Free Software Mag Interviews Sys-Con Publisher

NW writes "Tony Mobily, editor of the Free Software Magazine recently interviewed Fuat Kircaali, founder and publisher of Sys-Con Media. The interview revolves around the recent controversy surrounding the article written by Maureen O'Gara attacking Pamela Jones of GrokLaw."

Comments

Enterprise's finale begins in 30 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

And we're discussing some publisher?

Re:Enterprise's finale begins in 30 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless a hot Vulcan in heat comes over to my house to crush my pelvis during exhuberant sex, I've seen the last anything Star Trek.

Montreal?

[Montreal!!hahahahaha]

hahahahah

Re:Montreal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you create a new account? Seriously you are about as funny as old man soup

Re:Montreal?

[Montreal!!hahahahaha]

My advice to you, my young "canadian" friend, is to watch some South Park.
Montreal?
muahahahahahaha

Re:Montreal?

[Montreal!!hahahahaha]

Despite your slightly unkind posts, I wish you both a life full of happiness and a warm summer.
muahahahahaha

A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

So O'Gara did a piece where she tried to find out who Pamela Jones really is, and now she's a pariah because people were upset by what was written.

It's chilling how an angry mob can effectively silence a person just because they didn't agree. I thought people in the open source community were more open minded than that.

This is really chilling and scary how people can bully others into submission over one opinion piece.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

An opinion piece is something that lists the name of her mother (not PJ) and also gives a street address along with pictures of the outside of where she lives? Get real.

O'Gara's piece was an attempt at a smear job by painting PJ as a crazy elderly Jehovah's Witness. Those in the SCO camp/pro-SCO people must be incredibly desperate to be resorting to tactics like that.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[badasscat]

This is really chilling and scary how people can bully others into submission over one opinion piece.

What MOG did was not an opinion piece; it was, in fact, illegal. PJ is, by her own words, considering her legal options right now, but nobody has the right to a) trespass in another person's home (as MOG all but admits she did in her article, commenting on how the interior of PJ's home looks, noting she was not home at the time), b) list the addresses and telephone numbers of relatives, and c) slander another person publicly with unverified information.

I note that you're an anonymous coward so you obviously do not want us to know who you are. I wonder why?

What MOG did was beyond sleazy; it was illegal, journalistically unethical and personally immoral, and if she was silenced for that, she has nobody to blame but herself.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[jjmartin540]

Am I the only one who thinks that DOS'ing someone's website is crummy and ILLEGAL ? Yeah, I read O'Gara's story, and yeah she wrote some pretty unprofessional, rude, and possibly illegal things, but the hackers trashed LinuxWorld, which only posted the story. In TFA the interview-ee says that its a NATIONALLY-syndicated column, so, even if somone were to DOS a site, why not DOS HER website?

Re:A Chilling Effect

[gvc]

Here's the Letter to Readers by LinuxWorld detailing the standards of journalism that O'Gara contravened.

Among them stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, or social status.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[chotchki]

Well its rather simple. To an inexperienced sys admin a slashdotting looks identical to a DDoS.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[__david__]

O'Gara's piece was an attempt at a smear job by painting PJ as a crazy elderly Jehovah's Witness. Those in the SCO camp/pro-SCO people must be incredibly desperate to be resorting to tactics like that.

And stupid too. Given SCO's CEO, good old Darl, is a Utah dwelling Mormon it's not really in SCO's best interest making fun of other people's religions. There's so many of ways to make a Mormon look like a crazy religious kook, do they really want to open that door?

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

An interesting thing about Groklaw is that if you post comments that PJ does not like you will get banned without even knowing it. You will see the comments, but no one else. Kind of a slimy thing to do, really. Sort of a LACK of jurnalistic integrety maybe???

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

60 Minutes does this kind of thing all the time. It's not illegal. Its not even immoral journalism, if there's a story there.

OGara tried to figure out if there was an IBM-PJ connection, failed and published a fluff piece about PJ's car anyway. That's just crap journalism and a shitty thing to do.

As for PJ, her little internet soapbox made here a "public figure" and now she learns this has real world consequences. She basically started this nasty bitchfight with OGara, no suprise that someone bothered figuring out where she lived. (Just as groklawers did with McBride's home address and phone number.)

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the part calling it "news".

How, precisely, was ANY part of that "news" or even relevant to ANYTHING to do with the SCO story?

Obviously, this guy hasn't been following along, and has made this decision for monetary reasons.

However, I still hope to clue him in, and would hope that people would be less hostile towards him, but rather do their best to help him to learn what was so upsetting about the piece.

As for the denials, well, actually they shouldn't be talking about this at all, but instead be talking with a lawyer. It's not good if they don't understand why the piece is so chilling.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

People open the Mormon door all the time on /, and Groklaw. Darl McBride's home address has also been published in these fora. Basically PJ is the figurehead for a group of very nasty fanboys, just keeping enough distance so she can feel wronged when someone turns it around on her.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[bernywork]

No, not quite, 60 Minutes doesn't turn around and say at 110 something street, you will find this. That's the boundary that got crossed, if they said "In this apartment block in downtown Missouri" or whatever it was, that wouldn't be going to far. To publish the information on the internet of someone who obviously wanted to keep their personal life out of what they do professionaly, that's the step too far.

Also the information was unverified. The whole thing to me sounds like a smear story, no matter which way you look at it.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

You can add Gender and Physical Appearance

Although MOG concedes she never met Pamela Jones (neither PJ of Groklaw or the Hartsdale's Pamela Jones), she calls her an "harridan".

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't say 110 Something Street nowdays, but 15 years ago they would park right in someone's front yard and tell you exactly where it was.

It was a smear story. However, (hypothetically) if O'Gara had found IBM pay stubs all over PJ's desk, then it would have been legitimate journalism. Therefore stalking her house was a legitimate journalistic tactic.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[putaro]

I don't think anyone is really after O'Gara for trying to find PJ and have a face-to-face with her. The article (have you read the article?) is just crap, though, with lots of ad-hominem attacks, speculation, innuendo and addresses of people who may or may not be PJ and no real information of any kind. It reads like something an 8th grader would write after they got told off on-line.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Fuat Kircaali? By Anonymous O'Coward Friday May 13, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive asswipe who allegedly publishes the Sys-Con family of bird cage liners. The now-famous opinion-shaping hack magazine publisher Fuat Abdi Kircaali, aka FuAK, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met him - at a Yacht Show in Ft. Lauderdale complete with a "I'm FuAK, Who the FuAK are You?" badge - and described him as a fortyish Arab conman who giggled a lot. And fucked his Sr. Vice President of Advertising. Oh yeah? Wonder what flavor Astro-glide he uses. Fuat Abdi Kircaali is a 41-year-old piece of Arabic shit who lives in a shabby genteel $2.2 million mansion in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 3001 NE 36th Street in Lighthouse Point, Florida. Lighthouse Point is in Broward County and Broward County is spam-scam country. See, even though Kircaali treats Linux "magazines" like they were Kleenex and publishes hit-pieces regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this home address and - wouldn't you know it but - he cosigned for the $1.76 million adjustable rate mortgage with his apparent live-in girlfriend and Senior Vice President of advertising, Carmen Gonzalez. Fuat and Carmen have lived in this little piece of property since February, 2003. Now, this isn't your usual anonymous Florida McMansion. It's practically a self-contained village where spammers launch billions of V1-a'6rA emails upon the world from their garage, porn directors fuck the mouths off of white trash girls and people know each other's business. But Washington Mutual didn't know much about Fuat when they gave him a mortgage except that he had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, and liked yachts. Oh yes, and fucking his Senior Vice President of Advertising. He was also missing and had been for weeks. Nobody there knew where he was. He had up and disappeared one day, and the yacht skipper was worried about him. He said his son, Fuat Abdi Gonzalez Jr. had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some Linux zealots that "nobody knew," as the webmaster described them, had tried to DoS his website 5 times while he was gone - the SCO license he had had installed on his site - something nobody else in the internet seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the server. FUCKING HIS SR. VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING. TO BE CONTINUED.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Fuat Kircaali?
By Anonymous O'Coward

Friday May 13, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive asswipe who allegedly publishes the Sys-Con family of bird cage liners.

The now-famous opinion-shaping hack magazine publisher Fuat Abdi Kircaali, aka FuAK, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met him - at a Yacht Show in Ft. Lauderdale complete with a "I'm FuAK, Who the FuAK are You?" badge - and described him as a fortyish Arab conman who giggled a lot. And fucked his Sr. Vice President of Advertising.

Oh yeah? Wonder what flavor Astro-glide he uses.

Fuat Abdi Kircaali is a 41-year-old piece of Arabic shit who lives in a shabby genteel $2.2 million mansion in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 3001 NE 36th Street in Lighthouse Point, Florida. Lighthouse Point is in Broward County and Broward County is spam-scam country.

See, even though Kircaali treats Linux "magazines" like they were Kleenex and publishes hit-pieces regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this home address and - wouldn't you know it but - he cosigned for the $1.76 million adjustable rate mortgage with his apparent live-in girlfriend and Senior Vice President of advertising, Carmen Gonzalez.

Fuat and Carmen have lived in this little piece of property since February, 2003.

Now, this isn't your usual anonymous Florida McMansion. It's practically a self-contained village where spammers launch billions of V1-a'6rA emails upon the world from their garage, porn directors fuck the mouths off of white trash girls and people know each other's business.

But Washington Mutual didn't know much about Fuat when they gave him a mortgage except that he had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, and liked yachts. Oh yes, and fucking his Senior Vice President of Advertising.

He was also missing and had been for weeks.

Nobody there knew where he was.

He had up and disappeared one day, and the yacht skipper was worried about him. He said his son, Fuat Abdi Gonzalez Jr. had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some Linux zealots that "nobody knew," as the webmaster described them, had tried to DoS his website 5 times while he was gone - the SCO license he had had installed on his site - something nobody else in the internet seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the server.

FUCKING HIS SR. VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to make it clear since you aren't following: The published story was shite. Looking in her windows with her landlord and talking to her mother was perfectly fine.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[r7]

An opinion piece is something that lists the name of her mother (not PJ) and also gives a street address along with pictures of the outside of where she lives?

On top of that he says he found "nothing unethical" about the article. How could you ever trust a publication with an editor like that?

I will be checking my all of magazines for any reference to "Fuat Kircaali" or "Sys-Con Media" and not purchasing anything of the sort.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK because they make special computers for ugly people now (look for the Linux brandname at walmart).

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, where was the stereotype? She simply reported these details, but I didn't see any commentary.

Besides, PJ has reported plenty of times that the SCO execs were Mormons. What does that say about her "standards of journalism"?

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

oops, I cannot click the link above, I just added th e 127.0.0.1 listed in a previous post. :)

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

a) trespass in another person's home (as MOG all but admits she did in her article, commenting on how the interior of PJ's home looks, noting she was not home at the time),

MOG could have looked through a window. Sleazy I agree, but you're jumping to conclusions when you claim MOG trespassed.

b) list the addresses and telephone numbers of relatives

The only phone number in MOG's "story" was one that was published in a Medabiliti press release from 2003. I see no evidence that the number MOG did publish was a relative's number.

The MOG article is getting harder to find; it is effectively being deleted from the Internet. However here is a google cache copy. The only phone number in the article is 914-761-7423. If you google for that number you can find it in another google cache. The second cached copy is a press release submitted by Medabiliti to PR Newswire.

What MOG did was despicable - there's no doubt about that - but let's not start falsifying what she did. The facts condemn MOG enough as it is without having to make things up.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

For a moment there, I thought you were talking about the people rioting in Afghanistan because someone told them that someone at Gitmo flushed a Koran down the toilet.

My friend's bother knows the guy who saw the other guy flushing it. Seriously.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[pallmall1]

What's chilling is O'gara. It took awhile to put my finger on it, but O'gara was writing a message, not any kind of article. Think about it; there was no news value, no "facts" stated concretely, and no effort whatsoever to reach any interested reader on either side of the SCO debate.
O'gara didn't write this to readers. She wrote this directly to PJ, intending to shake her up by instilling an uneasy sense of fear not only for herself, but FOR HER FAMILY. "Watch your step, PJ. You'd never forgive yourself if someone close to you got hurt. It's a dangerous world, with serial killers and all. ...and accidents happen all the time. See,PJ, if I can find you, so can anyone -- especially now." Now THAT'S chilling.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Master of Transhuman]

"Our mission is to support the Open Source community by giving them the strongest voice and sharing information about their accomplishments in a truthful and positive way. We also strive to cover the shortcomings or problems we see with Linux and Open Source from an objective point of view."

NONE of which has anything to do with Maureen O'Gara who is an SCO shill and a deliberate opponent of OSS.

More importantly, Sys-Con is run by an asshole who is now attacking OSS people as criminal wackos who caused his company to go down "for three days" from a DoS attack.

Meanwhile he has not explained how it is that some OSS companies were NOT AWARE that their ads were being run on LBN, let alone next to anti-OSS articles from O'Gara. I suspect some probing will find this guy is inflating his advertising hits by running ads on his sites without the knowledge of his advertisers.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean a shilling effect?

