by the usual bunch [...] Seems like Microsoft's agents perhaps. They do have some, but I am not sure which ones

SpamBoy is abused by Microsoft agents, of course. We just don't know which ones.

Conclusion ¶

All in all, I think we have a case of what Schestowitz likes to call useful idiots. He's not necessarily sponsoring the spam shitstorm, but he doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it, either. He could have contacted SpamBoy through Reddit for example (they have a private message thing) and asked him to tone it down at least. And I think SpamBoy would have obliged him. But again, he's expendable (can't be directly tied to him) and too useful to just let go.

It's sad, in a way. I think Roy Schestowitz really does mean well. But his quest of becoming the next Pamela Jones/Groklaw and creating a real community around his work has failed miserably, and instead he finds himself surrounded by a scary cadre of weirdos, spammers, nymshifters and abrasive idiots with dubious IQs who tend to do more harm than good to his cause. And if he is indeed giving them the nod — if not outright encouraging them — then he's partly responsible for their actions. At the very least those actions ultimately reflect negatively on him, whether he likes it or not.

Moar? ¶

Any additional information that could be relevant to this article would be highly appreciated. Please contact me if you have anything that you think could be useful.  §

 

^“ Digg is also seriously [fucked] because it's gamed pretty badly. _„

– 2009-03-06

^“ I usually report any suspicious submission as spam, at least as soon I spot a distinct and objectionable pattern. When the same person always posts to the same domain, for instance, that's a red flag. _„

– 2006-09-17

Revisions ¶

• [2009-09-01] Additional Reddit discussion links; account deleted from Reddit (yay), a few more links and tweaks.
• [2009-09-16] Some cleanup, moar quotes, correction of the ZDNet link.
• [2009-09-18] Added a quote, testing out some new styles.
• [2009-10-04] Noted SpamBoy's sudden disappearance; some formatting changes.
• [2009-10-17] Noted cessation of spamming activity, fixed some typos.

Notes ¶

1. ^{^} I cannot bring myself to believe this could be a woman.
2. ^{^} Although it's possible for an account owner to request deletion from the Digg support folks, there is already an established pattern of deleted accounts in other social sites, so it's not hard to imagine Digg simply nuked him.
3. ^{^} As is probably evident by now, I'm too old for this shit.
4. ^{^} Schestowitz was accused repeatedly of operating the CyberPhoenix account on Digg as far as I can tell. This was also mentioned by a person who helped me gather information for this article and who was active on Digg at the time. I don't believe that to be true. Also, that comment predates the spam shitstorm unleashed on other sites during 2008 with the other SpamBoy aliases. I'm merely using it to show that Schestowitz has been aware of this person in some way or another for a while, as well as the fact that he was linking to his blog from more than one site. He's even grateful about his "compliments" and so on.
5. ^{^} More specifically, they seem to suffer from something called liar's remorse. Look it up, it's an interesting read. People who do dishonest things in the name of a cause they consider to be worthwhile often have a subconscious desire to get caught, and they make "mistakes" towards that end. Some also use that when they end up being discovered as a sort of excuse. " Ha ha, I wasn't really serious about this ".
6. ^{^} "Chips B Malroy" was a close enough match to warrant a second look.
7. ^{^} And I'm referring both to the wacky "advocates" and the people who like to bait them. Seriously, that place is just scary. COLA used to be a bit better back in the day. Sometimes threads would be crossposted to comp.lang.java so I was peripherally aware of what went on there, and in general the people there used to be actual advocates that seemed to sport IQs higher than the average sea slug. Alas, the quality seems to have taken a massive dive at some point in the past few years. Schestowitz' 24/7 crapflooding obviously has not helped with that.
8. ^{^} In this particular subject though, I'd tend to trust these guys. They are good at that. '7's reaction to that post also seems to confirm its validity.
9. ^{^} Gain does not need to be financial in order to qualify as such.
10. ^{^} I contacted Schestowitz with a request for comment and a few questions about SpamBoy's activities, but predictably I received no reply. Here is a copy of the email I sent him.
11. ^{^} I understand this is a sort of script that takes posts made by certain people on Twitter and echoes them to IRC. They are visible in most of his recent logs. His regulars need to request to be added to the list of Twitter accounts it monitors.
12. ^{^} This is a big thing with the BoycottBoys as well. Anyone who does not think exactly like them is "the enemy".
13. ^{^} See the "does anyone have any scandals I can use" and "bigger than Groklaw" quotes here.