01.28.11
Gemini version available ♊︎Techrights Member Explains Smear Attacks on the Site
Guest post by gnufreex (read original: “Opponents of Techrights… can they stoop any lower?”)
Opponents of the Techrights.org website often resort to personal insults and smear campaigns in order to deter people from reading Techrights and seeing the truth about companies that often employ some of those attackers. But this time, they really scraped the bottom of the barrel. They impersonated Dr. Roy Schestowitz on Reddit. They first created an account called “techrights” and later “rschestowitz”.
First (one that had the name “techrights”) was saying nothing much, only posted Techrights articles with modified headlines so that they sound sensationalist. I brought that to Dr. Roy’s attention on Techrights IRC channel, and as expected, it is not him and he had no idea who that might be. But Wayne Borean predicted that usual anti-techrights folks will scream that it is Roy. Guess what? He was right. Bunch of Microsoft/Novell evangelists (and their nymshifts) crept out of the woodwork and started bashing Techrights, pretending that they are disgruntled “linux community” that hates Roy for some reason, even though their nyms are well known as notorious trolls and their agenda is obvious to anyone who bothers to Google the nyms or even just looks at their Reddit posting history. At that point, I asked the submitter what is his motivation for using Techrights name was. Account disappeared hours later, with no answer.
Roy wrote a quick post about the event, but at that point, another forger had shown up on Reddit, under nym rschestowitz. I regret not taking screen-shots, since the account is now deleted and I can’t provide you with actual quotes. But anyway, “rschestowitz” sock-puppet first wrote comments to an unrelated thread on Reddit, claiming that he is Dr. Roy Schestowitz, and that he came to “assure people that this is his only Reddit account”, a then linked to Roy’s post about previous nymshifter. Since Roy’s Techrights post that “rschesowitz” linked explicitly says that he don’t and won’t have any Reddit accounts, and that people who claim to be him on Reddit are forgers, “rchestowitz” immediately looked as forger he is, and got negative response from two people who seem to be genuine Redditors with no stake in this charade (ie, not Novell/Microsoft hacks, judging from posting history). But there is third one who responded violently and whose presence shows that this was coordinated smear campaign. That nick (I won’t mention it here because it doesn’t deserve SEO) is from notorious hater site whose name I also won’t mention here. I will just refer it as NHS, as in notorious hater site.
From here, action moves to Techrights comments. Another NHS troll (which I exposed) comes into play to attack Roy. Troll actually claimed that negative response on twitter (from other NHS trolls) actually means that “linux community” holds Roy “in contempt”. Tries to sell this staged drama as if it was genuine “linux community”. Same as Reddit troll from first nymshifter. NHS troll later went out to say that “to the best of his knowledge” NHS never attacked Roy (which is a blatant lie; even UrbanDictionary.com page shows their hate) and actually claimed that Roy is “getting close to libel” when he says otherwise. Like everything is made up. Of course, NHS wanted Google juice so they asked for links to attacks, but Roy knew better than to promote their cesspool site by linking to it. I won’t link it either.
So what happened here? As far I can see, NHS trolls decided to make some fake accounts and pin them on Roy. Then attack fakers as they are real Roy. Classic straw-man. After that, plan was probably to accuse Roy of nymshifting. But it failed, because of proper reaction. However, this shows us that bunch of spoiled brats from NHS and Novell/Microsoft nymshifting TEs are willing to go as low as identity theft, to libel anyone whom they disagree with. They have no qualms of claiming that everyone who disagrees with them is zealot, Roy Schestowitz’s sock-puppet or even FSF shill, while every time someone get exposed as puppet, it turns out that opponents of Techrights were pulling strings. They also like to scream “conspiracy theory” whenever obvious agenda is exposed, while they are not shy of making up far fetched theories themselves, repeating the ad infinitum using fake nyms and diversion tactics. This behaviour of theirs is not going to stop, since they think they can support their libel by repeating it enough times on enough places under enough different nyms, so that people start suspecting foul intentions from Techrights. But people are smarter than that. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
Clanky said,
January 30, 2011 at 6:49 pm
While I agree (and have consistently agreed) that any attempt to impersonate either this site or Roy himself on Reddit or any other site is childish, I do wish to address some of the points you raised here.
You talk about how I was “exposed” as being from Linsux (you can type the name, it won’t burn your fingers), I never tried to hide the fact, if i had wanted to do so I would have registered an account under a different name.
I did not claim that “the Linux community” holds Roy in contempt, but that certain sections of it do, this was not intended to sound as personal as it did, what I should have said was that sections of the FOSS community hold Roy’s zealotry and his crusade against Microsoft / Novell / Apple in contempt, you asked for proof of this? The existence of so-called anti-Linux sites such as Linsux, Linux Haters Blog, TM Repository, all of these sites are populated mostly by Linux / Free Software users.