JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme 380
Reader scubabear writes "For years rumors have run rampant about employees of JBoss Inc. being actively encouraged to post anonymously, drumming up business by flooding the net with fake posts and simultaneously attacking competitors, all from behind a safe veil of anonymity. With the advent of a new feature for tracking users by IP on TheServerSide.com, the floodgates have been opened and those rumors have apparently been confirmed.
The Java blog space now erupted with posts from a variety of bloggers (here, here, and here for a start) exposing a variety of anonymous/pseudonymous accounts used by JBoss employees to put forth their Professional Open Source message and simultaneously slam anyone who gets in their way in online technical communities such as TheServerSide, JavaLobby, and various personal blogs. The evidence shows how a corporation can manipulate popular opinion via anonymous personalities, that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares, and that you should never forget that your cookies and IP address can and will be tracked online. No official response has been heard yet from the JBoss crew. Disclosure: I'm one of those bloggers erupting on this issue (see my story here)."
I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Zealotry (not a Troll) (Score:2, Insightful)
JBoss (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Be careful (Score:3, Insightful)
implications (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just sad. Shame on JBoss...
Re:These people give all AnonCows a bad name. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure OSDN can track you, but that's not going to stop you from astroturfing.
Sure you can! (Score:3, Insightful)
Linky [sf.net]. There's no guarantee anyone will read it, though. Them's the breaks.
TheServerSide Sucks! (Score:3, Insightful)
Truth Independent of Person (Score:1, Insightful)
It seems to me that the truth of someone's statements is independent of the person or their character, i.e. if Hitler origionally argued that E=MC^2, it would not be any more or less true.
I actually think posting by anonymous cowards is better then arguements by 'known' people since I look more closely at what the cowards say to verify if it is true or not.
Although the ideal situation, time permitting, is you double check what everyone says
Speaking of crap... (Score:2, Insightful)
I almost never post 'anonymously,' however, I put a pretty hefty distance between my online postings and my actual professional life. In fact, in many cases, my personal opinions have been restrained by contract. I can't post "I, an employee of XYZ organization involved in ABC project feel this way." That's what corporate PR departments are for and it is such standard practice to curtail officila public comments--for good reasons--that it smacks as pretty ignorant to start whining that someone isn't slapping their corporate logo on every utterance.
JBoss is a solid product and their licensing and revenue models are downright charitable. The posts addressing those issues were absolutely on the mark and perfectly justifiable. So there was some petty personal squabble. Big deal. Someone doesn't like you. Wah. This whole conspiracy theory comes off as pretty fscking childish in that context.
They want to make money AND give something away and you don't like that for some reason.
Get over it.
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on the nature of what they're posting anonymously.
Suppose I work for JBoss and I write up various posts of the form: "I used (fill in JBoss competitor here) for my business. Not only did they not do the work I paid them for, but they anally raped my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank! Next time I will go with JBoss for sure."
Or, suppose I work for JBoss and I write up a glowing review of JBoss's work, glossing over the problems or bugs. Then I post a few times agreeing with myself about how excellent they/we are. Astroturfing may be as old as the Internet (if not older) but that doesn't make it particularly ethical business.
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's like when you start having cybersex with somebody. It does indeed matter whether they're an 18 year old hot chick, or a 50 year old fat guy. Even if they both say the same thing, like "I wanna get with you, baby!"
More seriously, it matters because it matters who you're speaking for. When I stand up in a developer community and say my company is using ___ and the speed has gotten better between versions, that it crashes less often, or that the new features work as advertised, then I need to have something behind those claims. While people usually claim they're not speaking for their company, it still means more when someone is actually employed.
Furthermore, nobody wants to make enterprise software decisions based solely on the vendor's recommendations: you want to find a group of users that can verify the stuff works correctly. If I looked up JBoss's users to find out how it's working, and it turns out the entire JBoss user community consists solely of their employees posting under pseudonyms, you'd better believe we've got a problem.
Re:Speaking of crap... (Score:1, Insightful)
Christ.. it's like the Salem witch trials.
Re:Jboss's slogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:JBoss (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugly Story (Score:5, Insightful)
First, JBoss Group betrayed the trust of what should have been a largely sympathetic community in TheServerSide [theserverside.com] with their anonymous posting campaign.
The fraud was exposed by levelheaded participants, including the submitter of this story and staff at TheServerSide.
Then, the opportunists jumped in.
