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)."
Anonymous (Score:5, Funny)
Just take my advice, don't listen to anonymous posters...ever! Even if their argument is completely flawless and/or logically impermeable, ignore them.
(By the way, I don't work for JBoss, so you can listen to me.)
Re:Anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I think somebody from Jboss is on the same subnet as me. This is what happens when I try to post an anonymous reply:
Neato. I wonder if I know them.
Re:Anonymous (Score:3, Informative)
Given the MD5 hashes, you could find the IP within a few hours with a brute-force search. IPv4 space isn't *that* big.
Subnet would be within milliseconds, as there are only 32 normally-sane values, and only about 10 are actually used.
One-way hashes don't help much if the space of possible keys is small (that's why we have
Re:Anonymous (Score:3, Interesting)
<?php
header('Content-type: text/plain');
$ipmd = 'fcdc9cbc1f36501550576ab62144ef80';
echo "MD5 is {$ipmd}\n\n";
for ($i = 0; $i <= 255; $i++) {
for ($j = 0; $j <= 255; $j++) {
for ($k = 0; $k <= 255; $k++) {
for ($l = 0; $l <= 255; $l++) {
$ipt = "{$i}.{$j}.{$k}.{$l}";
$iptmd = md5($ipt);
echo "Test IP: {$ipt}\n";
echo "Test MD5: {$iptmd}\n\n";
if ($iptmd == $ipmd) {
echo "
Re:Anonymous (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that this secret must be transferred from one party to the other before it can be used. That makes it much less secretive. A discussion of the key exchange problem (of which this is a subset) is beyond the scope of this thread.
Not in this case. They just have to track what secret they use, possibly changing it regularly, as all they use it for is generating and then verifying a hash.
More common than you think (Score:5, Interesting)
It sucks because unlike marketing efforts and vendors' sales messages, which everyone has learned to always take with a grain of salt, I'm inclined to believe, often instantly and completely, a slashdot posting endorsing product X, because the poster seems unaffiliated and genuine and doesn't really have anything to gain from endorsing it.
In fact, it's very dangerous, because my trust can be easily manipulated this way; I usually don't have time to bother to verify the source of a given posting (Think of how many hundreds or thousands of posts you read a year). However, if I encounter product Y sometime later having read something about it before, I usually vaguely remember whether the post said the product was any good or not and that will usually determine my first impression. In that way, libelous anonymous postings are very dangerous -- I remember hearing some people post that "Python sucked" (probably because of some BS like the whitespace indentation) and for that reason I stayed away for several years until reading some very positive articles and posts -- and now it's one of my most useful productivity tools and I could have saved ridiculous amounts of development time reinventing the wheel had I known about it before. That's kind of a trivial example, but when $ is involved, it's even worse.
Sadly, it's basically the next form of spam. Most of us used to read (mostly) every word of all our emails -- now spam and outrageous commerical claims make that means of communication virtually useless. It will be a shame to see message boards and blogs, etc, filled with this kind of crap (blogs are already targeted by spammers). However, postings by these kinds of shills are often pretty blatant and easy to spot just because of their outrageous claims and distinctive style, but they will get more and more subtle. They're also virtually impossible to track, since real people are on the other end (and you can only really ban problem users after the damage has already been done). And if a company pays a few random dialup users (a tactic my old company was about to try -- yes, I've left since) to troll the net and make these kinds of postings, good luck trying to prove that the company did it or trying to track down or prosecute them.
Really, the only way to tell is to view a given poster's karma/post history and to look for certain suspicious patterns.
-fren
Re:More common than you think (Score:4, Funny)
You do, of course, mean hundreds of thousands, right?
Re:More common than you think (Score:3, Funny)
And people wonder why US tech jobs are being outsourced.
"Yes, just one moment, sir. I understand that you can't get your email but I've got this killer post I've just got to get done before too many other people post. My Karma is at stake here!"
Re:More common than you think (Score:5, Informative)
-fren
Core Values (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, JBoss's second Core Value [jboss.com] is "Group trust and personal integrity."
