LinuxToday Astroturfing Explained

cigarky sent us Paul Ferris' account (fwiw, Paul is a good guy) of the LinuxToday astroturfing that we mentioned a few weeks ago. Much more explanation about how Executive Editor Kevin Reichard was posting numerous comments under numerous aliases on the LT forums. Even more scary is the editorial war regarding linking outside content. My opinion is that LT's only value was the outside content they linked: until Dave and later Paul left, they were the best url for finding comprehensive Linux news. A real eye-opening piece about "Journalism" and Internet.com. (Note: LT and Internet.com are sorta competitors, although I never really cared much. My opinions are probably skewed somehow because of that ;))

Comments

Astroturfing? Sick!

[Jesse Helms]

Astroturfing... that's another sick gay reference. If I was president instead of that pussy Texas liberal Bush I would bomb the holy hell out of Slashdot's offices. This is SMUT! Federal money has paid for this SMUT! God is against gay commie liberal crap.

jobs.osdn.com

[Eric Green]

[eric@ehome]$ telnet jobs.osdn.com 80
Trying 216.138.211.59...
Connected to H59.C211.tor.velocet.net (216.138.211.59).
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 16:32:11 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 41966
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDGQQGQNMY=CECCFLMBNIDDPJMFPCILNIDB; path=/
Cache-control: private

Connection closed by foreign host.

Yes, does appear to be IIS on Windows, but it also appears that they do not themselves operate jobs.osdn.com, but rather farm it out to a subcontractor.

-E