Re:A Chilling Effect

[rpdillon]

Yeah, exactly, because commenting has something to do with Journalism (huh?), and of course Pamela Jones doesn't mention anywhere that it is a non-commercial site, and she reserves the right to moderate as she sees fit. Oh wait, yeah she does:

Comments Guidelines

Groklaw is a noncommercial site. It's my home on the internet, and just like if I invited you to my home, I'd appreciate it if you helped keep it clean, tidy and a friendly place to visit.

The Groklaw goal has always been civil speech and devotion to the truth, even when discussing those to whom we are opposed. Especially then. Groklaw has never been just a news site, althought it is a news site, because we have a purpose: to unFUD the FUD by laying out the facts. We pool our knowledge and work as a group. Our discussions require tolerance and politeness, so that we can focus on our goal.

We don't need hatefulness, or crudity, or venom. The truth is enough. While I welcome your comments, kindly keep them on the topics at hand. I reserve the right to moderate, although I have no duty to do so. You are responsible for your comments. This is a legal research and antiFUD site and we work as a community on projects. Therefore, divisive topics are not appropriate here. Keep in mind that Groklaw has visitors from all over the world. I would like everyone to feel at home, so please stick to the one thing that we share in common, an interest in legal cases in the news, currently SCO v. Everybody.

Consequently, I will delete any nasty or obscene remarks, any obvious trolling, any personal attacks, any illegal suggestions, any URLs to loathsome content or dangerous or annoying scripts, at a minimum. I reserve the right to remove user accounts as well. If you have any licensing instructions, include them in your comments. I will also remove misleading or incorrect statements or links thereto made by persons having an interest in the stock price of any company involved in any of the cases we cover on Groklaw, and no permission is granted to any such persons to reproduce the content of Groklaw.
[Emphasis mine]

This has nothing to do with journalistic integrity. Don't try to confuse the issue of whether or not it's OK to hunt someone down and publish personal information about them and their relatives with whether or not you can write whatever you want on someone else's private website, even after they've told you they won't tolerate certain behavior and reserve the right to ban/delete accounts/comments.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[d34thm0nk3y]

No, not quite, 60 Minutes doesn't turn around and say at 110 something street, you will find this. That's the boundary that got crossed

Seriously, some of the addresses read like friggin yahoo driving directions!

Nick and his wife Andrea live in fancier digs than his ma on East 76th Street off First Avenue

Re:A Chilling Effect

[d34thm0nk3y]

From the linked article:

Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at (address removed but was full in article) in Hartsdale, New York.

Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least,

Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to (address removed, but was full), Connecticut, 24 miles away

The woman at the house, Barbara Jones Sharnik (her mom),

Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westchester phone number (phone number removed) and a Medabiliti e-mail (e-mail removed)

Nick and his wife Andrea live in fancier digs than his ma on (full address removed)



judge for yourself...

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read posts by PJ where she defines "trolling" as basically anything she disagrees with. She actually stated "We don't want our beliefs challenged here".

And the groklaw forums are full of personal attacks and illegal suggestions (even if in jest).

Re:A Chilling Effect

[jack_csk]

Ya, someone in the world is planning for a massive damage of life and property, maybe us in the open source community should be more open-mind to that as well, huh?

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Provide a link to the comment "We don't want our beliefs challenged here."

Come on, back it up.

Re:A Chilling Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem.... Darls phone number and address was posted HERE before it was on Groklaw.
In fact it was posted there as a link from here.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744 ,39115983,00.htm

Idiot.

Nice, very nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Monty Python, do you get it ? It's funny, they named a programming language after Monty Python, they called it 'Python'. hahaha. It's funny, you see ? Do you get it ? Python, haha. It's very amusing to me.haha.it's very funny. Python!hahaha.it's funny do you see ?

My Rights Online?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck are MY rights affected by this stupid controversy?

Seriously, do the editors have any concept of what rights really are.

Re:My Rights Online?

[thundercatslair]

Nope they don't, especially Zonk. If you want them to post your article just submit it under the "your rights online" section.

The Credibility of Groklaw

[dj245]

Lots of people seem to be attacking the credibility of Groklaw lately, this case was carried by several online media including The Register which seemed to side against Groklaw. A conspiricy by SCO perhaps?

In the event of such a conspiracy, I today announce my new cut-rate prices of my credibility.

For $20, I will state in any highly moderated slashdot comment that Groklaw may not be entirely correct and all sides of the issue must be looked at.
For $40, I will embed subliminal messages into comments stating that Groklaw is evil and SCO is good.
For $80, I will crapflood articles with SCO propaganda.
and for $699, I will state that I too have purchased linux liscences for my company so we don't have to worry about the legal liabilities and also, Groklaw sucks.

All Prices USD, effective date 13 Friday 2005.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[chucks86]

How much is it to threaten giving up Microsoft products in order to get them at cut-rate... then sell the unopened products at an inflated value?

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Priceless?

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[PygmySurfer]

Lots of people seem to be attacking the credibility of Groklaw lately, this case was carried by several online media including The Register which seemed to side against Groklaw. A conspiricy by SCO perhaps?

Why is everything a conspiracy around here? MS funded SCO's bullshit lawsuit. SCO is funding this crazy lady's attack on our precious PJ. Much as slashdot might want it to be so, the world isn't out to get open source and everything slashgeeks hold near and dear.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is everything a conspiracy around here? MS funded SCO's bullshit lawsuit. SCO is funding this crazy lady's attack on our precious PJ. Much as slashdot might want it to be so, the world isn't out to get open source and everything slashgeeks hold near and dear.

Well duh... if everyone were out to get open source, they wouldn't need conspiracies and bribes. The bribes are there because everyone LOVES open source, and they will only oppose it if given obscene amounts of cash! :)

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is governed by the Marxian Doctrine of Historical Inevitability. Anyone opposing Linux World Domination must be a collaborationist gangster!

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[pcgabe]

How much to slap a sticker on Groklaw saying that their interpretation of the law is only a theory?

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Groklaw's credibility has been diminished for very specific reasons, including its censorship policy, hypocrisy and flouting Godwin's law.

Let's be clear: PJ threw the first punch at MoG by publicly accusing her of lying. Thereafter, the Groklaw community regularly attacked MoG in the most vicious and personal terms. If someone was anonymously running a web site attacking me, I sure would want to find out who was behind it.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[DickBreath]

Let's be clear: PJ threw the first punch at MoG by publicly accusing her of lying

Pointing out the differences between MoG's story and the actual facts is throwing a punch?


including its censorship policy

Whether you agree with them or not, Groklaw's posting policies seem completely clear, at least to me. I've never had any trouble abiding by them, and I post often (under a different name).


Groklaw community regularly attacked MoG in the most vicious and personal terms.

Private individuals posting to a website can freely express their disgust at the actions of a reporter. Perhaps you are new to trolling on slashdot?


If someone was anonymously running a web site attacking me, I sure would want to find out who was behind it.

Even if you did know who was behind a website, you have no need to publish their personal details.

I find it interesting that MoG can't argue any actual facts or issues. She can only resort to personal attacks. MoG doesn't refute PJ's arguments, she just publishes the personal address of PJ's 80+ year old mom, right before Mother's Day, an elderly woman who has no connection to the running of Groklaw; nor does PJ's brother. What do these personal details have to do with the problems in MoG's stories?

If MoG didn't want someone "attacking" her by pointing out the blindingly obvious problems in her earlier stories, maybe she should do some real journalism?

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[DickBreath]

How much to slap a sticker on Groklaw saying that their interpretation of the law is only a theory?

How much to slap a sticker on SCO fanboys saying that

• truckloads of code
• millions of lines of code
• the code right here in this briefcase
• the DNA of Linux is Unix
• the GPL is unconstitutional
• SCO's ownership of Unix

is only a theory.

Have you actually read any of the court documents at Groklaw, or their analysis? Are you aware of what Judge Kimball wrote last February? Are you aware of what IBM's counterclaims are, and what they will mean once discovery closes and SCO has shown no evidence in this farce?

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[DickBreath]

If someone was anonymously running a web site attacking me, I sure would want to find out who was behind it.

Said the anonymous coward while web posting several attacks on Groklaw.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Master of Transhuman]

Because, moron, MS DID fund SCO's bullshit lawsuit, albeit in a roundabout way (which is exactly the way these things are done.)

And given that Darl McBride has made a point of attacking PJ and suggesting she was "not who she seems to be", and given that O'Gara had access to SCo documents unseen by anybody else, it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that she is indeed an SCO shill and either on direct or indirect orders or on her own decided to pull this stunt.

Which makes you an innocent moron...

I'll bet you click on spam, too...

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Master of Transhuman]

Since GrokLaw's function is to cover the SCO case from the legal angle, saying that it's credibility is diminished by any other issue is a red herring and misleading.

Saying that PJ "threw the first punch" by analyzing and refuting MoG's bullshit is just plain stupid.

Finally, if an anonymous person is attacking me, sure, I'd want to know who it is - if it actually mattered to my safety or revenue. Which, however, does not mean I would publish a bunch of personal details which have NOTHING TO DO with the arguments said person was using (unless the person were like, oh, Jeff Gannon, who purports to be a "family values Republican" while actually acting as a gay escort IN the White House - in which case, the charge of hypocrisy might be validly based on those personal details.)

In other words, you're a moron.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Master of Transhuman]

Reminds me of the cartoon where the guy says, "I'm not waiting for my identity to be stolen. I'm selling it on eBay."

But you're selling yourself cheap! Look how much those "journalists" got for selling Bush's health plan! Scores of thousands! Go for the big bucks! Start writing articles claiming Linus is gay! That Linux is actually written by Red Chinese hackers! That Linus is a "foreign terrorist" - worse, a Communist! (Oh, wait, Bill already said that...)

Remember, the bigger the bullshit, the bigger the payoff!

YOU COULD BE PRESIDENT SOME DAY!

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[pcgabe]

Have you not read the Evolution sticker shock article from last year?

Note to self: "Do not attempt irony on Slashdot anymore, it will be misinterpreted."

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Anonymous Coward]

Groklaw's posting policies seem completely clear

Is that a fact? Where are they being "clear"?

Where (on PJ's site) does it say "if you want to post here, you may not say anything negative about this site, or the way it's run, anywhere else on the internet"

If it's "clear", it's only "clear" now, because you saw what happened to John Gabriel. When it happened, it was in no way "clear" that discussing Groklaw in another venue could be held against you.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[Allnighterking]

God you are cheap. You must be in Congress and not the Senate. Prices are higher over here.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[zerbot]

There has been a recent discussion on Groklaw about the "can't be seen by anybody but the poster" phenomenon. It's been experienced by people who are very strongly pro-Groklaw as well as by those who are anti-Groklaw, as well as by those who are in between. Some people can see their posts at one computer and not another. Switching to a different "view" of comments typically ends up showing all the comments. So it would appear that this has something to do with caching somewhere, whether at ibiblio, end-user ISP's, or in browser caches, and is not some nefarious plot to censor people.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[DickBreath]

If that is what you meant, it was definitely way to subtle. I did think of the "Evolution is only a theory" as a possible way to respond. I was also considering "Relatively is only a theory."

Your statement on its face definitely sounds like you do not believe any of Groklaw's analysis. So far, this case has gone just about exactly how I have kept telling my local anti-Open Source zealot, for over two years, thanks to Groklaw.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[PygmySurfer]

Yes, let's resort to childish name-calling, that's mature.

Because, moron, MS DID fund SCO's bullshit lawsuit, albeit in a roundabout way (which is exactly the way these things are done.)

Oh that's right, so did Sun too! buying software licenses leads to terrorism I imagine, too! MS couldn't just be buying insurance to protect themselves because there's UNIX code in SFU, and Sun couldn't be doing the same because there's obviously UNIX code in Solaris. Nope, everything's a huge conspiracy.

Maybe if I joined the unwashed masses in using Linux, I'd understand that anything critical of Linux and Open Source must be a conspiracy by corporate America to squash the commie hippies that are the Open Source movement.

I'll bet you click on spam, too...

Only if the pictures are nice.

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[pcgabe]

No worries. I should have linked to the referenced article in my original post. I thought the issue had been given more airtime here on Slashdot, but maybe it was too long ago for people to remember.

Sigh.

I guess I was just trying to vent on two topics at the same time.

Man, people that say "Evolution is only a Theory" are simply announcing their ignorance of what the word theory means. That really, REALLY bugs me. What's higher on the scientific credibility chart than a theory? Nothing! Argh!

Or, as we say here in Japan, BAKA...

Re:The Credibility of Groklaw

[mwood]

Um, the Senate is part of the Congress. The other part is the House of Representatives.

If I am Elected President...

[John F. Kerry]

If I am elected President, I will submit a bill to Congress outlawing Maureen O'Gara!

Re:If I am Elected President...

[fred fleenblat]

I get the humor, but just for the record, that would be a Bill of Attainder and unconstitutional.

Interview summary:

[Sheetrock]

I'm sorry if the article offended you nuts.

Re:Interview summary:

[ameoba]

I think it's more like "I don't really care what anyone thinks as long as we're making money on it".

Must be a Republican.

Re:Interview summary:

[Anonymous Coward]

the story was perceived as offensive by a group of the readers

I'll never purchase any publication by them again. Doesn't sound like there's much understanding there about the difference between right and wrong. Instead of a believable apology, we're presented with weasel-words.

Re:Interview summary:

[IdleTime]

Offended? Nope, no such thing. It irritates me that people are uninformed paid shills that has set out to defame and to harass PJ, and it irritates me even more that a so-called reputable newsoutlet carried it without a check. CBS-gate anyone?