Some bloggers gleefully joined the witchhunt, accusing their least favorite people of being anonymous posters, including real people, of course.
When I told one blogger that he needed to offer evidence when he accused someone of being an anonymous poster, he publically implied [theserverside.com] that I supported the posting scheme.
Several of the bloggers are themselves contributors to respected open-source projects, making this a particularly disturbing form of cannibalism.
The net result is another wedge driven into what was already an overly polarized community. No real winners here.
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because now they know that those "faceless individuals" were not there to help them but instead were there entirely for their own profit and deliberatly misleading, even lying, to them in the process. If I found out someone whom I'd been turning to for advice because they claimed to be an honest individual had been lying about who they were the entire time to conceal a conflict of interest so they could sell me something I'd be pretty pissed off too!!
(and although I suspect my company *might* make something that may compete with JBoss that doesn't have any affect on my opinion)
Thorny Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
An ethnic minority person walks into an ethnic majority bar and orders a beer. The ethnic majority guy next to him says, "we don't like your kind around here." Words are exchanged, and the ethnic minority guy pulls out a knife. The ethnic majority guy pulls out a gun and shoots him. Ethnic majority guy turns to the bartender and says, "just like an ethnic slur to bring a knife to a gun fight."
So what should you do when the enemy is both more powerful and unethical? Most business people don't grasp (or care about) the long run benefits of open source software. If they don't see the open source equivalent as being better - and let me stress, they have to see it as being better, regardless of whether it is better - if they don't see it as a better product, they're not going to use it. If they're reading the trades, the open source people should be promoting their products there by all means necessary. Anonymous? Do you think Microsoft's shills on this site are adding disclaimers? This isn't pattycake, this is business. This is war. If you can't handle it, at least stay out of the way.
As jroller.com is being slashdotted... (Score:2, Insightful)
JBoss panties around ankles, again.
Does the fun ever stop with these guys? It turns out that theserverside.com forums now has an interesting new feature that many of you might not be aware of. If you click on a particular user, you will see all the other users that have logged in from the same IP.
Obviously, this method is not foolproof, and can be easily misinterpreted to mean that two people behind the same proxy are indeed one and the same.
Having said that though, it is with immense glee that I see that once and for all, the JBoss wankstains can be seen for the hypocritical, conniving, underhanded, petty and insecure little fuckwits that they are.
So, let's pick a user at random! Say..ohhh I dunno...Marc Fleury. Who else does the slimy little fleury have hidden away in this too-large-for-one-person personality of his? Why, none other than our friend Arun Patel! Arun, for those of you unfamiliar with TSS, posts incredibly offensive polemics that happen to exactly mirror the unspoken thoughts of a certain JBoss cult. To be fair, many of the posts are too eloquent to be His Royal Garlicness, what with his penchant for multiple exclamation marks, rambling sentences, and all round freakish usage of full stops.
So, who else posts from that IP? Well, we have James Hardy. James' posts are often of the 'I'm sane but lets face it, JBoss rule' variety, as opposed to another on that list of deranged psychopaths, Chip Tyler. Chippie here will eagerly pipe in in any number of threads to say how much CDN suck, as well as how every move JBoss makes is intelligent and wise. There are literally dozens of other accounts that show how widespread this behaviour is. The only thing they have in common is a surprising love and admiration for all things JBossy, and disdain and abuse for all things non-JBossy.
Needless to say, Ben Sabrin and the majority of the JBoss folks are all on the trail too. So while it's impossible to actually draw lines between the fakes and their puppetmasters, it's very very easy to spot the group of nefarious rumprangers who have embarked on this laughably incompetent marketing exercise. Having said that, some of the linkages are very clear and easy to follow to individuals who happen to not work in the same turdfactory as the fleurys do. Bill Burke has the highly dubious honour of also being Joe Murray, famous for making noises to the effect of 'Mike Spille doesn't exist!'. Let's see you uuhmm and err your way out of this one Billy! Marc'll have you back in that gimp suit pretty sharpish if you keep being this sloppy.
It all makes an awful lot of sense, if you think about it. JBoss is very very little beyond a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. I was actually surprised at how many people at TSSS for example smirked when I asked if they used JBoss. The silent majority pretty much views that server as a bit of a joke, and rightfully so!
