The "User Threads" view shows the various threads that a community member has participated on. We have added some more information below the threads, which shows a list of other community members who have posted from the same location as this user. Users could be linked due to a variety of reasons, including posts made from a shared IP (dialup, dynamic DSL/broadband, wireless location), multiple aliases per person, etc.

The community has let us know that they don't like "fake" accounts posting on behalf of certain parties. We know it happens a lot by a lot of groups, and we know that we can't totally stop it, however this will hopefully help a little.

The linkage may NOT be due to fake accounts (as mentioned above), so please do not jump to any conclusions.

Cheers,

Dion

See my blog and also the BileBlog for, ahem, comments on practical application of this new feature.

     -Mike

My own comments:
http://jroller.com/page/rickard/20040517

For the record, and related to Dion's warning, the user browser is not the only evidence that "Chip Tyler" is Marc Fleury.

1. Which confidence can one grant on a site which sets up such a process without informing its members as a preliminary ?
2. It throws suspicion on the posts: how to distinguish 1 fellow with 2 users from 2 poor fellows which share the same proxy ?
What happens if one member uses 2 different proxies (for example : job and home) ?
3. This is dangerous, because it creates implicitly and insidiously a link between individuals and thus between their opinions.
It is as if one gathered the people by the color of their shoes in a newspaper of political opinions.
the short cut is perhaps exaggerated but unfortunately we live in a world of short cuts.
Sorry for my poor english but I really get irritated.
This is my last post here.

Which confidence can one grant on a site which sets up such a process ...

What confidence can one grant a site that does not set up such a process?

You are right: The taste of the medicine is terrible. What would you suggest, then?

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

The taste of the medicine is terrible. What would you suggest, then?

I would recommend that people avoid comments like this:

"So, the next time you see someone posting anything positive about JBoss, rest assured that it's just another one of their employees desperate to justify their pathetic existence."

I agree with all the criticisms of the JBoss Group (and with TheServerSide's decision to share the information), but some people are rapidly ceding the moral high ground.

Mike Spille, on the other hand, has shown sensitivity to both sides of the issue, possibly because he remembers what it was like to be wrongly accused of being a non-entity. Much appreciated.

Corby, you are undoubtedly right that some people will use this information to undeservedly attack some people. They'll misinterpret it and point the finger at innocent parties (as has happened to you on the Bile Blog).

But, like Cameron, I don't see a better solution. We are better having this than not having this. It could probably be improved - perhaps IP correlation could be shown to some extent, probably with masking of the actual IP addresses (replacing them with simple substitutions perhaps e.g. User IP A, User IP B, etc).

Yeah, I do know what it feels like to be wrongfully accused. And it sucks. But I prefer that to the alternatives.

    -Mike

Which confidence can one grant on a site which sets up such a process ...

Please keep the end of my sentence otherwise it's really not fair.
... without informing its members as a preliminary ?
That's the most important part of my sentence.

Please keep the end of my sentence otherwise it's really not fair.
... without informing its members as a preliminary ?
That's the most important part of my sentence.

I guess that the goals of the process included catching those that were already posting anonymously.

What you suggest would have negated those goals, which I believe explains why it was not done.

(As for truncating your comment, I was simply trying to point out that the lack of a process itself was a problem.)

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

I am sorry that you are not happy about it. I can totally understand.

We thought long and hard about what to do here. Ideally we would have loved not to have done it.

However, we have seen that people abuse the ability to be anonymous in many ways.

It isn't that being anonymous is a bad thing. I don't mind if you post with anonymity. The problem comes into play when certain things are said. The whole purpose of this feature is to try to stop attacks and lies from hidden identities, trying to look like something they aren't.

I know this happens a lot, from many companies (just because some entries have focused on certain companies doesn't mean they are the only people doing this... many are).

There isn't a perfect solution. This is one experiment, and we will see where it leads.

Again, the aim is to have a BETTER community. A more honest and respectful one.

Dion

Dion,

Apparently you (or someone's data) have identified me with Andy Oliver. Please contact me at spiritualmechanic at yahoo dot com in order to clear this up. I am very disappointed that you did not even attempt to email the people who are on this list, and some very nasty things have been said and my name is associated with it because you did not do your homework. I hope you will take the time to clear things up.

I am a real person, I'm not a fake account for JBoss. We are actual customers of JBoss (CTI Molecular Imaging is listed as one of their customers on their web site, or at least it used to be).

Thank you,
Steve Lewis.

Steve, the reasons why people's names might be linked are made perfectly clear in the text on this site.

Nobody at TSS has accussed you of being a fake account. If others have jumped to the wrong conclusions, it's hardly TSS's fault.