- We operate internally on the basis of mutual trust. Nobody in the company will knowingly deceive another member.
- We are honest.
- We tell the truth among ourselves, to our clients, to our partners, to our investors, to our prospects.
- We are committed to profitability and sound finances. We are thrifty.
- We place the needs of the federation of projects above individual ones.
Note to self: anyone who has to claim that they're honest probably isn't.Note to self: anyone who has to state that they're honest probably isn't.
Re:Core Values (Score:4, Funny)
If someone says "Trust me.", count your fingers after shaking their hand.
Re:Core Values (Score:3, Funny)
Thats thoughtcrime bitch!
Re:More common than you think (Score:5, Funny)
I spent a lot of time thinking about this sentence, carefully formulating a well-reasoned, thoughtful response to it. Then I went back over it, polishing it and making it more concise, pruning away every superfluous word that might obscure the essential message I was trying to get across. It came down to one word:
Boob.
JBOSS RULES! (Score:3, Funny)
- Not a JBOSS employee
- Really I'm not
Re:JBOSS RULES! (Score:2)
Re:JBOSS RULES! (Score:2, Funny)
(anybody who mods this down is also a JBOSS employee )
(Wonder aloud about whether it's all of Santa's elves who keep moding pro-Linux posts up on slashdot
Re:JBOSS RULES! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One question (Score:4, Informative)
There is a lot more than PHP out there, you know?
One more question (Score:2)
nahhh. j/k
Re:One more question (Score:5, Funny)
What's a Nubian?
Re:One more question (Score:4, Funny)
News flash (Score:3, Funny)
Re:News flash (Score:2)
"I changed my site so that I can update the homepage with Blogger instead of doing it by hand... it's not I am getting into this whole "blogging" thing."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, how is your site not a blog?
These people give all AnonCows a bad name. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainstream media outlets at least do their best to make their commentators and reporters declare any conflicts of interests they have so that viewers can know about it when considering information from that source. But, non-mainstream outlets are more direct... you get "closer" information, but you also take the risk of what happens when a source with conflicts is allowed to speak unchallenged. Which seems to be exactly what happened here.
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.
Re:These people give all AnonCows a bad name. (Score:2)
I wonder, should Slashdot have an anti-astroturfing exception in its privacy policy, under which it could potentially flag all posts that have ever come from known JBoss IP space?
Re:These people give all AnonCows a bad name. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say than 10% of slashdotters post with personally-idenfiable information.
[Here's my chance to get modded down as a troll by bringing up an old story that I submitted and got rejected.]
Basically, compression algorithms can be used as a means for identifying the characteristics of a given author. [innovations-report.de]
With enough of a sample size in an anonymous posting, you might well be able to correlate the author's style with openly-attributed works and thereby identify them.
Jboss's slogan (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jboss's slogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jboss's slogan (Score:3, Insightful)
I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:2, Funny)
I have been waiting for those wedding rings now for over two months! My fiancee has broken up with me because the rings I told her would "soon" arrive has been lost! She thinks I'm cheating on her because of you.
On my way to the postoffice I walked in a pile of dogpoo.
See you in court.
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I am crying big fat crocodile tears of this. (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon Glitch Unmasks War of Reviewers [donswaim.com]
This quote says it all: "John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel "City of Night" and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales."
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.
Zealotry (not a Troll) (Score:2, Insightful)
JBoss (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:JBoss (Score:2)
Even though most of us learned the authors of The Federalist Papers in history class, when they distributed them at the time names were not attached.
Anonymous writing with a self-serving agenda has been around for a long time...
Re:JBoss (Score:3, Insightful)
Customers (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't, but then again, it's accenture.
Its true, check my ip (Score:4, Funny)
So do this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So do this mean... (Score:2)
Annoymous is a myth... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, some speech does come with a legal liablity attached. "Free speech" is a great ideal, but it is also subject to the greater ideal of "Your rights end where somebody else's rights begin." That is, you can't use free speech to give instructions that put somebody else into danger or spreads lies about somebody else. That's just not your right to do because it ends up damaging somebody else's rights.
