Comments on: Beware the OOXML AstroTurfer: “The Wraith”, “multivac1”, “hAl”, Among Other Nyms

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:42:24 +0000

Okay, I’ve gathered some more information about this. At one stage I thought it might be Wouter Van Vugt, but he does not post anonymously. Anonymous disruption has its roots in financial agenda (typically incentives) and without the cloak of anonymity people become more careful when attacking others. So after digging for some information, here is what came up:

He left a homepage link on some of his posts, such as:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/04/04/breaking-free-of-the-politics.aspx#2045280

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/03/09/florida-house-of-reps-leveraging-openxml.aspx#1860227

These lead back to: http://anyinternet.spaces.live.com/

Could that be his photograph? That looks like a possibility based on the IPs.

He is also the main ODF-critic on Wikipedia. His user page is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HAl

It is interesting that he declares himself as a “beginning” XML coder”. He sure makes a lot of noise for a beginner.

I was found someplace that his real name was “Albert”. That would make his “hAl” moniker an example of Microsoft’s variable naming conventions, where variable names are prefixed with “h” if they are a handle, like hWnd, hCursor,
etc.

Based on his IP address he appears to be connecting from Amsterdam. If it’s consistent enough, then no proxies are involved, I suppose.

The anonymity remains a tad mysterious, but there you go.

Yesterday, in USENET, the usual ODF critics and OOXML lobbyists defended Rick Jeliffe’s payment from Microsoft, which has me suspecting that they get paid/compensated in one way or another, as well.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 23:06:05 +0000

Assuming that’s a single entity and the same one under different names, it would be nice to obtain the real name/s of this thing. This sounds just like the flatfish/Gary Stewart disease that has been infecting Linux sites for over a decade, always working from proxies and using literally hundreds of different identities. This involves personal vile attacks, not just attacks on Linux using lies and fake testimonies.

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:54:21 +0000

hey, I’ve been battling hAl on Wikipedia for over a year, I know how bad he can be… constantly linking biased pages onto OOXM pageL, rewording whole sections on advice from Rick (hAI actually did most of the editing for Jeliffe so it wouldn’t look as bad! see Talk pages for the dialogue), and he constantly trolls / ass-kisses on the Microsoft blogs just like Miguel does.. shocker, huh?

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:50:29 +0000

I have seen this many time before, even recently. Watch how a recently-departing Microsoft Evangelist decided to write a hypothetical ‘review’ of Linux and then published this in many press outlets using an “analyst” hat (hiding the Microsoft ties altogether).

http://slated.org/linux_still_doesnt_make_it_on_desktop_is_pure_fud

By: Great

Great — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:27:46 +0000

check this out :

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6171831/index.html

By: James Yu and Sarju Shah – Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007

It’s been more than six months since we published our first Xbox 360 versus PlayStation 3 graphics comparison feature. Games on both systems looked great, but the Xbox 360 games had more polish. We found that the Xbox 360 edged out the PlayStation 3 with higher-resolution textures and better lighting. The result of the first comparison wasn’t surprising–the Xbox 360 had been available for a year and developers were already cranking out second-generation games, while the PlayStation 3 had just arrived in retail with its first-generation games. We decided to check on a few games released in recent months to see if the PlayStation 3 has caught up to or overtaken the Xbox 360…

http://center.spoke.com/info/p86uUAU/JamesYu

James Yu
Program Manager
Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-8300
http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

So now we have people working for Redmond writing reviews of Xbox 2 Vs. Playstation 2

One more example of Microsoft funds the FUD spreading….