As for Gtroklaw, I have an account but I think I posted a couple of comments in the beginning. Today I mostly read the articles and skip the comments. Other than, I have no special feelings about Groklaw and PJ.

Re:Interview summary:

[Whyte]

Must be a Republican.

I think the correct term is Capitalist, but I can understand how easy they are to confuse.

Re:Interview summary:

[SpaceLifeForm]

Sounds like MS.

Re:Interview summary:

[MikeBabcock]

Common confusion -- capitalists are about free enterprise, not freedom of the press (necessarily).

Conservatives (Republicans in the USA) *often* value privacy and free enterprise, and often not the freedom of the press.

The press tends toward the liberal perspective in terms of freedoms.

Re:Interview summary:

[Master of Transhuman]

"Common confusion -- capitalists are about free enterprise, not freedom of the press (necessarily)."

Common confusion - free market advocates are about free enterprise. Capitalists are about owning the state and monopolies.

Re:Interview summary:

[SA Stevens]

Capitalists are about owning the state and monopolies.


You misspelled the word 'Communist', dude.

Re:Interview summary:

[Master of Transhuman]

You have no clue..."dude"

Re:Interview summary:

[SA Stevens]

How much Stalin do you have in your library? How much have you read? I am still missing two volumes of his Collected Works. I don't subscribe to that particular political economy, but I also don't have a schoolboys fascination with it, or any other 19th century scheme of political economy.

Have you even read Stalin's book on political economy? Have you read anyboy elses'?

Re:Interview summary:

[Master of Transhuman]

As I recall, Stalin was not much of a economist or anything else.

I believe you might want to read Ludwig Von Mises, or Murray Rothbard, before you mouth off.

Re:Interview summary:

[SA Stevens]

Of _course_ Stalin wasn't much of an economist. But under Communism a lot of 'works' came from him that weren't necessarily his original works.

The tone you use in discussion indicates you're not very serious about any of this anyway, so it doesn't matter how much further this goes.

Stick to your armchair ideology. It'll be amusing to look back on with embarassment later in life.

Re:Interview summary:

[Master of Transhuman]

Unless my belief in nanotech works out, as I'm 56, I don't think there's too much "later in life" left.

As a free-market anarchist who started out as an Objectivist (before I came to my senses), I'm perfectly familiar with the difference between Communism and Capitalism. Where you're not familiar is with the similarities.

Slashdotting != DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

I am not interested in offending our readers or in driving them away. I do wish that they had tried to work with me to find a solution before the fanatics out there launched DoS attacks for days even after we pulled the story. Our Web sites remained under constant attack from Monday through Wednesday, for three days. We lost thousands of dollars in revenues during the past three days. We are trying to recover from the biggest cyber attack in history any media company was ever subject to!

In Korea, only old people call a Slashdotting a cyber attack.

Re:Slashdotting != DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS? I was just trying to a) read the article in question, and b) write a polite letter to the editor there telling them that I thought it was an article in bad taste and should never have been published. I tried a few times to find email addresses at Sys-com.con, and never got back anything intelligible. I'm sure that a significant fraction of the hits they were receiving were equally benign.

Re:Slashdotting != DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wget their site to save it, and update often!

Re:Slashdotting != DDoS

[Master of Transhuman]

Wouuldn't matter if you DID find the editorial email address.

It doesn't work - bombs with an error message in both IE and FireFox. ALL their email links do the same.

Seems like the "world's leading iMedia company" can't handle using a mailto: properly.

Re:Slashdotting != DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

> In Korea, only old people call a Slashdotting a cyber attack.

In Korea specifically, old people have the same internet young people do, and they have bandwidth right to their home that can withstand a greater slashdotting than most servers.

Maybe Japan, but they're set to leave us a backwater as well.

He still doesn't get it

[Locke2005]

If somebody published an article with names and addresses of my family members, as well as a description of my car and the inside of my apartment, I would certainly interpret that as a threat, just like the old "We know where you live!" cliche. In fact, I would attempt to have the author and publisher charged with a hate crime, since I am in a bi-racial marriage, which people have been killed for in the past! There is a thin line between free speech and threatening speech; Moron O'Gara crossed it.

Re:He still doesn't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

look at at it this way the fabulous MOG claimed she was being harassed because some people telephoning her up until *GASP* 1130pm! and she goes on a shakedown of her 'enemy' and attacks her in a 'news report' and destroy her right to privacy.

Re:He still doesn't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it does sound a bit like harassment. This is not a figure like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison.

If one of his writers had written an article published in one of his magazines, do you think he would let him or her just tilt in the wind?

It's one thing to have one's picture published. It's quite another to have details of one's life published for no related reason in an article (i.e., "he lives here [insert picture of rusted out single-wide mobile home] with his mother and grandfather, and drives this [picture of trashed '79 Cadillac Seville with 4 different sized tires, plenty of car cancer, a completely sagged down roof liner inside, and different body pieces from about 8 different cars]. Why is he writing auditing applications?" blah blah blah, in an e-mail sent to the guy's higher-ups and shareholders right before the shareholder meeting or promotion/evaluation time...

It's fine to publish details about Groklaw, and Pamela's role with it, who Groklaw and PJ are connected to, what those connections might imply.
But it's entirely another thing to go at other things unrelated to what was being discussed.

Does your magazine now publish a social column, where various Linux and Open-Source dignitaries have their pictures taken in their work clothes, details of where they bought their Cheetoes and Mt. Dew, etc.?

What if we were to pry into the backgrounds of Sys-Con's editors, and take publicly available records, tie pieces together with suggestive language, and then wash our hands of it and say, "hey, it's all publicly available information! we're not responsible for any conclusions or actions taken by someone else!" Of course not. But saying, "I thought I smelled smoke" doesn't get you out of yelling "Fire!" in a theater, either.

That's just lame.

Good thing that Sys-Con's linux rag isn't worth reading much, compared to Linux Format, Linux Systems Journal, Linux Magazine, or just about any other Linux-dependent publication.

Re:He still doesn't get it

[orionware]

in fact, I would attempt to have the author and publisher charged with a hate crime...

Aren't all threats an act of hate? Or just if you are a certain color..

Re:He still doesn't get it

[MikeBabcock]

"Potential" crimes are interpreted based on the likelihood of the crime happening.

If you had a mistress whose husband is in the mob, and told the police you thought he might want you dead, that has a high probability.

Re:He still doesn't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

And as a half-breed (since that seems to unfortunately have some sort of currency with you), I hate to have any association with the likes of you. You are an embarrassment.

Being in a bi-racial marriage does not entitle you to additional rights. Being part of a minority race, or better said under-represented minority, does not entitle you to pull out the race card on something that has NOTHING to do with race. Law or no law, this is the exact reason why proponents against hate crime laws will use when they fight against the adoption of said laws.

There are good reasons for having and using hate crime laws. I tend to disagree with such laws in general, but I also understand why they exist or people call for them. But they do NOT exist so you can make a false, bullshit claim of being racially targetted because you are simply targetted for other reasons entirely, in this case a difference of opinion of software/legal support.

In fact, you pulling the race card here makes you the racist, not only against those you suspect are targetting you, but also against your significant other. How sad you are that you don't realize that and what you've become.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[davidwr]

Read the interview. I think this man is either underqualified for the job of CEO of a media enterprise, or is pretending to be.

Either that, or he's purely in the business-as-in-corporate side of things and not the business-as-in-journalism side of things. If that's the case, he shouldn't have been asked to approve O'Gara's ("I decided to publish the article"), or anyone else's works, that job should go to people with editorial responsibilities.

Here's my "favorite" example of confusing statements:
In one part, speaking of Pamela Jones being a blogger not a reporter, he says "The reporter's job is to report news." In another, speaking about O'Gara's hack job, he says "I decided to publish the article. It was published because it was an accurate news story." Are you as confused as I was?

My least-favorite part, if true and I sincerely hope he's mistaken (I think he's confusing a DOS attack with the /. effect):
"The reason why we decided to pull it [O'Gara's hack job] was that when the content, style and the language of the story was perceived as offensive by a group of the readers, a denial-of-service attack was launched against our entire company, interfering with all of our publications and all of our readers."

Not much for an apology

[heli_flyer]

From reading the article, apparently it's not the complaints from the readers, nor the complaints from the advertisers which prompted him to pull the articles. The only reason he pulled the article is the DDOS attacks. He still doesn't seem to understand what he did wrong.

Re:Not much for an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they were DDoS. When PJ published her story called Intimidation, I wanted to read the article to know what it was about so I Googled for it. Their website was slow as hell. I guess that I wasn't the only one who wanted to read the article (millions read Groklaw).

Then the story hit Slashdot and a Slashdot Effect ensue.

So DDoS of traffic from both Groklaw and Slashdot ?

Pretty ironic that the guy who don't see what he did wrong felt he was attacked.

Re:Not much for an apology

[brennz]

Mr. Kircaali is *FULL OF IT*. I have several emails from his advertisers expressing their discontent with the content of MOG's attacks on PJ He is tap-dancing, to make himself the victim. Instead, he should be looked at the kid in the corner wearing the dunce cap, obviously for making disruptions.

Re:Not much for an apology

[HorsePunchKid]

Exactly. It's not an apology at all. It's like running over someone in a crosswalk and then saying, "I'm sorry you didn't get out of the way quickly enough." Fuat Kircaali does not believe even in the slightest that there was anything ethically questionable about the article, or he wouldn't have run it.

Pathetic. Anything for some extra traffic, I guess. They certainly got more hits from me than they ever have in the past. At the expense of never getting any more in the future, though. I hope it was worth it, Fuat!

Re:Not much for an apology

[choconutdancer]

"We did not pull the story because there was anything inaccurate in the report, we did it because it somehow led to the DoS attacks" unbelievable. I gave him the benefit of the doubt before. now he gets nothing from me. any boycotts should continue. and now that Fuat has explained his true position on the subject it looks like there needs to be another round of people expressing their views to sys-con's advertisers.

Re:Not much for an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything for some extra traffic, I guess.

And then when he got the extra traffic, from Slashdot, he interpreted it as a DDoS. Pretty funny actually.

Ethically, he lives in the gutter. I hope his advertisers gave him the pain he deserves for this.

Re:Not much for an apology

[LarsWestergren]

e still doesn't seem to understand what he did wrong.

I think this is an ongoing trend. In Sweden, as in most of the western world, there has been a number of scandals in politics and business lately. Every time the people in charge claim to apologize, you see that what they are actually saying is "We are sorry this came to public attention."

They might be willing to remove someone lower down. However, when you look closely you almost always see that the person was given an equally prestigious position somewhere else in the political/business hierarchy. Andn the management or political leaders who let all this happen, they refuse to accept any guilt for what happened on their watch.

I'm beginning to wonder if most positions of leadership is occupied by sociopaths. Hitting them in the wallet seems to be the only thing they understand, therefore, from now on I will boycott Sys-con until this editor is sacked and management clearly distance themselves from this kind of behaviour in the future.

Re:Not much for an apology

[Anonymous Coward]

He's following the patriotic Bush line -- nothing I do is wrong, and to criticize me is terrorism...

That's Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

Green on the outside, not on the inside.

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

Ph.D. or no Ph.D, Spock of Vulcan usually went by "Mr." not Doctor. Doctor Spock wrote baby books.

Re:That's Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

He knows that and is just a troll.

Re:That's Yoda

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll?
Informative or Offtopic. I hope you're metamoderated to hell you 13 year old fucking newbie mod.

What an ass

[instantkarma1]

To paraphrase..."There was nothing ethically or morally wrong with the story. It was factual. However, many of our idiot readers.....errr..customers, got their panties in a was about it. I see no problem publishing personal attacks against people, including their physical address and making fun of their religion, but I'll be damned if some of our readers aren't prudes."

This guy is absolutely classless. I think I'll pass on anything put out by them in the future.

Re:What an ass

[uofitorn]

I read the entire article, what you just said was neither insightful nor funny.

** POST FOR COLLATION**

[Anonymous Coward]

* A NOTE *

Will persons interested in whining about the "your rights online" section occasionally containing articles which do not directly relate to the idea of rights on the internet please do so as a reply to this comment, instead of as a top-level comment. That way the rest of us may easily ignore you.

Thanks, your cooperation is appreciated.

You hear that deafening clattering noise?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the noise of any public goodwill earned by Sys-Con deciding to stand for journalistic integrity, being undone by the Sys-Con CEO's big mouth

N. vs. S. Korean /. victims

[Anonymous Coward]

North Koreans can't withstand Slashdotting, as they rely on carrier pigeons for connectivity, and the military has orders to shoot pigeons on sight.

South Koreans with their multi-deca-megabit-per-second connections to their homes have no such problems.

MOG did not know it was the *right* PJ

[One Louder]

Even in the "article" itself MOG admits that she didn't know for sure if she had tracked down the actual PJ, and even implied that this "Pamela Jones" might have been the victim of identity theft.

Given that, why plaster the address and pictures of a potentially innocent party across the Internet?

What about the mother? She's not a party to Groklaw in any way, she's not a blogger, a reporter, or anything, yet her address and pictures of her house ended up in the "article".

I'm sorry - I see nothing ethical here.

YOU FAIL IT, FUCKTARD

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you move to Montreal and get cancer and die. Slowly.