People who oversimplfy the Bill of Rights... such as those who claim that the 1st Amendment protects all expressions of speech from all authorites everywhere, or that the 5th Amendment means you'll never have to tell of your own crimes in court if you don't want to are making sophomoric mistakes. They sound right, but they're not.
The same goes for this suposed "right" to be annonymous. You can try... but there's always somebody who can squeal on you if they want to.
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone in this group of thousands of nodes published this, but none of us can tell you who.
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone in this group of thousands of nodes published this, but none of us can tell you who.
oh, IANAL, but...
The thousands of people behind those nodes end up just sharing the liability. I can't wait for the first lawsuit that forces a cluster of nearly-annoymous people together into a single defendant, finds that joint defendant liable for something one member of the group did, and then gives them the option of either having each member paying their equal share of the v
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:2)
However, the problem with that is that Freenet doesn't keep any logs. You can't trace back what there is no record of.
Of course, this assumes that Dubya's cronies weren't watching your computer when you published it...
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-t
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 c
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.
Sure you can! (Score:3, Insightful)
Linky [sf.net]. There's no guarantee anyone will read it, though. Them's the breaks.
Re:Anonymous is a myth... (Score:3, Interesting)
The tragedy-of-the-commons aspect is that it takes responsible adults who respect each other to preserve anonymized communication. Fraudsters always get their fingers in the pie, as well as those who promote ever-increasing surveillance ("It's for the children !")
Freedom's just another word for nothing left yto lose...
Re:Annoymous is a myth... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
implications (Score:5, Insightful)
As P2P news moves into the realm of possibility... (Score:3, Funny)
It's sad (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just sad. Shame on JBoss...
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?
Astroturf! You got the cutest little astroturf! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya da da da da da da
Secret Smurf!
Astroturf!
The thing that really makes me laugh is that the last slashdot article [sdtimes.com] featuring SCO getting an award for FUDdism also has some nice comments about JBoss.
Don't be evil, please.
Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Interesting)
"When these masked marauders enter a discussion, you are no longer debating facts and opinions; instead, you are fencing with a phantom"
So the people are masked, their motives are unknown, but the discussions are still real, yes? Here at Slashdot, people can post anonymously, or with presumed pseudonyms/identities; I still don't see the problem.
If some engineer tells you that you should implement some feature you either agree or disagree, it shouldn't matter that the engineer is from company X or some guy in a basement.
This whole post seems like a rant from people who have a grudge so deep against JBOSS that they have made a policy of disagreeing with the company as a whole. Is it any wonder that such a flagrant policy has made JBOSS go undercover? How ironic is it that these people can have a normal discussion with "faceless individuals" but as soon as they realize those individuals were from JBOSS they want to scream bloody murder?
Joseph Elwell.
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:2)
If they're working for their company, posting things in favor of their product and against other products, then it can be seen as equivalent to statements made by the company itself, promoting their software and bashing others. In that case, what's said has to conform to some rules about what's
Called out (Score:3, Interesting)
In the end I'm not sure how much effect comments like these really have, as there is balance.
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: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:Links not /.ed, more thoughts... (Score:5, Informative)
The reason I blogged about this is really simple: truth. Yeah, I know, that sounds trite and stupid, but that really is the main motivation. JBoss people have been posing with very convincing names like "Chip Tyler" and "Joe Murray" for quite some time now, talking up their own product, dissing people like the CDN folks, and directly going after people like me. Some of it got quite nasty as well - and all under the cover of fake names. NOT anonymous ones - no Anonymous Coward. One of them - someone claiming to be Arun Patel but really a senior JBoss executive - went so far as to say online that he worked for WIPRO in Bangalore, India, and to attempt to prove that I was a shill. And he did this when the guy actually has e-mailed me and knew exactly who I really am. The icing on the cake is that the individual _setup the fake Arun Patel account using his real corporate e-mail address_.