What is stunning is how they seem to have next to no capacity for learning. Come on garlicboy, how fucking hard can it be to write a classloader? Do you really NEED UnifiedClassLoader, UnifiedClassLoader2, AND UnifiedClassLoader3? Didn't your mother teach you how to name classes? The thing is, it'd fine if you lot were just crapping out hilarious code. Sadly, it isn't enough for you, instead you feel the need to go out of your way and create a million fake accounts everywhere just to spread the word and hijack any potentially intelligent conversation. Are you that scared of innovation and a world where JBoss co-exists with the rest of humanity?
The saddest part about all this is that the most likely outcome is for these posters to now ensure they use a different IP when posting, to disguise the trail more effectively. I'm sure the very notion of 'gosh, maybe we should let our software do the talking instead of using underhanded tactics like these' is heretical in that camp.
So, the next time you see someone posting anything positive about JBoss, rest assured
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Insightful)
And besides, an opinion is only as valid as person giving it, and a "hard data" is only as valid as the method in which that data was collected. So if company X says their product works great that is less valid then a third party saying it works great. Furthermore, if I know that group X is conducting a study I will be more on the guard for things that might might tilt the results in thier favor.
This behavior is deliberatly misleading and thus unethical. Period.
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a hint - if you are having cybersex you can rule-out right away that it's a hot 18-year-old.
But why does it REALLY matter? You have no way to know, so if you are doing this by definition you do not care.
More seriously, it matters because it matters who you're speaking for. When I stand up in a developer community and say my company is using ___ and the speed has gotten better between versions, that it crashes less often, or that the new features work as advertised, then I need to have something behind those claims. While people usually claim they're not speaking for their company, it still means more when someone is actually employed.
Possibly. The thing that bothers me about the accusations of foul play are this - what are the exact contents of the posts being made by JBoss employees? There's nothing wrong with having an opinion and being employed all at the same time. Sometimes I just want to give quick technical advice without bothering to identify myself. The links seem to be
I can also see the possibility of people wanting to defend thier company being bad-mouthed on forums without nessicarily revealing they work there. Sometimes you do that so you don't get in trouble at work, sometimes because if it gets out you work somewhere you have a lot of people contacting you for various things related to the company and you don't want the hassle. There are a number of legitimate reasons to conceal identity when posting online.
Re:Speaking of crap... (Score:4, Insightful)
One is called discretely exercising your right to free thought and speech, the other is astroturfing and inherently deceptive.
You sound like a shill, but that really is irrelevant (I don't want to be guilty of ad hominem). The fact is, these individuals at JBoss look like complete asses. I would be embarassed if I was discovered to be the fake identity that was writing great things about me. Gawd!
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one of the problems even DRM faces. Manufacturers can't trust their own deployed software as these can be patched/cracked to bypass restrictions.
Even with strong cryptography, it's just not possible to trust an implementation which is in another's hands.. with end-to-end encryption you can possibly protect the content of data, but you may not be able to protect its source/destination unless you trust each and every node out there and have absolute control over it to keep it trusted.
Even with strong encryption, there are a lot of ways of exploiting the implementation.
Ethical?.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's stupid and dangerous. Posted By: Mouloud - on May 18, 2004 @ 05:58 AM in response to Message #122469 1 replies in this thread
... deleted some
Retroactively identifying people is highly foolish - particular subsequentely linking individuals to a company. If a site provides an anonymous mode:
If people using anonymous mode in an "unethical way" may be a problem - remove it, give everybody warning and move on.
No i don't work for JBoss, and yes i know IP/cookies etc. are tracked - however i don't expect amazon of anybody else to post what that information!
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is that? I don't see how they are tied together.
Not wishing to be help accountable for your speech might make you want to be anonymous. Not wanting to be held responsible for what you say might make you want to be anonymous.
But neither of those are infringing on your right to free speech. You are given the right to speak freely, you are not given the backbone to do it.
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's possible to change a many-hop freenet route to a force-routed path if you have your implementation at the front compromised.
There is Still a Case to be Made for AC Posting (Score:4, Insightful)
We all want privacy don't we? Do you really want someone throwing a rock through your window because you said something negative about a group they are a member of on Slashdot?
Open Source is all about, well, openness right? It seems so ironic that a company based on the Open Source philosophy would do such a thing. But how many times have many of us said that Open Source is about freedom to create not about anti-commerce. If it is ever proven that Open Source companies CAN'T be profitable, then I think the future of Open Source will be bleak.