Re:YOU FAIL IT, FUCKTARD

[Anonymous Coward]

That is great that someone modded the parent insightful.

Yeah this is worse than nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an entire community of persons directly or indirectly harmed by Ms. O'Gara's ceaseless and frequently slanderous public relations work for big business. By accusing this community of people of hacking/terrorizing him into pulling Ms. O'Gara's pieces, it's worse than if he'd just left the articles up in the first place.

Re:Yeah this is worse than nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are these people who were "hurt"? Emotionally fragile fanboys? The toadys who hang out at Groklaw?

It's rather ironic how much Groklaw yells about FUD, but if you wade into the comment sections, the shallow FUD about Sun and Microsoft goes from wall-to-wall from those lamers.

that clarifies things

[iggymanz]

The CEO is content to run a "tabloid trash" type of website, where reporters can harass and intimidate people. That answers everything.

legal issues, as always

[fred fleenblat]

People should keep in mind that Mr. Kircaali really doesn't have the option of fully admitting and apologizing for anything. That would just open up him and his company to a giant lawsuit.

He has to forcefully deny any wrongdoing to remove the possibility that at a later trial, a lawyer could just just hand the apology/admission to a jury and say "Here's the evidence, he admitted to it, please make them give PJ $1 (holds pinky to lip) MILLION dollars"

Re:legal issues, as always

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying he does have the option of doing the right thing. It's just that the consequences are undesirable.

Doing the right thing is often difficult and complicated, if you're caught doing the wrong thing. Living rightly in the first place usually avoids this kind of problem.

Re:legal issues, as always

[putaro]

Bull crap. There's a big difference between opening yourself for lawsuits and being a tool. He goes well beyond being cautios. For example, he says that the only reason he pulled the story was because there was a DOS attack against his servers. He could have just said "In my judgement the story was reasonable but many of our readers and other staffers disagreed so we chose to remove it". If anything, he's really opened himself for a lawsuit by publicly endorsing O'Gara's invasion of privacy and stalking rather than disavowing it as a mistake she made that slipped through the system.

Re:legal issues, as always

[Master of Transhuman]

Right - his "forceful denial" that was actually published could be ripped to pieces in five minutes by a retarded attorney.

Most of it can easily be described as a further hatchet job on OSS and PJ in particular, and as SCO-directed bullshit to boot, given that he's using the same "OSS supporters are wacko nutjobs who use DoS tactics" crap that Laura DiDio AND MoG used.

If somebody supoenas his email, I suspect we'd find some interesting stuff.

If he's the best Sys-Con can trot out, the Board of Directors need to find a new guy. Maybe Darl would be interested...

Re:legal issues, as always

[Knaldgas]

"People should keep in mind that Mr. Kircaali really doesn't have the option of fully admitting and apologizing for anything. That would just open up him and his company to a giant lawsuit."

If that is the reason of lacking apology, I think they missed the point again. From my judgement of PJ, I would say that a sincere apology would be the safest way to avoid a lawsuit, not to mention getting back readers.

By not making that apology, they also clearly states that MoG has not broken their "high standards" of ethics. (read: this is a tabloid).

In fact I think PJ should sue them for $1M, simply because they show no remorse.

They got a couple of extra hits from me over this, I hope that will keep them "warm" for a long long time...

Re:legal issues, as always

[cahiha]

People should keep in mind that Mr. Kircaali really doesn't have the option of fully admitting and apologizing for anything. That would just open up him and his company to a giant lawsuit.

He is open to giant lawsuits already, and this sort of behavior doesn't look good to a jury. If he comes crawling on his knees to PJ, perhaps they can reach a settlement.

Re:legal issues, as always

[Ten Ryu]

If admitting his mistakes would open him to a lawsuit and if his goal was to preserve the good name (?) of his company, the only winning move was not to play. The fact of giving this interview at all would have brought him into trouble from either or both sides. Which once more raises the suspicion that this guy doesn't understand what he's dealing with.

I'm going to miss Maureen

[ErikTheRed]

I mean, who else writes stuff that you can read something on your screen that makes your scream:

"WHORE! YOU GODDAMN FUCKING BILL-GATES FELCHING, DARL McBRIDE COCKSMOKING WHORE!"

There's just something so cathartic about that.

Oh, wait, Forbes is still printing Daniel Lyons. Never mind.

I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Kill all Muslims]

...because hate crimes imply that a crime against one type of person is worse than the same crime against another type of person, in effect charging you for (real or perceived) motives in addition to the the actual crime committed. This is the part where your typical Slashbot is supposed to make a comparison to 1984's thought-crimes. Although I do find it quite humorous that I am posting this comment under this particular account of mine.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the moment it leaves your brain its no longer a "thought" crime.

The purpose of "hate crime" laws should be simply to establish motive. Turning a "sorry, I didn't mean to burn that cross in your yard" case into a "damn, I shoula tied you to it!" case.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate hate.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I used to disagree with "hate crime" laws but then I realized their point. Yes, most people don't commit violent crime because they love their victim. But that's not the point.

The purpose of Federal hate crime legislation is to give the Federal government authority to go in and investigate should the local enforcement NOT do his/her job because said prosecutor, police and justice agrees with the crime because they too hold those prejudices. There are places where a crime against blacks or gays might not be thought of as a biggie and swept under the rug. In most cases, I wouldn't like encroachment of federal power, but it IS a human rights issue and at this point, the local justice system would be broken so someone needs to step in.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that violation of a person's human rights was covered under a seperate federal law. A hate crime is a crime that has more victims than a regular crime because it intimidates a whole community of people. In a similar way, an act of terrorism is not just a murder - it has effects beyond the immediate victim.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[jaymzter]

Hate crimes are thought crimes, pure and simple. The government has no business in our heads. If this means some joker gets off for killing a gay or black, then I guess _society_ will have to change in order for them to be prosecuted. You know, that's how we've been doing it, before hate crimes? It's taken a long time for many of those race crimes of the 60s to be prosecuted, but they're doing it.
Let's face it, hate crimes terrorize your thoughts and remove any responsibility for the culture as a whole to change its attitudes.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[snorklewacker]

> The purpose of Federal hate crime legislation is to give the Federal government authority

If you stop right there, you're perfectly correct. I am by no means a "states-rights" fan, which is usually just a cover for bigotry, but federal hate crimes legislation is nothing more than a power grab in an attempt to federalize as many crimes as possible.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is hate crime legislation is not limited to the federal level. States have them as well.

And there is nothing stopping the federal government from adopting a law which makes a federal law the backup if the state or local enforcement does (and will) fail and which does not invoke hate crime standards.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[njcoder]

oh yeah.. cause the federal gov't loves blacks and gays

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with hate crimes laws is that it marginalizes non "hate" crimes.

Why is a racially motivated assult and battery any worse, criminally, than a "regular" one? The black person who gets victimized becuase of her race is not any worse off than if it was another black person who beat her. The punishment should fit the crime, not the motivation.

Another little known fact about hate crimes is that it is seldomly if never used in cases of black on white crime where there is clear racial motivation or jew on non-jew crime. It simply is not politically correct to apply the hate crimes laws here.

Hate crimes laws are clearly against the letter and spirit of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause, but obviously our political climate will not support such an interpretation in the courts.

Re:I thought Slashdot was against hate crimes...

[Anonymous Coward]

A hate crime is a crime that has more victims than a regular crime because it intimidates a whole community of people. In a similar way, an act of terrorism is not just a murder - it has effects beyond the immediate victim.

Thats stupid thinking.

If someone in your neighborhood gets violently beaten during a burglary, would there not be quite a bit intimidation beyond the victim, whether or not there was any sort of racial, religious, or homophobic bias involved?

If a person is directly intimidating a community (e.g. by saying "all jews will be killed"), then that is covered under existing law.

The problem with these hate crimes laws is that it makes non-bias crimes less significant. When you become the victim of a crime, race doesn't matter. You have been victimized. The motive or reasoning behind the crime is rather irrelevant by the time you get mugged, raped, beaten, kidnapped, or robbed.

Fucking idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was responsible for the DDOS attacks (I'm not), and had stopped them because they stopped publishing O'Gara, then I'd start the DDOS right back up if I read that.

If so, that leads to an amusing question.

[Anonymous Coward]

If slashdot was in fact the supposed "DDOS" he spoke of, could slashdot sue him for slander?

Fuat Kircaali, leave him alone

[perrye]

Yes, there is one residence listed, but lets not stoop to the level he expects at least a few among this community to lower them selves to.

That said, when he does say that his phone rings off the wall, we may wonder how many of those calls are from the other camp, trying to put the OSS comunity in a bad light. There would be no way for us to prove it either way.

Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[DrJimbo]

He has suffered enough. Add the following lines to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 coldfusion.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 dotnet.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 eclipse.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 issj.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 itsolutions.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 jdj.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 linux.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 linuxbusinessweek.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 mxdj.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 pbdj.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 symbian.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 weblogic.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 webservices.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 websphere.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 wireless.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 www.sys-con.tv
127.0.0.1 xml.sys-con.com
127.0.0.1 www.linuxworld.com
127.0.0.1 www.sys-con.com

Re:Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. I wanted that list for exactly that purpose.

Re:Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[The Bloooated]

Grats, DrJimbo... you've saved me hunting these domains down myself.

Re:Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[gclef]

I prefer this way:

named.conf:
zone sys-con.com{
type master;
file sys-con.com.blackhole;
};
zone sys-con.tv{
type master;
file sys-con.tv.blackhole;
};

put an SOA for sys-con.com and sys-con.tv in the respective files, and a wildcard A record pointing to 127.0.0.1.

Poof...sys-con's gone. Doesn't matter what they change their names to.

Re:Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[Homology]

You can a singlefile blackhole thus :

@ 1D IN SOA @ root.intranet. (
42
3H
15M
1W
1D )
TXT "Blackholing of annoying advertizers."
1D IN NS @

Yuck, /. removes formatting and don't like ;

Re:Help stop "the biggest cyber attack in history"

[ajs]

"Yuck, /. removes formatting and don't like ;"

Slashdot
has no problem;
at all;
with indentation or;
semi-colons!

Have a nice day.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[man_of_mr_e]

I think their servers are capable of withstanding a slashdotting, as they've been listed in numerous articles before this. In order to bring down a site with that kind of infrastructure, it's got to be a deliberate attack.

That's not really an Interview..

[BackOrder]

I've eagerly read this interview but as I've devoured the words it seemed to me Mr. Kircaali was becoming aggressive in his answers. Up to a point where he finally complained about his media company being DoSsed. He did put emphasis on the fact they've had experienced the biggest cyber attack in history of any media company (which, I would like to remind you, sounds like SCO words in the past).

This raised a question in my mind - what this interview was for? He did not seem to really care about the case nor he did not really excuse himself to have allowed O'Gara's article being publish.

The questions were repetitive and they never got where the reporter wanted the interview to go. Kircaali has been evasive in his answers about the topic of interest (PJ, Groklaw, O'Gara's work, etc). He was nonethelesse quite exhaustive on his report of being attacked and threatening emails sent to his customers.

It just leaves me on the feeling he is upset because he's losing a great deal of money. Someone should remind him that he decided to publish O'Gara's article.

Spam?

[arose]

I sent her an email but I haven't received an answer yet, I must admit... Here is the phone number for G2 Computer Intelligence, 516 759-7025. Most unknown emails go to spam boxes these days, at least in my case.

He filters unknown emails for a publicly stated email account? If his email isn't stated it has no relevance to the question.

Re:Spam?

[Master of Transhuman]

Yet he makes a point about how anybody can contact him.

Their editorial email address is working today, so I just sent a nice email to their editorial department pointing out that his brilliant interview has caused Sys-Con to be hated more than ever now.

discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[brennz]

My email ("A problem with your advertising + SYS-CON Media website") was quoted in that interview. I'd like to set the record straight on what Fuat Kircaali discussed with me. I sent out email to SYS-CON advertisers, questioning them if they knew about the article. A few hours later I received a call from him. First he was yelling at me "I want to speak with the chairman of $MYEMPLOYER" Then he started threatening to sue me. It was only then that I said I he could easily discuss this with my lawyer. Only after his verbal tirade continued, did I choose to end the conversation with him. His claim that people "needed legal counsel" is a joke. He was threatening to sue people, they no doubt replied "speak to my lawyer". Mr Kircaali treated me in a manner which I find unbecoming of a CEO / publisher. He also did not know the definition of slander/defamation either. Another legal newb attempting to intimidate people. gg.

Re:discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I couldn't find copies of the offending O'Gara articles, but that interview did reek of a reality distorting bubble.

Re:discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[X]

Copies are available on O'Gara's sites, as was mentioned in the article. For example:

http://www.clientservernews.com/

Re:discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this CEO there's nothing morally or ethically wrong with publishing someones name and address, the name and address of their mother, children, pictures of their car, description of their home and religious denomination. If someone went ahead and did just that we would have more avenues to attempt to communicate why this may not be a desirable thing for the individual concerned.

Re:discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of us who are familiar with Fuat don't find this at all surprising. His business and personal practices have never been great.

Re:discussion with Fuat Kircaali

[_Sprocket_]

I was suprised that your letter was even included. It seemed to be little more than a concerned reader pointing out their dislike of the article to the media company and its advertisers. Hardly the same calibre as the previous example given.

