Slashdot Mirror
Confessions of an Internet "Shock Jock"
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."
Why would I give this asshole yet another page view? What could the article possibly say that would make me think he's not a lying asshole? I think this is one case where everyone shouldn't RTFA. Oh, wait. I'm new here...
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
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.
There is no downside to internet anonymity, that would also exist without internet anonymity.
His definition of internet "shock jock" appears to be closer to my definition of "unethical sack of shit," but why quibble over semantics.
I've never seen a CV written in a format like that before.
"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."
Or, say, Slashdot, which got InfoWorld half those hits by regurgitating it's bullshit in the first place?
Come on Slashdot editors- you can't post that quote, almost as if you're pretending that you're somehow innocent of this. You may been unwitting pawns in the InfoWorld hits game certainly, but you posted a FUD article about Android fragmentation just a day after InfoWorld had been outed as guilty of this and untrustworthy and that suggests that perhaps you enjoy leeching hits off their FUD as much as they enjoy generating them. So why pretend that Slashdot too doesn't use shock articles sometimes to try and increase hits?
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Slashdot articles else I wouldn't come here, but it's pretty obvious that some of them are inflammatory FUD (hell Slashdot posted the original article in question) and that others of them are Slashvertisments.
Slashdot's credibility absolutely has decreased over the years because of this, and so it may want to read the above quoted sentence and take some lessons from it itself to ensure it avoids ever heading the same way. I suspect that the editors play the biggest role in this by you know, doing some actual editing and checking the authenticity of the article they're about to post.
After the 96th paragraph about how "Major IT firm X comes knocking at my door", I realized this guy is your usual narcissistic fuck and stopped reading. The choice of phrases like "comes knocking at my door" tells me everything about this guy: he wants to clone himself so he can finally fuck someone worthy of his love.
Seriously. I did not need a thousand word sub-essay on Dvorak, Windows NT and NetWare. What a fucking retard.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
"“Most Reviled Person on the Internet, 2010 Edition.”", "while the future may see my name relegated to the role of punch line for a crude party joke". Sounds like this guy has a vastly overinflated sense of self-importance. Or maybe I don't spend enough time on the internet to know who the Most Reviled Person was and will be doomed to laughing uncomfortably trying to blend in at parties when people start busting out the Randall Kennedy jokes.
to comment (4 or 5 months ago) that IDG news is a biased, paid up, propagandist, political mouthpiece. I was modded as a troll, back then.
I'll bite. I skimmed through your comments looking for this -1, Troll claim that you have made and was unable to find it. According to Google (not an authoritative source) I can only find one comment in which you name IDG and it's not modded Troll, it's modded Offtopic. Nor does it rest at -1, merely at 0. There's an important difference between the two. You may have had a legitimate point it just had no place on that article for Slashdot. I suspect that if you had compiled a list of examples that would conclusively lead the reader to agree with you, you might have even gotten a +2 Interesting.
... but who should be the ones laughing in those situations? Probably the people who are employed.
I've noticed unfortunately that, when you do cite sources, it appears as though you're trying to pound a square block into a round hole. Be careful not to look for things to prove you're right but instead to read many things about the subject before concluding that there is evidence from reliable sources or maybe your viewpoint needs adjustment.
I have several friends from India, they have never complained of the media bashing India. I cannot say I've noticed this beyond jokes about outsourcing and telemarketing
On top of that, you throw out the sporadic groundless conspiracy which can hurt your message:
No popular Indian newspaper reported anything like that. I'm pretty sure that this news has been created by the manipulation wing of CIA and published by its media partners. Those filthy bastards don't like to be idle. Now that they've exhausted all the crap they can publish about China, they've turned towards India. Please don't believe them.
Listen, if you have a message to get out, that's fine. But a short post with such large conspiracy claim is often outright dismissed.
Your comments are often curt and therefore don't have a lot of content. This results in you lashing out at your reader which violates the know-your-audience rule of writing and often brings nothing new to the discussion.
My biggest advice to you is to add more meat to your comments and don't get in little pissing matches with long back-and-forths between you and another poster. People don't enjoy reading ping-pong matches. Think out your argument or claim ahead of time and account for all viewpoints from the get-go. That's my advice. You rarely see me post more than one or two comments per article and it's not because I don't read the responses, it's because I come here to say something, I say it and then I'm done. Anything I missed was an error on my part and I deserve the valid rebuttal.
