07.28.09
News Site That Promotes the SCO Lawsuit and Microsoft’s Patent Racket is Bullying Critics
Summary: Sys-Con responds to critic whom it exploited with “Jihad”
AD HOMINEM attacks are a convenient method for shooting down not only those who disagree but also those who expose.
In all sorts of ways, Sys-Con has been promoting Microsoft and SCO agenda for quite some time. One person in particular, Maureen O’Gara (MOG), stood out as suspect because of the sheer SCO bias and the relationship with Microsoft [1, 2]. This is not a personal attack because it refers only to professional details, such as those that may (and obviously will) lead to bias.
“In all sorts of ways, Sys-Con has been promoting Microsoft and SCO agenda for quite some time.”Sys-Con went way too far when Maureen O’Gara, whose relationship with the publication goes beyond just employment, stalked Pamela Jones (even her family), and then published personal smears that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. One of the regular trolls who harass this Web site has been doing the same things to other people, but that’s another story.
Sys-Con has just fallen quite deep into the mud, again. When exposed, it started to personally prosecute and harass the messenger, who finally speaks out. It is primarily about Ulitzer, which is really just an offshoot of Sys-Con.
Carla at Linux Today adds: “Linux Today readers might recall that Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Ulitzer, is also the CEO of Sys-Con Media, notorious for publishing the infamous Maureen O’Gara’s “expose” of Pamela Jones of Groklaw.”
Anyway, about Ulitzer/Sys-Con:
It all started at the end of March, 2009, when I discovered that I was listed as an author on a site called Ulitzer (http://ulitzer.com)*. They had used my name as a subdomain on their site (aralbalkan.ulitzer.com; this has since been removed) and the site presented a photo of me, stating that I had been an author with them for several years. They had also scraped my blog posts and were reproducing them on the site under a different license to the one that I had published them under.
Beyond simply using my content without permission, they had misappropriated my identity by stating that I was one of their authors. And I wasn’t the only one. To this day, David Heinemeier Hansson (http://davidheinemeierhansson.ulitzer.com/) is a Ulitzer author (he’s apparently been writing for them since November 24, 2005), as is – quite ironically, I may add – Matt Cutts (http://mattcutts.ulitzer.com/), head of Google’s webspam team, who has apparently been a “Ulitzer author since September 3, 2008″.
Other prominent Ulitzer authors include Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly, http://timoreilly.ulitzer.com/), Jeremy Allaire (@jerBrightcove, http://jeremyallaire.ulitzer.com/), Dion Almaer (@dalmaer, http://dionalmaer.ulitzer.com/), and Michael Arrington (http://michaelarrington.ulitzer.com), among many, many, others. Needless to say, I can only assume that many of these authors don’t have a clue that their identities are being misappropriated and that their content is being used without permission.
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Following that first article, they published another article, titled “Turkish Web Designer Declares Death on Twitter” in which they stated that I was “said to be organizing an underground group to kill or bodily harm the company representatives according to his Twitter logs” and continued to compare me to the Turkish assassin who “shot and wounded Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981″. The details of that article are documented here.
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I am not the first person Sys-Con have attacked like this – they also very publicly attacked Jame Ervin, calling her (among other things) a “bitch” as documented here – but I would like to make sure that I am the last. This is an opportunity for us to say “no” to Sys-Con once and for all and to make them understand that we will not put up with online bullying.
I do not have, nor have I ever had a “cihad”, jihad, or any other “*had” with Sys-Con but what I have had is enough of their bullying.
So what can we do? Well, several things.
Boycott Sys-Con
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Ad revenue: or, how Sys-Con spams Google with duplicate content
In order to get ad revenue, Sys-Con and Ulitzer scrape the RSS feeds of authors (sometimes without their permission or knowledge) and then display this content alongside a deluge of advertising from their sponsors.
For years we have openly complained that Sys-Con was spamming Google News with name/word-loaded pages that contain almost no story or just a press release with tons of arbitrary words/brands appended.
Moreover, after years of pretending that Maureen O’Gara was kicked out for what she had done, this lady was permanently brought back, unmasked, and then shown with a full name rather than an old alias (with some very old photo of hers). She is still boosting the SCO agenda and Microsoft’s patent racket against Linux. We watch it closely but rarely remark on it as that would draw attention to known troublemakers. █
“Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