Thanks for noting how Mr Kircaali really behaves when he's not trying to play the wounded victom. It dovetails nicely with the interview.

unethical ... and cowardly and disloyal

[wes33]

in the immortal words of Fuat Kircaali:

"The reason why we decided to pull it [O'Gara's hack job] was that when the content, style and the language of the story was perceived as offensive by a group of the readers, a denial-of-service attack was launched against our entire company, interfering with all of our publications and all of our readers."

Leaving aside the incredible moral blindness of missing what was wrong with the O'Gara article, this guy admits he is willing to dump "entertaining" and "accurate" reporters because of a DOS attack. Nice guy to work for ...

What a piece of work is Fuat Kircaali.

Re:unethical ... and cowardly and disloyal

[Fnkmaster]

This guy redefines the phrase "piece of shit". I'd really hate to see their shitty little publications go out of business. No, seriously. I'd shed a tear or two for that.

Maureen O'Gara did accuse PJ of being a thief

[Anonymous Coward]

Maureen O'Gara carelessly tossed the accusation that there was some Identity Theft going on, with PJ as:

A) The Victim
B) A willing accomplice
C) Herself, but not really Pamela Jones
D) All of the above, more wild accusations to come in our next mogwash piece.

Completely apart of the deliberate slurs and slants, criminal accusations make for straightforward Defamation cases.

Mr. Kirkaali says that PJ should not fear thieves, but seems blissully unaware that his own jourmalist accused Pamela Jones to be a thief, and published it on-line.

Maybe he need someone to explain Remedial Ethics 101 to him.

Re:Maureen O'Gara did accuse PJ of being a thief

[koko775]

For anyone wanting to read the article, here it is, sanitized of personally ID'ing info: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148847&c id=12476760

Christ

[Junichiro Koizumi]

I have no idea what any of this means, and I feel I am a better man because of it.

Shameful

[ChaosDiscord]

So the publisher admits that he pulled the article not because it was ethical, but because he was being DOSed. So they first lack the ethics to realize that publishing someone's home address and the address of their elderly mother is wrong, then bend over when attacked. That's shameful. This publisher has shown that he fundamentally does not get it. I strongly support his first amendment right to publish that article, but he's still a sleazebag. I'll be avoiding the entire SysCon family of magazines as I can't trust them to do good journalism.

Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there! It looks like you are voicing a dissenting opinion. Would you like to:

Get modded down

Get bitchslapped

Get temp-banned

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, Clippy!

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who makes the joke is Redundant and the guy who points out the joke is funny? There's a reason you people are shunned.

Reminds me of something earlier in the SCO saga

[mcc]

So is this the new trick, if you're in a situation where you kind of look like the bad guy and you're trying to deflect attention, just claim somebody DDOSed you?

Show His Hand Quite Clearly

[Mateo_LeFou]

"A group of individuals (mostly with anonymous emails) contacted all our customers."

I presume he's talking about sys-con's advertisers. This is not journalism in the fourth-estate sense; it is simply another cynical business model. Do what it takes to deliver up the eyeballs to the advertisers.

In this respect, I can't see why O'Gara was let go -- presumably it's because she indirectly caused what they think are DoS attacks, and you can't @#$$% with the revenue stream.

I picture Ned Beatty here. Anyone with me?

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Lifewish]

Personally, I'll believe it as and when I see the logs. There are plenty of people out there with both the means and the inclination to launch a DoS attack against syscon. I very much doubt that any significant number of them take Groklaw seriously.

Well, somewhat.

[DietCoke]

If that "tabloid trash" ends up getting back to their advertisers, they aren't content to run with it. This is like ringing the doorbell and running... they get off by publishing something like this, but when it offends the public sensibilities they retreat as fast as possible.

I'm glad that they canned MOG, but talk about a lack of balls... the damage was already done. They were just tired of being called jackasses, and thought that pulling the article would stop it.

Jackasses.

Re:Well, somewhat.

[iggymanz]

its clear their advertisers need another round of outrage from us which also references their CEO's statements.

Big time.

[khasim]

From TFA:

The "editorial board members" of LinuxWorld are appointed from among the leading professionals and participants of the Linux community at large.

Well, that's just sweet. But what does it have to do with anything?

LinuxWorld's independent advisory board and the core editorial team(s) have full editorial decision-making authority in everything that goes to print.

But MOG doesn't appear in print. Her articles are posted on your web site.

So what does anything about "print" have to do with this story?

They funnel that passion into the accurate and unbiased editorial content that you look for in the pages of our magazine(s) every month and in every new issue.

Still, not in print so why are you talking about this?

We believe that a magazine such as LinuxWorld, supported by hands-on participants and leading industry experts, offers real-life editorial content that you will not find elsewhere.

Hey! I can write this "note" and try to turn it into a free ad for my wonderful magazine.

Our compensation and deep satisfaction is in knowing that we are providing a valuable service that benefits Open Source, Linux, and everyone in the industry.

Yep. If I ever need to find PJ's mom, I'll know the site that provides that "valuable service".

This is how LinuxWorld differentiates itself from other venues.

Yep. Linux Journal certainly wouldn't publish that, even on its web site. Nor any other technical publication.

On the pages of LinuxWorld you read articles written by the most knowledgeable and experienced professionals in the world.

Did I mention the part about turning this into a free ad?

Last but not least, we are pleased to announce that with the launch of our new Web site, we now made all our archived content and past issues available online.

Thanks for having me on the show, did I mention my new web site? Can I do a quick plug for it?

Please be sure to take a look at the "LinuxWorld Topics" section of our new Web site to explore our archived content grouped under a rich number of categories.

I'm real sure I mentioned the free ad time. Right?

Before I end my note, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you our publishing guidelines.

End your note? You haven't even gotten to the subject.

We believe in the Golden Rule.

Give us the gold and you make the rules.

In all our dealings we strive to be friendly and courteous, as well as fair and compassionate.

This was not a single article. Read the past ones. You'll see an ongoing stream of hatred.

But those were okay to put on your sites.

We treat sources, subjects, and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect. We show compassion, show good taste, and avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.

Hmmmm..... You might need to check this page then - http://linuxbusinessnews.sys-con.com/read/49228.ht m?CFID=39636&CFTOKEN=75BBE516-14D5-139B-BC4011A448 3558B3

Yep, Linux Business News on the sys-con.com site. And if I may post some of the hate there:

Whatever you think of his politics, McBride may have a point or two. How come such an influence peddler is so mysterious?

So, PJ is "mysterious".

The name PJ is apparently a nom de plume or, in this case maybe it's a nom de guerre.

Maybe it stands for "Pam Jones".

Re:Big time.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Cap?

We have no intentions of encouraging or hosting an ongoing meaningless and pointless debate at our Web site, which does not go anywhere or accomplish anything and which, frankly, most of our everyday readers don't care for.

Shouldn't be a problem without any readers.

It's about money...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and nothing else. He printed the article because he was getting paid to do so. He pulled it only when he thought he was losing money by not doing so.

Any other noises he's making are just BS.

Your Rights Online?

[Narcoleptic Electron]

You're obviously not Pamela Jones.

Your rights are not affected in the least, as long as you don't point out bad behaviour of an unscrupulous company, such as SCO, in a public forum. You don't have to worry about a Maureen O'Gara character coming after you and posting your private address and phone number on a very public website that may or may not be affiliated with said unscrupulous company.

In other words: as long as you watch what you say, your freedom of speech is not affected in the least.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that PJ/Groklaw made it "personal" first.

If I started a slashdot journal dedicated to the moronic posts of "Narcoleptic Electron", publishing dozens of longwinded essays pointing out your numerous inaccuracies and false assumptions, and your hardheaded refusal to see things my way, would it bother you? How about if my legion of fans started ragging on you personally in the comments, calling you nasty names left and right and generally demonizing you?

Well, if I did all of that, I certainly wouldn't assume the magic shroud of Internet anonymity would protect me, and it wouldn't suprise me a bit if you showed up at my house one day. Having a secret public address is not a "right" of the Internet. Grok the law of the streets.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[perrye]

MOG does not seem to make an effort to find accurate facts. She has been invited to get the facts from the same source that PJ and the Groklaw community use: Documents filed with the Courts.

MOG did not state unequivocally that the PJ she had outed in the article that started the current controversy was Groklaws PJ.

I noticed in the Faut interview, he indicated that PJ's phone number as given by PJ was from a press release. I'll be looking for that document...

Re:Your Rights Online?

[kfg]

You watched a lot of Charles Bronson movies as a kid, didn't you?

KFG

Re:Your Rights Online?

[Anonymous Coward]

Charles Bronson documentaries. You're the hapless buddie who gets mowed down by a stray flamewar while ordering donuts.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[nathanh]

You don't have to worry about a Maureen O'Gara character coming after you and posting your private address and phone number

Maureen did not post a private phone number. Here's a comment from earlier in this story...

The only phone number in MOG's "story" was one that was published in a Medabiliti press release from 2003. I see no evidence that the number MOG did publish was a relative's number.

The MOG article is getting harder to find; it is effectively being deleted from the Internet. However here is a google cache copy. The only phone number in the article is 914-761-7423. If you google for that number you can find it in another google cache. The second cached copy is a press release submitted by Medabiliti to PR Newswire.

What MOG did was despicable - there's no doubt about that - but let's not start falsifying what she did. The facts condemn MOG enough as it is without having to make things up.

You're right about the private address though. That's irresponsible journalism; something I'd expect of Fox News or 60 Minutes.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[Master of Transhuman]

You're an idiot.

440 Eddy Street, #424, San Francisco, California

Come on down.

Moron.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a proposition for gay sex? I can get plenty of that in my part of SF, thanks.

Re:Your Rights Online?

[l0ungeb0y]

"440 Eddy Street, #424, San Francisco, California"

So you live in the Tenderloin -- one of the most rat infested hoods in the city. I don't see why anyone would want to come on down to your place, unless it was to buy some crack or get a good "gumming" by your "girlfriend".

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the group that DDOSed SCO? Or are we still in denial about that happening?

Sorry to inform you, but nobody gives a flying fuck about Mareeen O'Gara or SysCon except Pamala Jones and her thralls. (As evidenced about the 100s of groklaw articles published about those noname losers.) And a lot of those fuckos feel seriously wronged and may not have one's normal moral boundries in place.

World's leading i-technology magazine publisher

[Chuck Chunder]

Well that makes sense, surely everyone else would be too embarrassed to call themselves an "i-technology magazine publisher".

I suppose it could be worse, they could be an "i-technology e-magazine net-publisher".

Who is Fuat Kircaali?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Fuat Kircaali?
By Maureen O'Gara

Friday May 13, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive asswipe who allegedly publishes the Sys-Con family of bird cage liners.

The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.

Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.

Fuat Abdi Kircaali is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel $2.2 million mansion in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 3001 NE 36th Street in Lighthouse Point, Florida. Lighthouse Point is in Broward County and Broward County is spam-scam country.

See, even though Kircaali treats Linux "magazines" like they were Kleenex and publishes hit-pieces regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this home address and - wouldn't you know it but - he cosigned for the $1.76 million adjustable rate mortgage with his apparent live-in girlfriend and Senior Vice President of advertising, Carmen Gonzalez.

Fuat and Carmen have lived in this little piece of property since February, 2003.

Now, this isn't your usual anonymous Florida McMansion. It's practically a self-contained village where spammers launch billions of V1-a'6rA emails upon the world from their garage, porn directors fuck the mouths off of white trash girls and people know each other's business.

But Washington Mutual didn't know much about Fuat when they gave him a mortgage except that he had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, and liked yachts. Oh yes, and fucking his Senior Vice President of Advertising.

He was also missing and had been for weeks.

Nobody there knew where he was.

He had up and disappeared one day, and the yacht skipper was worried about him. He said his son, Fuat Abdi Gonzalez Jr. had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some Linux zealots that "nobody knew," as the webmaster described them, had tried to DoS his website 5 times while he was gone - the SCO license he had had installed on his site - something nobody else in the internet seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the server.

FUCKING HIS SR. VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVERTISING.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Re:Who is Fuat Kircaali?

[Anonymous Coward]

and you can reach him at 954-943-3281

That article was linked all over the web.

[khasim]

I'm sure it had a LOT more hits on it than her other articles.

Not a DoS, Fuat

[Dr.Zap]

Tsk, tsk. It was not a DoS, Fuat, and it was not an attack. It was a DDoS, and the result of your publishing an article that many people tried to read simultaniously, an occurance commonly refered to as a "slashdotting". You're a publisher. Isn't this the kind of attention you wanted?

OK I changed my mind back again........

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Here I was ready to give Sys-Con the benefit of the doubt since they fire MOG but fuck it! This interview only proves that they aren't sorry, they do NOT see the err of MOGs ways.

If MOGs story WERE legitimate and they fired MOG not because of her story but because of it's unpopularity then that too would be mucho unethical.

Throw Sys-Con and it's publications into your meat/cyber space equivalent of a kill file.

DDoS,DoS, but not an attack.

[Dr.Zap]

Oops, what am I thinking? it was a DoS too, just not an attack.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[rhizome]

Sorry to inform you, but nobody gives a flying fuck about Mareeen O'Gara or SysCon except Pamala Jones and her thralls. (As evidenced about the 100s of groklaw articles published about those noname losers.)

Yeah, dude. Obviously.

And a lot of those fuckos feel seriously wronged and may not have one's normal moral boundries in place.