This isn't about a vendetta, or revenge, or personalities clashing. It's about exposing a company that uses deceitful tactics to gain market share and simultaneosuly attack individuals and companies. I personally don't care if it's common or not - no matter how prevalent it may, it's still wrong and it should be rooted out and exposed when it's discovered.
Keep in mind also that this was a coordinated corporate policy, and it involved the "big names" at JBoss, and sometimes the weight of faker posts would actually overwhelm entire threads.
It was coordinated, it was nasty, and had high volumes over a span of well over a year.
-Mike Spille
Re:But why would they do it? (Score:4, Interesting)
The CDN folks are some of the leads for the Geronimo project. This is an Apache-licensed J2EE application server.
In other words, it's a new free Java application server which is in direct competition to JBoss. Since it's Apache, anybody can use it (and particularly modify and distribute it) with far fewer restrictions than with JBoss. They are a direct competitor to JBoss - a direct open source competitor.
The JBoss fake posters publically called the technical skills of the CDN/Geronimo folks into question. They did exactly the same to the other major open source Java server, the Jonas people.
The purpose is simple: generate interest and market share for JBoss, get the residual interest that pays their training/services/support bills. Do it by boosting your own stuff, and trying to do verbal hatchet jobs on your competitors and detractors. Make regular people who happen to disagree with you or compete with you look like the bad guys, make you look like poor besieged victims and underdogs.
As for the rest - you'd be surprised what a fake grass roots campaign like this can do. In combination with other legit marketing techniques, it's powerful and persuasive. It gets them just enough attention to get articles written, to get research firms like Gartner and Forrester to take notice - and to get enough attention to get VC funding.
I can understand your puzzlement given the examples and if you're not in the community. But imagine the sample of posts in the referenced blogs - and now imagine 500, 600, 700 of them over years. It has an effect, a very measurable effect. Smearing the names of people who disagree with you just serves to magnify that effect, particularly when it _seems_ to come from uninterested parties.
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously have no familiarity with JBOSS. Shy retiring innocents they are not. For years now they have been haranging anyone who listen that JBOSS is the best Application Server in the known universe, this despite substantial evidence that some of their critical systems were well below standard.
I have no problems with an organistion hawking their wares. I do have a problem with it being turned into propaganda and stuck down my throat when I know it to be patently false.
The JBOSS organisation are doing the OSS movement a serious disservice.
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)
If they were really evil, (Score:2)
They could have hired PR firms. This would be cheaper than spending engineering hours. The results might not be as good because engineers know what they are doing and can give you honest answers. If they really wanted to post crap and act like, oh M$ term, "net thugs", they could have offshored it!
They could use anonymizers.
They could have
I'll h
Re:Anonymous or not opinions count. (Score:2, Informative)
I think people have grudges against JBoss because of these online forum practices. I've followed a couple of flame wars in the past and believe me, the JBoss guys just do not shut up. I remember looking back at how often they would post and wonder how much spare time they had on their hands - and that didn't include any of these 'anonymous' posts.
They always shoot people down, telling them to put their money where their mouth is but their problem now is that people are actually starting to do this - eg. Ge
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.
TheServerSide Sucks! (Score:3, Insightful)
No way! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, I'm retarded...
Trust nothing you read on the internet...I am sexy!
Speaking of crap... (Score:2, Insightful)
I almost never post 'anonymously,' however, I put a pretty hefty distance between my onl
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!
This can never happen on Slashdot, thankfully. (Score:2, Informative)
theserverside.com is a cesspool anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
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:So what was the real motivation? (Score:4, Informative)
A big key of this is hijacking threads. If a thread started going "bad" from a JBoss perspective, both employees with their real names and fake names would sweep in simultaneously posting positive things about JBoss and refuting negative parts. They literally turned some threads from being anti-JBoss to looking positive.
