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Windows 7 Memory Usage Critic Outed As Fraud
A few days ago, we ran word of a report alleging that Windows 7 consumed more memory than it should, based on a report from Devil Mountain Software; a followup post linked to Ars Technica's robust deconstruction of that claim. Now the story gets weird: Fred Flowers writes The original story quoted the company's CTO, Craig Barth on the issue. Now, InfoWorld editor in chief Eric Knorr has still more to add. From Knorr's blog at InfoWorld.com: 'On Friday, Feb. 19, we discovered that one of our contributors, Randall C. Kennedy, had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network), in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics. ... There is no Craig Barth.' Knorr's post goes on to say that Kennedy has been fired from his blogging gig at InfoWorld over this 'serious breach of trust,' and that his blog will be removed."
ZDNet, an InfoWorld competitor, was about to go public with an exposé on Randall C. Kennedy and Devil Mountain Software, but InfoWorld actually beat it to the punch by disclosing the matter itself.
InfoWorld's editor in chief, Eric Knorr, should be commended for dealing this matter quickly and decisively when he discovered Mr. Kennedy's deception. At the same time, he should think very carefully about the series of decisions that led to this outcome.
Randall C. Kennedy was an InfoWorld blogger known for his outrageous, inflammatory posts. Often these posts appeared to disregard the facts, overinflate the issues, or otherwise ignore the tenets of basic journalism in favor of sensationalism and manufactured furor. Doubtless InfoWorld appreciated the traffic such posts drove to its site. What it should have realized, however, was that beyond contributing to InfoWorld's success, Mr. Kennedy had a personal incentive for generating that traffic: promoting his own company, Devil Mountain Software. With that as his motive, he had far less incentive to consider InfoWorld's journalistic integrity when crafting his blog posts. Preserving that integrity was the job of InfoWorld's editorial staff. They failed to do so.
Compounding the issue is InfoWorld's decision to partner with Mr. Kennedy on the "Windows Sentinel" project, InfoWorld's in-house branded version of Devil Mountain Software's exo.performance.network Windows monitoring product. The original post announcing Windows Sentinel is currently hidden behind a password, but the Google cache clearly shows that InfoWorld was aware that Mr. Kennedy was behind Devil Mountain Software all along:
Today, I'm happy to announce the beta version of InfoWorld Windows Sentinel, a joint project with the exo.performance.network founded by InfoWorld Contributing Editor Randall C. Kennedy. ... According to Randall, the main point is "to develop a more concise picture of the Windows computing landscape.
InfoWorld's editorial staff should have seen that allowing a contributor to use InfoWorld's brand to promote his own company's products and/or services constituted a conflict of interest at best, and at worst, a serious breach of InfoWorld's responsibility to provide truthful, unbiased reporting to its readers.
InfoWorld needs to think very carefully about how to proceed in future if it hopes to recover its integrity after this incident. In an age where publications are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their power to drive revenue, it is more important than ever that editors take a stand for the paramount importance of high-quality, thorough, accurate reporting and editorials, untainted by financial interests or the pursuit of personal gain. InfoWorld stumbled by continuing to support Randall C. Kennedy when it should have, at the very least, questioned his judgment. It can and must do better.
According to the linked reports (both those in the summary and this one at ZDNet- http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31024) the only reporter for InfoWorld who "Barth" was quoted by was Gregg Keizer. This raises a question: Did Keizer know about this deception? And if not, how did he get contacted by Barth initially? It is possible the Keizer was deceived but some sort of answer would be nice.
However it's interesting to note that Randall Kennedy was one of the standard bearers in the public campaign against Vista. If you go through the most egregious condemnations of Vista posted to /., you'll find that a disproportionate number were sourced to Randall Kennedy at Infoworld. Many of which were about as truthful as the Windows 7 memory article.
Kennedy has been an extraordinarily biased source about Microsoft for a long time, and over the past few years I've lost a lot of karma pointing this out. For me this feels like vindication.
The UAC, in Vista, nagged constantly early on because of poorly written software. The UAC prompting means a program at launch either via code or manifest, or certain other compatibility-conditions (like being an installer) needs access to the user's administrative token, rather than the default neutered token. Typically that means its doing something it shouldn't have been doing, such as writing files into the installation directory rather than the user's profile (and thus needing administrative rights) or, for example, writing runtime settings into the local machine's registry rather than the user's registry.
The UAC prompts became far less common as time went on because publishers fixed their software that was doing things that even in XP they shouldn't have been doing (and getting more secure in the process).
They're reduced in Windows 7 primarily because a request for privilege escalation that is a direct result of a user action (based on a bunch of criteria, including a valid digital signature on the application, and I believe on the MSI that installed it) gets escalated automatically.
You *really* should almost never see a UAC prompt. Now, if you're a developer and are doing things that need to be escalated all the time, then no shit you're going to see it a lot. But a normal end user should virtually never see one on up-to-date versions of software on Vista or Windows 7. If you are, you should contact whoever publishes the software in question and tell them to fix it.