I suppose you'd like us to adopt the moral compass of an anonymous poster with a chip on their shoulder? Way to go, champ.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Lifewish]

How about the group that DDOSed SCO? Or are we still in denial about that happening?

Again, I'll believe it when I see the logs. Until then, I'll treat it the same way as I do SCO's magical disappearing code in linux.

Sorry to inform you, but nobody gives a flying fuck about Mareeen O'Gara or SysCon except Pamala Jones and her thralls.

I think you misinterpreted me (my fault). When I said "There are plenty of people out there with both the means and the inclination to launch a DoS attack against syscon" I was referring to your common or garden script kiddie, as opposed to anyone with an emotional involvement with the case. Sorry, I should have worded that more clearly. I'd agree with you that pretty much the only people who care what Maureen O'Gara is saying are those she does a hatchet job on.

And a lot of those fuckos feel seriously wronged and may not have one's normal moral boundries in place.

My personal experience of the groklaw crowd is that, on average, they're noticeably more moral than, for example, the slashdot crowd. There's a far higher signal to noise ratio and considerably less obscenity and trolling. Certainly there's less chance of a groklawer doing anything nastier to MOG than sending her an annoyed letter. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.

Reminds me of tabloid journalism

[dacarr]

This guy running Syscon seems a bit like a tabloid journalist. I get a feeling that the interviewer just came out of the interview feeling like he had a bucket of snot poured on him.

The man is an ass.

[AltGrendel]

As in:

horse's ass
Pronunciation: 'hor-s&z-
Function: noun
often vulgar : a stupid or incompetent person : BLOCKHEAD

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that supposed to be a comeback? Try harder.

Maureen? Is that you?

[Anonymous Coward]

quit trolling /. and get back to the unemployment office before you lose your place in line

That's how publishing tends to work

[PCM2]

In the trade press, and probably even newspapers though I have no firsthand experience there, you generally have two arms of the company, which we might call "church" and "state."

"Church" is the editorial department. The head of an editorial department is the editor-in-chief.

"State" is the publishing side. This is where all the marketing, advertising, sales type stuff happens. The head of the publishing side of the business is the publisher. Typically the publisher does not get a direct say in what goes into the magazine. He can object, but what the editor-in-chief says goes. In a well-run operation, the publisher might get a lot of say in what goes on the front cover of a magazine (because you can consider the cover a marketing vehicle as much as it is an editorial one) but that's about where it ends.

The role of CEO is trickier. Doubtless this is a business position. Probably the role of the CEO has more to do with preserving a brand identity for the book through its editorial content. The CEO is probably not all that involved in the day-to-day operations of choosing which articles to publish and which not to publish. He probably does get some say in the matter, though; so, if there's a problem, he probably goes and yells at the editor-in-chief at 4pm on a Friday afternoon and everybody needs to bust ass over the weekend to fix things.

Anyway -- in a well-run publishing outfit that has not compromised its journalistic integrity, the "church" and "state" sides are separate (which is why people tend to call them that). And to tell you the truth, I have no reason to believe this isn't how it is at Sys-Con.

When O'Gara's article was published, who raised the stink? The editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld. Sounds good so far; it's his job to meddle in content. But how did it get published in the first place? Because the editor-in-chief of LinuxWorld doesn't have oversight over it. If O'Gara's content was published as part of a normal publishing structure, perhaps he would. But apparently, according to what Mr. Kircaali says, it is Maureen O'Gara who has oversight over what she publishes. Sys-Con merely "syndicates" it, meaning she basically gets a rubber stamp from Kircaali and nobody even bothers to read it. And I quote:

Maureen does not act directly on behalf of SYS-CON or anyone else. She is the owner of her own company, G2 Computer Intelligence. She is not a staff reporter of SYS-CON. We have been syndicating her LinuxGram newsletter for more than three years. ... We do not make decisions on behalf of Ms. O'Gara. I'm not her boss.

So, to Mr. Kircaali: You're quick to put down blogs, but how is what Ms. O'Gara does any different, if there's no editorial oversight? If nobody's her boss, nobody decided what she should or should not write about, nobody has oversight over her stories ... then what's that, if not the same thing as blogging?

I think the reason this guy's answers come off so terribly is that he's really not used to being in a position to defend editorial content. He's a business guy. He gets content, he syndicates it on the Web. Certain content goes out without the backing of an editorial department or the oversight of any staff editors? Great! All the cheaper. Well, now it's come to bite him in the ass and he really doesn't know what to say about it, except that he wishes it would all go away and he could go back to running his business.

Re:That's how publishing tends to work

[Anonymous Coward]

If nobody's her boss, nobody decided what she should or should not write about, nobody has oversight over her stories ... then what's that, if not the same thing as blogging?

Well, she's getting paid, so she's a professional. Same difference as between a girlfriend and a whore.

Fuat Kircaali's bizarre ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find Fuat Kircaali's ethics acceptable and I'll be continuing to inform his advertisers of my strong opinion.

Re:Fuat Kircaali's bizarre ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find Fuat Kircaali's ethics acceptable and I'll be continuing to inform his advertisers of my strong opinion.

no doubt with anonymous messages such as the one you just sent...

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the interview. I think this man is either underqualified for the job of CEO of a media enterprise, or is pretending to be.

He's also underqualified for the job of "proud American citizen", which he claims to be:

You shut down the Web site of a media company with multiple DoS attacks for three days, because you don't like a story you read there. I'm a proud American citizen. Where are my First Amendment rights?

If you were a proud American citizen, you'd know that the First Amendment is a restriction on the actions Congress can take, you utter fucking moron. What, you think Congress is behind the DDOS?

It was published because it was an accurate news story.

I'd like to know what he thinks was factual or news. O'Gara herself admits she doesn't know if the person she found was actually the Groklaw founder or not, and there seems to be precisely zero newsworthy information in there.

Anyone else finds it funny how he keeps going on about the DDOS as if it's "the worst EVAR!"

an even better deal

[toby]

I'll do it for double those prices!

Incidentally...

[dacarr]

PJ has her own pointers regarding what O'Gara did over here. Her side doesn't line up with Kircaali's statement - and under the circumstances, I'd believe her first.

Karma in action

[Anonymous Coward]

He himself said he has no problem with peoples personal details being published!

More Contact Information, Less Communication

[pipingguy]

Here is the phone number for G2 Computer Intelligence, 516 XXX-7025. Most unknown emails go to spam boxes these days, at least in my case.

Uh-huh. And how many phone calls get shunted to an "answering (see the irony in that adjective?) machine" where you have to know the exact code in order to speak with a human being?

We've gotten so good at avoiding real communication and providing pseudo-communication that it's pissing people off.

The preceding has been a pre-programmed response from [insert name here]. If you would like to speak to me personally, press 0 on your phone...wait...maybe there will be a beep...hold on...NOW.

[...]

Sorry, your message length has exceeded the maximum allowable. Please call back and try again and thank you for calling!!! [dial tone]

That guy is an obsequious weasel of a human being.

[rdean400]

He points out that the story was removed, not because it was unethical, intrusive, and mean-spirited, but because SYS-CON was subjected to DOS attacks. Whoever did those DOS attacks, SHAME ON YOU! Most of the world that doesn't read this interview will think the publisher pulled the articles for the right reasons (the reasons mentioned above and the fact that the article has nothing to do with Linux).

In my opinion, until this guy recants the idiocy he spews in this article (or leaves the company), Sys-Con should continue to be boycotted.

As well as rude and condescending

[btarval]

Let's see, he interrupts the question before the point is made several times, insults the work PJ has done (even though he claims that to have never read Groklaw), and defends his publications' use of the term "elusive harridan" against PJ because "it was an accurate news story".

Oh yes, I can see that he's a bastion of high standards as far as Journalism goes.

Personally, I found his comments unbelieveable. One would think his goal would be to try to re-establish some sort of credibility with his readers. All he's accomplished is to drive people away.

I'm not sure what his goal was with his comments and attitude, but clearly it wasn't to improve relations with the Linux community, or to come across as an unbiased source for information.

Editorial responsibility?

[walterbyrd]

>>We do not make decisions on behalf of Ms. O'Gara. I'm not her boss.

I don't know much about publishing. But, I thought that controlling content was indeed the responsibility of the editor?

If I were the editor, and I saw content that included publishing the address, and photos, of the home of PJ's elderly monther; I don't think I'd publish the story. That is the responsibility of an editor, isn't it?

Also, why does a tech publisher want to publish the address of a blogger's elderly mother? How is that related to technology?

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about similar articles detailing the homes, relatives, friends, etc, of Fuat Kircaali and M'Gara?

At this point it seems only fair. After all he just said he thought there was no ethical problem with it.

Strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

So how does a wildly distributed collective of people work out when they've reached a consensus? If there was a Linux corporation they could publicly say that sys-con are turkeys and not to be listened to. What would it take for the open source community to be able to issue such a statement without stepping on toes?

A complete withdrawal of credibility would be far better than a slashdotting, or DDOS, as a slashdotign may appear to a turkey.

Screw this guy

[Anonymous Coward]

I... can't... believe this fucknut.

If he can't see what's wrong, and give a REAL apology. He is saying "Sorry, but I don't see what was wrong." Screw him and all his crappy ad-ridden pseudo-news site.

OMFG that irritates me.

PS: Glad I found a use for OMFG!

Is MOG actually a real person?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall a specific article of ?hers? where ?she? writes about the difficulties ?her? wife has using computers. Does s/he just publish other people's work under the MOG name?

JW stereotype

[Anonymous Coward]

Reporting that someone named Pamela Jones is (probably) a Jehovah Witness is factual, but irrelevant.

In her very last paragraph, her conclusion, Maureen O'Gara states that BECAUSE PJ has JW witness books in her(?) car, she cannot possibly be the real Groklaw.Net Webmistress.

Now how's that for a religious stereotype ? Can a Catholic be a competent Web author? What about an Eckankar follower ?

In fact, her faith is irrelevant, and MOG is WRONG trying to make it relevant. I shouldn't have to explain it to you ?

FIrst amendment rights ...

[dougmc]

I'm a proud American citizen.

So? Does that give you license to act like a jackass?
[alas, to many, the answer is yes, but I digress ...]

Where are my First Amendment rights?

Dunno. You seem to have just used them, and they worked fine.

Did you look behind the couch? When I lose something, that's where I usually first look.

Though I wonder if you've really lost them -- after all, the First Amendment says that `Congress shall pass no law' ... and while this has generally been interpeted as meaning that the Government shall pass no law abridging your freedom of speech, in this case, I see no law having been passed. So what are you complaining about when you ask about your First Amendment Rights?

Where are Ms. O'Gara's?

Hers seem to be perfectly functional as well. Did she lose hers too?

Where is the freedom of press?

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press. You own your press, and so you have freedom of press, and you used it. What's the problem?

As for the story you posted, what did you think the response would be? I'm not talking about the DoS attacks, but just the general reaction from the more `moderate' people? Did you think that people would appreciate knowing who PJ was? Was that news?

As far as the DoS attacks go, call the FBI. You should be able to assign a large dollar figure to the damage being caused, and so the FBI will probably take your complaint seriously. Nail the bastards! Seriously. I don't approve of what you've done, but you've already given yourself enough problems -- we don't need criminals adding to them with DoS attacks.

As for the rest of the world (the people who are saying that you made a poor decision, in varying degrees of articulateness), well, you made your bed -- now lie in it. I don't feel sorry for you. You may have had every right to post the story (or maybe not -- it sort of looked like a threat. But I'll leave that to the lawyers) -- but the bad will you've just gained with a signifigant portion of the community can't be a good thing.

Re:FIrst amendment rights ...

[rusty0101]

Just got to thinking, perhaps the 'DoS' attack being talked about, is not as people would initially think, bringing down the site through some network attack. Perhaps the actual notifications being sent to the advertizers about the initial article, and possibly their subsequent response, up to and including canceling their advertizing contracts with sys-con, is being considered a denial of service attack.

The logic here is that in order for sys-con to provide service, they need a positive revenue stream, which for them comes from getting paid for presents and clicks for ads. If the advertizing companies are canceling their contracts, sys-con will be unable to pay for the servers and bandwidth required to provide the service that allows them to sell ad space. i.e. it becomes a Denial of Service, where the attack is directed at the money aspect rather than the network aspect of that service.

Obviously if the advertisers are pulling or canceling their contracts, sys-con would have to negotiate new contracts either with other advertisers, or re-negotiate contracts with the advertisers who are currently pulling out. Somehow I doubt such contracts would be as lucrative as the ones they had before.

As for whining about first ammendment rights, it is his right to elect to remove a story from his servers. Just as it would be my first ammendment right as a BBS owner to delete messages I find offensive that are being posted on my BBS, or web server, or groupware server, or any other server.

Perhaps MOG should look behind her couch as well.

-Rusty

Re:FIrst amendment rights ...

[dougmc]

As for whining about first ammendment rights, it is his right to elect to remove a story from his servers. Just as it would be my first ammendment right as a BBS owner to delete messages I find offensive that are being posted on my BBS, or web server, or groupware server, or any other server.

Absolutely. His servers, his domain. He can do whatever he wants with them.

As for the DoS attacks, they're nothing new. People have been getting hit with them for various reasons for quite some time now. Now they're distributed, launched from thousands of compromised systems across the world, and therefore very difficult to track, but if the FBI were to get sufficiently interested, and if the attacks were to persist, they could find the source much of the time.