Media manipulation is both harder and easier with the popularity of the Internet. Anyone who wants to can be a publisher now. How many of you regular posters to Slashdot used to write letters to the editor of your local paper on a regular basis? I know I didn't. I've written more on issues I care about in the last 2 years than the previous
Systems such as Slashdot are easy targets for conspiracy. We "rate" one another by name. My real identity MAY be secret, at least if I've been very very careful, but unless I do all my "Karma whoring" under this id and all my controversial posts anonymously, people are going to have a pretty good idea of what cmacb thinks about things. They may have a pretty good idea of what other Internet activities I engage in, who my online friends are, and a lot of other inferences not so easily drawn. Am I comfortable with this? Sometimes I'm not so sure...
The other day I posted what I thought was a perfectly normal reaction to a Slashdot article. I was a bit surprised that it got quickly modded up to a 5 (I really don't care that much about mod points other than the general "acceptability" of what I've said) I was even more surprised though to find myself personally insulted several times in the 14 posts that followed and then shocked to see the posts containing nothing more than insults modded up to 3, 4 and 5 while my original post dropped down to "1 troll". There was nothing the least bit resembling a troll in my post. I didn't bother to defend it though, as I don't want rocks through my window and I had clearly offended a group who, by their own writings, is capable of doing such a thing. Hopefully the fact that they had enough mod points among them to make my post disapear and their insults at me "informative" that they won't be tempted to hunt me down as well.
It made me realize that Slashdot, and several other systems I use just like it, are broken in a serious way. The moderation is good, but allowing me to filter posts based on WHO and individual is is just plain wrong. Some of the best posts I've seen on Slashdot are AC and some of the worst are by other people with good Karma. But I'm more interested in rating the post than the person. Why can't Slashdot (and systems like it) tally the ratings on my posts in such a way that nobody even knows what my ID is? Essentially combining the moderation and meta moderation and providing anonymity at the same time. I thiink that if you rated a particular poster poorly some number of times you would stop seeing their posts, without even knowing who they are or that you had done so. Some people ONLY want to see posts they AGREE with, and those people could rate posts accordingly and they would gradually get their wish. Others (like me) would rate on the "quality" of the posts without regard to agreeing or disagreeing with the content, and event
Re:Jboss's slogan (Score:3, Insightful)
Ethics matters (Score:5, Insightful)
My first job, at IBM, wonderful, the only company I'll name because they were perfect. Awesome. My granddad set me down before I took it, he had 35 years there and is a true blue retiree, blue to the end. He told me something that I still remember, it may not be the best place, they have their problems but not once was he ever asked to do or expected to do something uncomfortable for him ethically. They don't speak negatively about their competitors, generally, and they don't expect anyone to. I got bored, the place didn't move fast enough for me, there were politics but I never felt obliged to do anything uncomfortable, in 5 years. It didn't seem like much at the time.
Next job. They cursed at each in the status meetings, first week there I was treated to a stream of insults during a status meeting, because that's how they are. In the two years there I saw people lie to other people I saw people intentionally break code before handing it over to business partners. I saw a whole assortment of dishonesty. That shit runs down hill. They will treat you that way by the time you're done. I remember some of the meetings with vendors, I felt embarassed, I felt like we were treating them like crap and I was ashamed to be part of it. It's one thing to hate your job and just do it because they pay you to and you're a professional; something else because you don't like the way the company makes other people feel. I'm not talking about cut-throat business or anything like that, I'm talking about making people feel bad about themselves, on purpose. There is something to be said about professional conduct.
Insert a few good years of consulting, pretty much clean and pure capitalism. All the shit is kind of taken care of before you start. I always felt inclined to do more though. It may be some of the purist moments of my career; I did work and got paid and that was that. Not completely satisfying, I didn't get to see a lot of projects all the way through, but not all together bad either.
Now I work for a startup with the real deal sleezy VC people pulling the strings. We take open source software, put some pretty kind of GUI on it and then oversell it to people and charge a lot of money. At first we didn't want to admit that we used open source until we learned that it was a benefit in the market place. During that time we actually tried to hide the technology under the covers. Then we started claiming that we did more to it, we took it and made it better, when in reality we never touched a damn thing. Then we placed a couple of TM's on shit that the OSS does, gave it a name and called it our own. Then when an author took exception to some of our practices we were told to go out anonymously and bad mouth him. We've done this to 2 or 3 open source authors. (Now I've done a fair amount of my own OSS coding, I'm a bit of an ideologist and I'm kind of taking a back seat in this new biz, I know what it's like to have people telling you your free code is shit and that you're no good because of it.) I've never directly disobeyed my boss until I got here, if they asked me to do something and the pay kept coming, I'd do it even if I thought it was bad engineering or something; here they have asked me on several occasions to try to influence people, use my reputation to do it, do it anonymously, to try to spread bad FUD about specific people, all while riding on their backs and I won't do it. I sit in on sales calls all the time and we pretty much lie to people, I know how sales is and you put your best side forward but we lie to people. "Do you support blah hardware?" The answer is that we support a particular model, the answer told is that we support most models. I've been tutored in the techniques, you are never supposed to say no, first you say that most people don't want that to make the customer think they are odd by asking for something nobody wants, then you change the subject, then if that doesn't w
DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
Even that well defined chunk of functionality is rife with botchable details. Anyone with half a clue also knew that even if the channel was secured correctly that incorrect or malicious behaivor on either side of the link could compromise it.