Along the way, they made people who posted any negative JBoss posts look like they were the bad guys. "Oh poor us, look, these mean people are persecuting us!". This is a prime JBoss tactic - do something underhanded and slimy, and if there's a whiff of being caught make the people doing the catching look like the bad guys - and make yourself look like a poor victim.
Keep in mind that, having literally done it for years, they're pretty good at it. No blatant cheerleading. Sometimes they would put a mild negative comment in to make the post look more realistic "gee, CMP really sucked, but I hear it's better in 3.2", or "yeah their JMS wasn't that good, but they say they're making it better - anyone know anymore about that?".
To judge it, you have to look at the volume of threads and volume of posts over time. The blogs referenced have touched upon only maybe 5-10% of the total! We had neither the time or energy to exhaustively post everything the fake users did. If you happen to have the time, check out some of the threads on TheServerSide. Watch for their entry into them, and watch them turn the tide of opinion on a thread, and discredit naysayers along the way. In an odd way you have to respect it - they've raised these fake posts to an art form, they've honed their craft over many years.
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.
No. You, my friend, are just a loser (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, those minorities are oppressed for something completely
Iraqi minister (Score:2, Funny)
"It is all a lie, there was no blogs, there is no internet! YOU ARE NOT ON THE INTERNET I TRIPLE PROMISE YOU!"
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 t
Not news (Score:2)
Does anyone seriously think JBoss hasn't been doing that same sort of thing right here for ages? Or that the reviews you read on Amazon are all on the level? Or that the reviews you'll find when you're looking for a web host are all honest? Come on. Internet astroturf has been rampant for years.
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!
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
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
Alternatives? (Score:3, Interesting)
So now we are supposed to think JBoss sucks because nobody who knows better really uses it, and only shills endorse it (does anybody who knows better really use EJBs anyway? The architecture sucks, and that's Sun's fault, not JBoss'). Fine, so what the hell is the alternative? Apache Geronimo isn't off the ground yet and got off to a rocky start with licensing issues with some reused JBoss code (that whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth about the JBoss people actually, who seemed too eager to try to discredit a competing project).
Thankfully I got out of the enterprise software world two years ago, and if I never have to see another heinous piece-of-shit EJB system for the rest of my life, I can assure you it will be too soon. Nonetheless, for my personal edification and to enlighten those I still interact with who are stuck in that world, what the hell Open Source J2EE platform ought they to be using?
Frankly I'm not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
If you go to their forums you'll get a taste of the sheer nastiness around JBoss:
Altogether a very unpleasant community. So the kinds of slimey, underhand and outright dishonest behaviour by JBoss people being reported here doesn't exactly surprise me. I guess they must take Microsoft and SCO as their inspiration.
The bad behaviour of the JBoss community has been reported previously on Slashdot.
Such a shame really as JBoss itself is an excellent App Server.
Re:Be careful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Be careful (Score:2)
I ask this as a serious question...
Re:Be careful (Score:2)
I do this if I ever forget which is which.
(And no, I don't think there's any real difference, save that the words mean two different things and are oft confused.)
Re:Were they that successful? (Score:2)
I always wondered what it was, but the official site, instead of giving a concise description, has a bunch of corporatese crap.
This story means that I won't ever have to worry about finding out, which is just good for me.
What is JBoss? (Score:5, Informative)
JBoss
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
JBoss (pronounced Jay Boss) is an open source, Java based application server. Because it is Java based, JBoss can be used on any operating system that supports Java. It is open source, but a company (also named JBoss) creates it. The company has a tech consultation service, but the consultants spend half of their time programming.
JBoss implements the entire J2EE suite of services.
The Sims Online uses JBoss to run its multiplayer games.
Re:And this is news because??? (Score:2, Informative)
SCO, Microsoft, William Gates Foundation, RIAA, MPAA, Government, big companies not mentioned already, patents: bad
Linux, Linus, Apple (with regards to BSD), BSD, Java (with regards to Sun opening it), Freedom of Speech, Natalie Portman: go
Re:Story is a Reminder (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Story is a Reminder (Score:3, Informative)