As for your guess about the logic, I dunno. SCO has been hit by similar attacks, and in that case the financial impact wasn't so obvious. I think it's more of a knee-jerk reaction -- `I don't like them! Well, I've got all of these bots ... let's DoS them!' without actually thinking of what they're doing.

Perhaps MOG should look behind her couch as well.

Indeed. Maybe that's where Jimmy Hoffa's hiding ...

Re:FIrst amendment rights ...

[iwbcman]

German Humour:

"Man wird als AK geboren, einmal AK immer AK."

Translation:

AK is an abbreviation for Arschlochkind, or Asshole-Child

One is born an asshole-child, once an asshole-child always an asshole-child ;)

And the owner of sys-con just showed what kind of an AK he actually is ;)

Mediabiliti Press Releases

[perrye]

There is no "Medabiliti press release dated April 14, 2003."

Mediabiliti Press Releases

Was this bit in MOG's article fabricated?

Fuat is a scumbag

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuat Kircaali
3001 Ne 36th St
Lghthse Point, FL 33064-8568
Tel.: (954) 943-3281

how's that feel fucker?
Here's some more information:
fuat@yachtchartersmagazine.com

Re:Fuat is a scumbag

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrasting to the reactions of the zealots here to the release of PJ's info, I doubt he gives a flying fuck that you found easily obtained public information.

Shotgun mouthwash plz.

Disgusted

[cjames53]

Not only does he not apologize, he approves of everything MOG wrote, and says they only pulled it for practical reasons, not ethical reasons. Disgusting. Have these people no sense of decency at all?

It's a recurring problem

[MarkusQ]

He still doesn't seem to understand what he did wrong.

He doesn't understand what he did wrong when he published the article, and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts he doesn't yet realize what he did wrong in the interview.

I can't imagine anyone with even a shred of a clue, when giving an interview that is almost certain to be linked to by slashdot, giving blanket permision like he did:

Besides, talking about personal home numbers, you can find my home number listed in the white pages and my home address is listed there as well. If a reporter wants to call me up at home or in my office, they can look up my phone number and address and show up at my door and ring my bell. I will come out and take a picture with the reporter if he or she wants to take my picture. Any reporter is welcome to my home as well as my office. We are not anonymous or private when it relates to our professional lives.

*Wince* What was he thinking?

--MarkusQ

P.S. For the record, if I ever get interviewed and slashdot gets hold of it, I want all of you yahoos to stay the heck away from my house. My number is not listed and I will not pose for photos with you.

Re:It's a recurring problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The only Fuat Kircaali that whitepages.com knows about is this one - wonder if that's him.

Kircaali, Fuat & Carmen
3001 NE 36th St
Lighthouse Point, FL 33064-8568
(954) 943-3281

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=3001+NE+36th+St,+lig hthouse+point,+florida&hl=en

Maybe someone from that area should go and take pictures of his house and so on, and post them on their blog.

Identity Theft

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the best part: MOG toss around a *criminal* accusation.
Its no different than if she accused Pamela Jones of being an accomplice in drug smuggling, or baby-stealing.
You cannot make criminal accusations lightly, unless you're ready to back them up.
You never print or publish such half-accusations.

MOG proof of PJ's theft is ... TO BE CONTINUED.

Slander, Libel & Willful Defamation. Next Case.

Regarding Mormons and PJ

[j_w_d]

If you actually go through PJ's posts, she is generally very careful to insist that religious stereotyping be eschewed. Other Groklaw members and ACs have indeed debated whether Mormonism had any role, but the general consensus has been to argue that attitude down.

He didn't get it.

[Kid Zero]

*sigh*

He just doesn't get it. He thinks "Me Media! Me almighty journalist! Me do what I like! Me No apologize but call YOU moron! Worship Media!"

We think "God, what a idiot."

and they wonder why we don't trust them?

Pamela Jones EXPOSED

[Anonymous Coward]

Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara

Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.

The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.

Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.

Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.

See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.

Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.

Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.

But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."

He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."

She was also missing and had been for weeks.

Nobody there knew where she was.

She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.

Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.

The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.

Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.

Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.

That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.

Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westches

Pamela Jones EXPOSED

[Anonymous Coward]

Uncensored, unsanitized version becuase information wants to be free:

Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara

Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.

The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.

Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.

Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.

See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.

Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.

Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.

But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."

He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."

She was also missing and had been for weeks.

Nobody there knew where she was.

She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.

Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.

The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.

Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.

Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.

That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.

Nick and his ma were apparently involve

I think you misunderstand `trespassing'

[brokeninside]

First off, I'm not a lawyer. That said, I've read more than a few legal codes. In most jurisdictions for which I've read the trespassing laws, a person has to be informed that they aren't welcome before criminal trespassing can be considered to have occurred. Hence, the popularity of ``no trespassing'' signs which inform all comers that they are not welcome. A verbal message of ``don't come around here no more'' will also do the trick in many places.

The bottom line, in many places (perhaps most places) you can legally waltz into someone else's house uninvited (provided the door is unlocked), sit down on the couch and watch television unless (1) the house owner asks you to leave or (2) there is a posted sign proclaiming that trespassing is not allowed.

I'm also unaware how actionable listing contact information for relatives is. If the information is public, I can't imagine how doing so could be illegal.

Which leaves slander. There might be a case for that. Or one for defamation of character.

Re:I think you misunderstand `trespassing'

[Master of Transhuman]

Right - just try your scenario.

See you in a year (or two) after your ass has been fudge-packed by your cellie at the state joint or county jail you will be occupying.

IANAL either - but you're very ANAL.

There are plenty of criminal codes that will be used against you for "waltzing" anywhere you aren't wanted.

Re:I think you misunderstand `trespassing'

[qeveren]

I think you've kind of forgotten crimes like 'breaking and entering'. Regardless of whether or not you have permission, I doubt you can legally enter someone's domicile, locked or otherwise, except under very specific circumstances.

IANAL, obviouisly...

Re:I think you misunderstand `trespassing'

[rpdillon]

I think you misunderstand "breaking and entering". The only legal requirement to be "breaking and entering" is to have to manipulate a physical object to gain access to a private area you do not own, and have not obtained permission to use. In this case, turning a doorknob satisfies this requirement.

So, don't go running into people's houses and sitting on their couch just yet. I know this may be far-fetched, but I think they might mind...would you?

I'm not so certain, but you might be right

[brokeninside]

First off, I'm not a lawyer. That said, I've read more than a few legal codes. In most jurisdictions for which I've read the trespassing laws, a person has to be informed that they aren't welcome before criminal trespassing can be considered to have occurred. Hence, the popularity of ``no trespassing'' signs which inform all comers that they are not welcome. A verbal message of ``don't come around here no more'' will also do the trick in many places. The bottom line, in many places (perhaps most places) you can legally waltz into someone else's house uninvited (provided the door is unlocked), sit down on the couch and watch television unless (1) the house owner asks you to leave or (2) there is a posted sign proclaiming that trespassing is not allowed. I'm also unaware how actionable listing contact information for relatives is. If the information is public, I can't imagine how doing so could be illegal. Which leaves slander. There might be a case for that. Or one for defamation of character.

He thinks readers are a DDOS!

[BroncoInCalifornia]

The only reason he pulled the article is the DDOS attacks.

These online SYS-CON rags must not be getting much traffic. The geek comunity has been avoiding SYS-CON for a while now.

For a brief while it looked like SYS-CON was doing the right thing so we all had a look see. They could not handle the traffic. They have no idea how much traffice they could have if they did the right thing on a regular basis.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies for the misunderstanding, fine sir.

Response from LinuxWorld Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a few of the LinuxWorld editors saw the interview, and you can bet that they aren't happy. Here, here, and here.

What does ethics have to do with journalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con:

What does ethics have anything to do with professional reporting and journalism?

What indeed. And people wonder why so many CEOs are going on trial.

This notion that being a "journalist" justifies invasions of privacy of all kinds against all kinds of people may be the straw that breaks the camel's back for most Americans, and results in reigning in press abuses. One can only hope. For my part, while I don't normally approve of DoS attacks, in this case, they were probably the only effective sanction for bad corporate behavior.

Things That Happen to Sr. Editors During Reunions

[blackbearnh]

Yep, I was at my 25th High School Reunion when this broke today, here's my initial comments, more to come later in the weekend.

James Turner
Senior Editor
LinuxWorld Magazine

More grist

[rhizome]

LinuxWorld Editor James Turner weighs in late, and thickens the plot.

Re:More grist

[_Sprocket_]

So Turner notes that there's a Forbes article in the works. And he is inclined to guess that it won't be favorable to the Linux community.

There seems to be an interesting amount of media attention. And an interesting spin. Is this simply dust kicked up from an interesting incident? Or is it being driven by someone's PR firm?

There was a recent Slashdot article noting how the vast majority of news stories (outside of events like disasters, etc) are driven by PR firms. One example given was the "suits are back" stories being ultimately PR fodder for the Men's Warehouse. The author notes that in any story that goes beyond simple facts, the reader should follow the money.

Not just Groklaw...

[phantomfive]

There is real fear in the publishing industry among bloggers. And it is quite understandable.....they are an unknown that threaten anything from taking down the entire industry to exposing them as liars. So given the fear, I can see how even honest reporters might subconciously look for the evil side of blogs......

The Publisher Is An Asshole

[Master of Transhuman]

His entire remarks demonstrate it to anyone who can read.

I suspect he's bullshitting about the DoS attack, as well. While I had problems accessing Linux Business News (and by the way, they send you an email every time another response is made to the article you post to, and they offer an opt-out link - which doesn't work!), I neither saw nor heard of any DoS attack on them.

His response is the classic human primate response of claiming to be completely blameless and on the side of "right" when caught doing something stupid and unethical and getting problems because of it.

It is now justified to boycott the entire organization until HIS ass is kicked to the curb along with MoGTroll's. I'm sure he has investors (not to mention advertisers) who would be unhappy to see him be responsible for lost revenue due to being an asshole.

AND notice he didn't explain anything about how Sys-Con was running ads for OSS companies on LBN without the OSS companies even KNOWING their ads were running on LBN, let alone next to these sorts of anti-OSS articles.

A little inflating advertising clicks program - sounds exactly like something this asshole would be part of.

Oh, I was going to keep my subscription too

[Xisiqomelir]

"We ran a story entitled "Who is Pamela Jones?" The facts in the story were accurate. There was nothing in the story we thought factually, professionally, ethically or legally wrong." This attempt to save face is going to cost him.

LinuxWorld Editors Resign!

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out! Apparently the editors got fed up.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Master of Transhuman]

I'm not sure there WAS any "attack". Did anybody hear about such a thing before this interview? Especially since he claims it was the "biggest DoS attack" ANY media company has suffered?

It sounds to me like this guy was claiming such in order to use the same "OSS people are wackos" claim that Laura DiDio AND MoG used.

Which is very suspicious. It tends to make me think he's part and parcel of the same SCO-loving crew since he uses the exact same tactics.

I cancelled my free subscription

[LarsWestergren]

This was very unfortunate. I was glad to be offered a free subscription for Java Developer Journal just a day ago. I accepted, but after reading this interview I sent a polite mail asking to cancelling it.

Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns...

[mellonhead]

http://turner.linuxworld.com/read/1278212.htm

The Other Shoe Drops

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Senior Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Magazine Announce Resignations

MONTVALE, New Jersey, May 14th, 2005 --- The entire senior editorial staff of LinuxWorld Magazine has today announced that they will be leaving the magazine, effective immediately.

The following statement was released by the group. "We regret that Sys-Con Media has been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

James Turner

turner@blackbear.com

603-552-2020

Dee-Ann LeBlanc

dee@renaissoft.com

(604) 898-8433

posted Saturday, 14 May 2005

Re:Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns..

[heli_flyer]

I'm glad you've done the principled thing, but I still wonder: who will keep Fuat Kircaali from doing stupid things without you guys there?

He came across as somewhat of an arsehole

[elronxenu]

This was the guy's chance, probably his only chance, to acknowledge that Maureen O'Gara's stuff was beyond the pale, to say sorry for it and renew readers' faith in the quality of his publications.

Instead he chose to use his time to pick nits about whether bloggers are reporters and whether the telephone numbers which were published were business or personal.

And then he launched into a lengthy diatribe about how his websites were being DOSed by "fanatics" and how people were complaining to his advertisers.

The "DOS" was most likely just a slashdotting. I know for a fact that Groklaw suffered load related problems when the "Intimidation" and followup articles were posted. Groklaw hit some kind of resource limit on comments on the "Intimidation" article, and I was seeing PHP error messages too. If Mr Kircaali saw a much higher flow of traffic than usual, for several days afterward, that would be because he didn't pull all of the Maureen O'Gara stories off his websites, contrary to his promise. There were reports that some stories had remained and my impression is that it took a few days before they were all gone. Of course people are going to reload the site frequently during this time - those who care whether SYS-CON.COM keeps its promise, and those who care whether any Maureen O'Gara stories remain.

And as for the second horn of Mr Kircaali's contention, that people were unjustly contacting his advertisers, my understanding is that the continued presence of Maureen O'Gara at SYS-CON.COM had been an issue for 6 months and Mr Kircaali had refused to terminate her for that length of time. If something's an issue for that long, of course somebody is going to escalate it. And the advertisers are ultimately Mr Kircaali's boss.

