Slashdot Mirror
JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme
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)."
This anonymous stuff is just a bunch of crap. Why anyone would listen to someone posting anonymously is beyond me.
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.)
You get what you pay for in free online forums. Here on Slashdot, you're welcome to publish what you want, but if you don't want to be tied to an e-mail-confirmed user account then you have to accept that your username will display as "Anonymous Coward", be penalized in the point-based mod system (assuming the user hasn't overriden the setting from the default), and you'll still be IP and cookie tracked for whatever purposes OSDN wants.
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.
Seriously, who is going to take a company that prides itself on being a Proffesional Open Sourse Company.... have to wonder what marketing genious came up with that one...
drunk chemists
My heart is forever broken. To think that this kind of crap would go on within the open source "Community". Newsflash : This happens everywhere. On every review site, on every opinion forum - EVERYWHERE. I have competitors anonymously bashing me on Yahoo Shopping, E-Pinions, Shopping.com etc. It is done for one reason - profit. J-Boss is trying to make money, and they are willing to use all the tools at their disposal to discredit everyone who does not share their opinions. This is nothing new and nothing that will not happen again.
Isn't doing anything new. This particular technique was around long before the internet, or blogs...
-LoneWolf-
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
...that all of /.'s "Anonymous Coward" postings bashing SCO can be backtracked to Linus now?
You can't really publish anything truely anonymously. You never really could anyway. The closest thing is to find somebody who is willing to know who you are who is willing to accept your writing and publish it without crediting you while disclaiming that somebody else wrote it. Of course, that person has to accept the legal liability that comes with publishing that work as if they wrote it themselves.
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.
This is interesting, because if you can remember the stock market has even been swayed by posts on the yahoo economic forums in the past...I think this is a step in the right direction, anonimity is great and all, but when your using it to ruin the competition and make yourself look better (or in the case of the stock market to weasel people out of their money) then someone has to crack down on you....in this case I'm even more excited because it seems to be public/private intervention rather then the government, so these people DEFFINATELY are going to get what's just deserts for their actions.
Sad for Open Source primarily. Astroturfind is the sort of activity you expect from corporations like Microsoft, but I would much prefer F/OSS (and the industries it created) to flourish on its own merits, just to prove to the world that there is no need for dirty tricks when the software and development methods are good.
This is just sad. Shame on JBoss...
I guess I don't see the problem. Whether the posters were anonymous or not, don't their opinions and refutations of the facts matter?
"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.
I must say that I am shocked to hear that some thing like this could take place, and on the internet of all places. I thought that every thing I read on the internet was true and that I would make millions from forwarding emails and that hot 18 year old on AIM that wants me is not a man.
Oh wait, I'm retarded...
Trust nothing you read on the internet...I am sexy!
I know you were being funny, but this is a very clever (albeit very unethical) and common technique. I know that at my last company (who had, well, some additional ethical concerns, but anyway) they would post on targeted message boards hyping up their site and would pretend to be happy customers. It's highly cheap, low effort, and effective.
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
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
An Open Source (LGPL) implementation of a J2EE aplication server.
There is a lot more than PHP out there, you know?
That site is full of so much flaming and mindless shrieking, it makes me wonder how Java gets anywhere. Seriously, there are a few exceptions, but the average quality of comments there make Slashdot seem like a community of polite geniuses by contrast.
This is another ugly story that shows how little we need SCO and Microsoft to attack the open source community, because we are so willing to do their work for them.
First, JBoss Group betrayed the trust of what should have been a largely sympathetic community in TheServerSide 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 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.
When google fails ;)
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.
After all, JBoss's second Core Value 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.
You don't see a difference between posting pseudonymously in order to respect obligations not to express opinions of your employer, and posting pseudonymously in order to give the impression that you are specifically NOT affiliated with your company and represent an independent viewpoint, including referring to yourself in the third-person and making up false claims that make the company look good?
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!
> What does WTF mean?
What's a Nubian?
I know it's a joke, but JBoss is not the best choice in all cases. It has no license fees which is awesome, and there are things that make it easy to develop with over other J2EE containers. But if you are expecting a lot of users, it's not the way to go. When doing the performance improvements on a J2EE application, I couldn't get 200 simultaneous users to be able to use the JBoss system. Websphere 5 was handling 1300 (that was it's limit, though that ended the improvement work I did, since that was the target goal).
-no broken link
You ruined a potentially good joke. You should have said: What the fuck does WTF mean?
Sorry, not even close. I'm not an employee of CDN, have never been, am not affiliated with them in any way. Neither are the other bloggers referenced. The only person referenced with any affiliation with JBoss is Rickard, who used to be a major committer on JBoss.
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
You have to realize first that this really did go on for years, and involves hundreds of posts. The motivations seemed to be three fold. 1) Show JBoss in a good light. 2) Disparage competing products. 3) Gain control of discussion threads, and discredit people who wrote negative posts regarding JBoss.
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.
Oh, sorry, I'm too deep into the community and forgot that what's obvious to me may not be obvious to the world at large.
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.
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