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Confessions of an Internet "Shock Jock"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hey-wait-i-use-a-pseudonym dept.

An anonymous reader followed up on the Windows memory-leak fraud scandal, which is worth reading before you read the perpetrator's justification. "Randall C. Kennedy comes clean about his past, his relationship to Craig Barth and how it all came tumbling down. Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld."

2 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. No Choice at This Point by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's a lengthy piece, you can probably skip the parts about Intel and Wall Street (although some of you may be convinced that becoming such a spinster/shill/whore/liar requires years of training). But What I found most interesting:

    And implode it did. After publishing a particularly alarming set of findings – which I still stand behind while continuing to evaluate new data – the internet became engulfed in controversy. As the furor grew, and as more and more media outlets questioned just who this Craig Barth fellow really was and what made DMS tick, the house of cards came crumbling down. The persona of Craig Barth was exposed as one Randall C. Kennedy, and the entire web of half-truths and misdirection was exposed as the ruse that it was.

    (Emphasis mine.) It seems like he has a reasonably technical background. What has he found that cannot be explained by SuperFetch (high memory usage) and Native Command Queuing (backlogged disk I/O queue)? Those were the two big percentage differences and apparently explainable if not desirable for the average user.

    So, what next? For starters, neither the exo.performance.network or Devil Mountain Software, Inc., are going anywhere anytime soon.

    Surely he must realize that open sourcing everything about exo.performance.network is the only thing he can do at this point. I mean, no one's going to trust him again if he has any way to manipulate the data/results without subject to complete inspection. The only option I see is to open source the software client and post the raw data alongside his own analysis. Without that I'm not stupid enough to trust an adoption rate quoted from this guy let alone average disk I/O queue on Windows 7. Without this kind of auditing, I'm sure those numbers will turn up to be just enough to make my eyes widen and my finger click his link. I am saddened that people will probably continue to run his client without knowing this whole story of how they were manipulated by a particularly crafty scam artist.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  2. What a piece of work by FrankPoole · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This guy drags journalism through the mud, celebrates it like a pig rooting in his own feces, and then has the nerve to blame the media for blowing everything out of proportion and now is trying to claim his 15 minutes of fame like he's a GD Survivor villain. What a jerk. Oh, and by the way, XPNet's Windows 7 data is flat-out wrong and anyone who knows anything about Windows and memory will tell you the same thing.