I know this post looks like a direct criticism or attack on you but it's not. It's meant to be constructive criticism because you have some real gems in your posts but every so often get really careless or resort to name calling or make outrageous claims with no proof. If someone had convinced me that this Randall C. Kennedy guy was a complete bullshitter months ago, I would have loved to have known ahead of time.
My work here is dung.
After all, it’s not as if I had trafficked in nuclear secrets or or stolen someone’s credit card information.
"Look guys it wasn't so bad, I was just foolin, no big deal!"
I merely tried to shield what was important to me from the fallout of the world that had been created for me.
"I'm the victim here, but I'm still a manly man, look at my sacrifice, I'm jumping on the grenade here! (as I throw everyone close at hand under the bus)"
And in the end, I failed miserably.
"Please feel sorry for me now that I've abused your trust for years and years."
It was a dumb move, born of frustration at feeling painted into a corner of my own making. I should have just walked away earlier – it’s just a blog in the end – but I lingered too long on the edge of the razor, and eventually it cut the heart out of everything I had tried to accomplish.
Wait is he trying to say that he almost got away with it, man he wishes he got away with it?
Fuck this asshole forever. As if what he's already done isn't enough, he tells his life story like anyone gives a shit. "Ohhh look how much money I made I am so awesome and knowledgable no wait feel sorry for me I'm just a man—a very manly man—protecting his family. But seriously, I'm rich and super smart, oh by the way buy my product you can trust me. I promise I won't create any more personas to review my own product and tell you how great it is."
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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.
Balancing the two worlds had become almost impossible, and I longed to escape from the "shock jock" persona that had been created for me...
I merely tried to shield what was important to me from the fallout of the world that had been created for me.
Sounds to me like this guy still is incapable of accepting responsibility for his own actions. If he can't accept responsibility for what HE created and what HE did, how is he ever going to have any measure of integrity?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I had a blog where I wrote all sorts of articles about things from computing to history to literature. Things I personally liked and all that. Pretty tame, homely blog. 20 hits on a good month, but meh, who cares. It's not like I'm Tom Friedman. Then one day I wrote a post on scientology (basically, it's hypocritical to criticise it as a religion if at the same time you're okay with all the others).
Boom! 300 page views that month. A dozen comments. Flamewars and fans.
If I'd been earning money from that blog, you bet I'd have taken a hint and continued to write things about how Obama is a commie, Glenn Beck should head an armed invasion of those baby-eating godless socialists in Europe, minorities are shifty, oil companies are conspiring against hamsters, and gays are actively plotting against our way of life every time they go Satan-worshipping on moonlit nights. Real me wouldn't stand for any of those, but real me - the regular guy who lives and lets live - doesn't sell as well.
Fox and MSNBC are more attractive investments than middle-o'-the-road CNN. The New York Times is doing all it can to survive, while the Sun and the National Enquirer sell on like it's 1970. Trash sells. I blame the man, but I also pity him. Only human, and as LotR says, the hearts of men are easily corrupted.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Well, if you strip away the self-important tone of TFA, it boils down to this:
A guy with a technical background discovered the rush of trolling a large audience. The major difference between this and a large segment of /. readers is, he did it under a journalistic guise - which makes him an unethical asshat whereas the /. trolls are merely run-of-the-mill asshats.
So then he tried to have his cake and eat it too: he wanted to enjoy the respect of his peers in technical endeavors while still having his fun as an asshat blogger. So, big surprise, it backfired and now he's lost the respect of his peers.
As for the Windows 7 RAM usage data - he may well have reported that in good faith, but it doesn't matter because of who he'd chosen to become. (As much as he tries to sound like he was drawn into his situation, ultimately he chose to be what he was and is; this article really just shows that while he may be resigned to the consequences, he hasn't truly accepted responsibility.) Maybe he really has reason to believe his findings, or maybe the desire to save face is coloring his view. (He certainly wants some measure of justification; I guess it's easier to feel that it's all unfair if the story that gets you caught was a case where you were factually correct.)