Now we have DRM. In DRM, Bob wants to communicate something to Alice but at the same time he wants to prevent Alice from communicating it to Eve. All of the data and necessary keys are in Alice's possession. Granted, the data and keys are obfuscated but she in still in physical possession of everything needed to decrypt the data.
From a strictly information theoretic point of view, why should anyone take that scenario seriously? Bob can make it varying degrees of PITA for Alice to blab to Eve but there is no inherent security here.
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Having said that, I'm not overly surprised that JBoss does this, I've always found the product to be good but the company to be, um, not focused on the users. Newbies have a *very* hard time getting started (check the forums for examples, or try asking a question on IRC) and there's a lot of gaps in the doco that I presume are there to drum up support business.
Re:It's sad (Score:5, Insightful)
JBoss is doing to J2EE what Microsoft was doing to Java back then, only worse. They implement only whatever parts of the standards they feel like coding, and in whatever incompatible way they feel like implementing them.
(Nothing against coding your own framework from scratch. Lots of people did that. E.g., Cocoon, Struts, Springs, etc. Very useful some of those. But FFS, don't call it a J2EE application server unless it actually implements the J2EE specs to the letter.)
Their official response to any complaints was basically "then you suck." E.g., when we complained that under JBoss 3.0 an application loads classes from another application (and then throws an error), their response was basically "then it's your problem. You should recompile all those apps to use the exact same versions of all libraries." The problem that in an enterprise environment someone deploying a totally unrelated application can break your app that worked for months, never seemed to sink in.
I'll go further and say: JBoss and IBM are also the main reasons I'm weary of the mantra "you don't need to sell software, you can make money by supporting it." Both JBoss and IBM's WebSphere (even though IBM's software isn't OSS) make their creators more money from selling expesive consultants than from selling software that works. And gee, in both cases, the software quality is _total_ _shit_.
And I can see how they have no incentive to improve it. Good software that just works, also doesn't need tons of support and consultancy. Crap software, on the other hand, needs tons of it.
On the flip side, they need tons of marketting to get more people to buy it... and end up needing expensive consultants to even just make it work. IBM has an army of salesmen to sell it to retarded managers. JBoss, turns out, has astroturfers. Why am I not surprised?
No. You, my friend, are just a loser (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, those minorities are oppressed for something completely out of their control. They didn't choose their skin colour or face type, like on MMORPGs. Even if they wanted to get expensive surgery to change that (which is already a demeaning and stupid thing to be forced to do), they couldn't afford it. Because they're only getting the crap jobs.
Which rules crap software programmers out of that category on both counts.
(A) Noone's going to do any real discrimination against you. Au contraire, you're one of those fairly rich white-collar guys.
(B) when a company deliberately decides to release crap products and cover it with lots of nasty PR (like JBoss did), they're discriminated against for their own goddamn fault. Not for something out of their control and which they can't change.
So spare me the whiny emotional rethoric already.
And here's another thought for you: software is a _tool_. Repeat after me: "software is a _tool_."
It's _only_ job and role is to get a job done. A company or individual using it should see some benefit from it. That's the _only_ reason they're using it.
It is _not_ a weapon of mass destruction in your retarded ideological wars. Which is exactly what you're proposing to use it as and for. You don't care what collateral damage you cause, you don't care if your lies and astroturfing cause someone a loss. You just care about getting ahead in a petty imaginary war against Microsoft.
In other words, the exact same morals as scammers and those virus writers selling zombie machines.
And I wish such people would die a slow painful death. It's about time this industry returned to being about providing something useful, instead of being one big bullshitter contest.
Re:Links not /.ed, more thoughts... (Score:1, Insightful)