Mr Kircaali defends the practice of running Microsoft advertisements on a Linux website by asserting the absurdity of refusing to run Microsoft advertisements on a Microsoft website. This is a straw man argument; few people would complain about seeing Microsoft advertisements on a .NET website. But Microsoft is the enemy of Linux specifically and Free Software in general, so it is rather disturbing that an OSS advocacy site should run their advertisements (this includes Slashdot).

Finally Mr Kircaali closes with some choice weasel words on the issue of privacy, an unsubtle insult to Groklaw's readers ("if the majority of Ms. Jones' readers are the same people whom we dealt with this week, now I understand better why she may want to remain anonymous") and a bit of bignoting themselves as the victim: a media company who became a victim of perhaps the biggest cyber attack in history.

My opinion is, whatever the merits of Mr Kircaali's arguments, he chose exactly the wrong way to close off the matter. I doubt he has endeared himself to anybody except Microsoft, who believe they benefit by painting Linux supporters as vigilante zealots.

Re:He came across as somewhat of an arsehole

[ninthwave]

Well I know the advertisers understand the issue better than he does as at lesat when the accused me of spam and I said no it is a letter writing campaign. The few I had a dialogue with got what was going on. So they are understanding the situation. So if the advertisers are having dialogues with us supposed attackers he has a real problem, and he did the wrong thing in addressing it.

Dear Linus - Please deny them Linux trademark.

[thedarb]

Dear Mr. Linus Torvalds,

Would you be so kind as to pull Sys-Con's license to use the Linux trademark? I think other publishing companies could better represent your trademark.

Thank you,
Brandon Darbro

Re:Dear Linus - Please deny them Linux trademark.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Mr. Dildo,

If you knew anything about trademarks, you would know that they are not misappropriating it because they are not labeling a kernel or an operating system that they have created as "Linux". In their masthead, "Linux" is an adjective.

Fuck you,

Linus' Lawyer

Re:Dear Linus - Please deny them Linux trademark.

[thedarb]

Well thanks for the education, but did you need to insult me while delivering it?

Re:Dear Linus - Please deny them Linux trademark.

[jcaren]

Whoa!
I think you are on the right line here.

ARO holds the rights to the perl camel for
Larry Wall and defends it vigorously.

It *may* be possible to get ORA to do a similar
thing for our esteemed TUX, protecting his
honour. :-)

Jacqui

Was this "DoS" a Slashdotting?

[thedarb]

I wonder if this supposed Denial of Service attack was actually many Slashdot readers looking into the story and the company mentioned in the original post. Thoughts on this?

*TheDarb

Re:Was this "DoS" a Slashdotting?

[Xisiqomelir]

Are you suggesting, sir, that the world's leading i-technology magazine publisher (with 16 titles) would be unaware of a simple distinction that our lowliest crapflooder could manage? Don't be preposterous.

They still have ads on the internet?

[Darth23]

Haven't seen too many since I switched to Firefox.

Re:That guy is an obsequious weasel of a human bei

[Anonymous Coward]

I womder if he'll get it if we ask for the name and adress of his mother, including a rough description of the house she lives in.

His mum will then take remedial measures to correct her mistake....

Re:Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns..

[Anonymous Coward]

There wasn't any stopping stupid actions with him there. Best to get out before the shit sticks to you.

Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Commite

[walterbyrd]

James Turner, former senior editor of LinuxWorld wrote Fred Brown of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Commitee. Here is what Fred Brown wrote:

James,

I agree with you. That piece by O'Gara definitely is outside the norms of good journalism. It's bullying, insulting and harassing, and I, for
one, really don't get the point of it. That's not to say that other journalists are sometimes guilty of those sins, but that still doesn't make it
good journalism.

So I don't think you did the wrong thing in using you First Amendment rights to call for O'Gara's ouster or reprimand or whatever. The SPJ Code of
Ethics says ethical journalists should "expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media" and "abide by the same high standards to which they hold others."

Fred Brown

Co-chair, SPJ Ethics Committee

http://turner.linuxworld.com/read/1277987.htm

Update.

[bmo]

ALL OF THE SENIOR EDITORS OF LINUXWORLD HAVE RESIGNED!

Nobody can stand Fuat any longer. The ones who can go do something else have decided to do just that.

The sooner IDG gets its trademark back from Sys-Con the better.

Sys-Con - System of a Con.

--
BMO

Important topic headline does not go here.

[Anonymous Coward]

There sure are some ugggly people working at Sys-Con. Getting rid of O'Gara was a step in the right direction... yet whats with such bs coverage over this crap for the past couple of days. Its like a damn geek Soap opera. I agree what she did was wrong and incomptent "journalism" but let her name fade out like the hag she is.

Re:Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns..

[Anonymous Coward]

No on will stop FK, he owns SYS-CON. Oh, wait, you can vote with your wallet and avoid SYS-CON publications and web sites.

Summary: O'Gara good, but DDoS wins

[Anonymous Coward]

I would summarize Fuat Kircaali's words somewhat differently (paraphrasing):

"We stand by everything that O'Gara wrote, and it is the right of every journalist to harrass anyone they like, and the tone of their articles is of no concern as long as their facts are correct.

We removed the story because the DDoS attacks on our site were costing us money."

In other words, the only thing that swayed him were the DDoS attacks. It seems then that this is the only method of influence that he leaves open.

Re:Summary: O'Gara good, but DDoS wins

[Trepalium]

I have yet a slightly different summary:

"We haven't actually bothered to read or fact check anything O'Gara has written, but since it's created a controversy, it must be good. We're getting a lot of hits, and we're making good money.

Unfortunately the DDoS attack is now eating some of that profit, so we have to pull it."

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

In one part, speaking of Pamela Jones being a blogger not a reporter, he says "The reporter's job is to report news."

Why is that confusing? A reporter's job is to report the news, but reporting news doesn't mean you're a reporter. For example a policeman's job is to enforce the law, but if you or I enforce the law we are vigilantes, not policemen.

Sys-Con Editors Resign

[Prototerm]

It appears, according to their blogs on the Sys-Con web site (referenced above), that the senior editors have all resigned over this interview.

The editors have all resigned.

[tomhudson]

Am I the only one who thinks that DOS'ing someone's website is crummy and ILLEGAL ?

Because it wasn't a DoS. Just like when SCO kept claiming someone was DoSing their site, and it turned out they had misconfigured their server. There was no DoS - just access to the site was slow. If you believe that motherfucker Fuat Kircaali I have a swamp, a bridge, AND a million lines of infinging code to sell you.

Besides, the editors have resigned en masse:

Saturday, 14 May 2005
The Other Shoe Drops
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Senior Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Magazine Announce
Resignations

MONTVALE, New Jersey, May 14th, 2005 --- The entire senior editorial staff of
LinuxWorld Magazine has today announced that they will be leaving the magazine,
effective immediately.

The following statement was released by the group. "We regret that Sys-Con Media has
been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate
under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to
meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of
Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment
ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
James Turner
turner@blackbear.com
603-552-2020

Dee- Ann LeBlanc
dee@renaissoft.com
(604) 898-8433

Last Updated: Saturday, 14 May 2005 1:05 PM GMT :: Comments/Trackback (15-0)
Why is Fuat the Only Person Who Doesn't Get It

I just got home from my 25th High School reunion, so sorry if I'm coming to the game a little late on Fuat's interview in Free Software Magazine this afternoon.

A few things right off the bat. I've been supporting Sys-Con this week because I believed that this was based on, at worse, a misjudgement on the part of Fuat Kircaali in approving the publication of Maureen O'Gara's original article. It is becoming clear that Mr. Kircaali does not understand or value the basic ethical standards respected by the mainstream publishing industry. I wrote earlier today to the Ethics Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, who's code of ethics I've quoted before in this space. I included a copy of the original O'Gara article. Here is the response:

James,

I agree with you. That piece by O'Gara definitely is outside the norms of
good journalism. It's bullying, insulting and harassing, and I, for
one, really don't get the point of it. That's not to say that other
journalists are sometimes guilty of those sins, but that still doesn't make it
good journalism.

So I don't think you did the wrong thing in using you First Amendment
rights to call for O'Gara's ouster or reprimand or whatever. The SPJ Code of
Ethics says ethical journalists should "expose unethical practices of
journalists and the news media" and "abide by the same high standards to which
they hold others."

Fred Brown

Co-chair, SPJ Ethics Committee

In spite of this, I have received abuse from Sys-Con staffers accusing me of treason against the company. I've also been implied to be responsible for the DDoS attacks against Sys-Con. In light of this, you can expect further developments later in the weekend.

James

Addendum: Comments from Steve and Dee-Ann

Last Updated: Saturday, 14 May 2005 11:38 AM GMT :: Comments/Trackback (3-0)

Friday, 13 May 2005

The Truth, The Whole Truth, and nothing but ...

[Toon Moene]

> Well, how do you compare the popularity of a
> blog to the job of a reporter? A reporter is
> not a blogger. The reporter's job is to report
> news. The reporter's focus should not be on
> winning a popularity contest but on making sure
> that they are reporting the facts and the news
> accurately.

Exactly, Mr. Fuat. And that's why we go to Groklaw, and not one of your outlets.

Toon Moene (physicist at large)

we know where you live....

[Tangurena]

The purpose of the OGara piece was to clearly send a message to PJ: We know where you live, we know where your mother lives, we can kick down your door any time we want to.

The chilling and scary message was the one OGara sent, not the response by the public. The public's response was based on the feeling: if they did it to PJ, they can do that to us.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[SA Stevens]

Again, I'll believe it when I see the logs.

So you're still in denial. Or should I pull up emacs and generate the 'logs' you speak of? (iow- wtf would make a 'log' believeable to you?)

reject hate_crime concept

[Anonymous Coward]

No such thing as "human rights". That concept is neo-stalinist, gunpoint blather. Actually, RIGHTS are culturally dependent behaviors supported by (that particular ) citizenry. What free-men do! OTOH those supporting "human rights" are stalinist thugs and deserve treatment accordingly ...

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[aricusmaximus]

"A reporter's job is to report the news, but reporting news doesn't mean you're a reporter."

Wrong. As soon as you publish something as news, then you are a reporter. There is no such thing as a "reporter's" badge or a reporter's license. The only difference between being a amateur or professional reporter is if you get a paycheck out of it. Any formal requirement, such as a "Reporer's Licence" would be a inherent violation of your First Amendment rights.

If PJ was not claiming to be a reporter, then you might have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, you didn't take the 5-10 seconds to check the groklaw website and mission statement. To quote:

• "IANAL. I am a journalist with a paralegal background"
• "First, [Groklaw is] a journalistic enterprise..."

"For example a policeman's job is to enforce the law, but if you or I enforce the law we are vigilantes, not policemen."

Wrong again. Enforcing the law, inlcuding making citizen's arrest is not vigilantism.

Two strikes. Care for a third?

Re:Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns..

[radish]

Well done! Be sure to keep us informed of where you go next so we can give them our page impressions :)

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[man_of_mr_e]

Perhaps. He claims their sites were offline much of 3 days or so. I didn't go to any of their sites so I don't know.

However, it's not really as beyond the realm of reason as you seem to think. Recall that there were some monster DoS's against SCO, which even Eric Raymond foudn confirmation of by taking to the actual attacker.

Even though i'm open source friendly, I have no problem believing this happened.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[man_of_mr_e]

Maybe you'll believe Eric Raymond when he verified that it actually happened.

http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2003082501026 NWCYLL

Re:Sr. Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Mag Resigns..

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what publications SYS-CON owns?

apologies are good

[TubeSteak]

there was an paper summarized in some medical magazine that basically concluded many malpractice lawsuits could have been avoided if the doctor(s) had just owned up and said "i'm sorry, we screwed up. we want to make things right"

instead corporate counsel tells them not to admit anything and a legal broughaha ensues.

Re:apologies are good

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll second that one. I had some complications following a surgery where the surgeon made a mistake. The thing that really pissed me off was how everybody involved clammed up, even those who had nothing to do with the surgery. I went from having caring, compassionate care to being treated like a stick of dynamite about to go off. All I would have wanted was to be compensated for the extra expense I incurred due to the follow up care (a few hundred dollars), and to know that my case would be used to educate those employed by and practising in the hospital so that it wouldn't happen again. I wouldn't even have required an apology from the doctor.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[Lifewish]

Thanks for the link - I honestly hadn't come across that snippet before. That does add a lot of credence to SCO's claims.

Currently the evidence in the case of Sys-con seems to be a little less convincing - I've seen 5 IPs running "wget -r /" cited as the supposed DoS attack (enough to swamp a small host, but certainly not enough to be construed as definitely malicious).

Sorry for taking so long to reply.

Re:Huh? Does this man use his own dictionary?

[man_of_mr_e]

While I agree that i've not seen any evidence to support the claim of DoS yet, I just wouldn't put it past anyone. People get emotional over things and often run off and do things that are not well advised.

The fact is, all it takes is for one hothead with the skill and resources to do something like this, and we're all aware that many of us geeks tend to have less than stellar emotional maturity at times (as any trip through the kernel mailing list will tell you).

Maybe it never happened, maybe it did, maybe it was exagerated, maybe it was something misinterpreted... the point is, I'm not going to dismiss the possibility of it happening, only question the facts supporting it.