And, given the evidence that's come to light here (JBoss' Director of Sales and Business Development creating false accounts to trash JBoss' critics, for crying out loud!), it's hardly surprising that people are having a hard time distinguishing between real JBoss customers and the inventions of JBoss' underhand marketing exercises.

Best regards,

Robert Lowe
http://rmlowe.com/

To me, this is truly the highlight of the year, not EJB 3.0, not JDO 2.0 not any of the JSRs :).

The reaction (in this thread and other fora) is amazing!

Does anyone believe that the opinions expressed in TSS are 'mass' opinions? The better known ones (like Cedric, Purdy, Spille, Fowler, et al), when they post, it may be considered an 'expert' opinion. And, it is very obvious that most people that dont sign off (with an email id or a company name) ARE anonymous. Here agian, most people with no malicious intent! But... does anyone care "who" is saying something?

All readers are discerning, and decided for themselves, on the usefulness and credibility of the posts. (A bit 'flame'er thoughts on my blog)

Cheers,
Ramesh

Hi Ramesh,

I believe this is a good example of why it does matter "who" is saying "what".

Later,
Rob Misek
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Cluster your Work. Work your Cluster.

Ramesh, take a look at the posting history of one "Chip Tyler".

   https://www.theserverside.com/user/userthreads.tss?user_id=137276

The posting history goes back for years. This name has shown up often enough and for long enough that many people were duped into believing this person was "real".

Take a look at the "Arun Patel" case. Here an individual tried very, very hard to appear to be real, to the extent of claiming to be a worker for WIPRO in Bangalore, India. Unfortunately for "Arun", he did a rather sloppy job of doing the convincing, and we all know now who was doing that posting, and that it was from Atlanta, not Bangalore :-). But for each such sloppy job there have been some real artists building up fake personas over very long time frames.

As for why anyone would care - the person masquerading as Arun was fully aware of how paranoid and sensitive my old employer was about any kind of public exposure. In fact, I told Ben Sabrin in an e-mail who I worked for - and asked him not to mention this publically because they are so paranoid. Ol' Ben then went ahead and revealed this information in a campaign to smear my name. You could look at this from many different perspectives; one possibility is that he was purposefully trying to get me fired. Fortunately for me, I was smart enough to quit, so it this was a non-issue :-)

The same individual also besmeared and besmirched the reputations of several ex-JBoss committers who are now part of the Core Developer's Network. Many people will not remember who said this - what they remember is what was written:

Says Arun Patel nee senior JBoss executive

David Jencks - Anyone use the first version of the JBoss JCA implementation?
Dain Sundstrom - Didn't someone on this list say the JBoss CMP engine was crap? And until recently has gotten better.
Jeremy Boynes - Can not even name what this guy has ever done in his career
Greg Wilkins - The guy who just can not give up, and realize that Tomcat is the servlet spec
I think this is one other dude as well.

Now read the above attached to some Indian dude named "Arun Patel". Now read it again knowing that it's a JBoss executive. Reads a bit differently, doesn't it?

    -Mike

Mike that's all well and good but I don't care. In the slightest. So there are conmen in the community. I'm shocked. As far as I'm concerned it's better to let a hundred men go free then to convict one innocent man and you've already convicted two innocents (Corby Page and Steve Lewis). This is just a tool for one clique to (witch)hunt another clique. Why did this information need to be made public? Why couldn't the TSS admins do, you know, some administration and weed out the fake accounts on their own time? The idea that this will raise the quality of discussion is laughable. (Ironically, this will probably only hurt TSS a lot. How many people, including yourself, only even came here for the JBoss flamefests?) Anyways, you can be sure if this is the point we've reached then really the game is already over. I'm outta here.

Why did this information need to be made public?

I assume it's because some sort of evidence had to be provided in order to stop this type of behaviour.

D Ocean: Mike that's all well and good but I don't care. In the slightest. So there are conmen in the community. I'm shocked.

The behavior that was pointed out was designed to silence dissenting points of view. That's not "conning" someone, that's the online equivalent of a SLAP suit.

D Ocean: As far as I'm concerned it's better to let a hundred men go free then to convict one innocent man and you've already convicted two innocents (Corby Page and Steve Lewis).

Mike did no such thing. I assume you are referring to "the bile blog"? Is that your normal source for reference material?

D Ocean: This is just a tool for one clique to (witch)hunt another clique.

Funny how that term "witch hunt" keeps coming up. I wonder if a whole bunch of people randomly selected that term?

As for the suggestion, there is no hunting being done -- it was a simple matter of looking at an audit trail of web posts. If BEA had been implicated, it would be BEA on the hot seat. Same goes for Microsoft or Oracle or IBM. How many times has Microsoft been caught pulling crap like this? (Answer: Many.)

From my point of view, this is not personal, it is simply something that had to be pointed out. It is not pleasant. Sorry.

However, just because it is exceedingly unpleasant to point something like this out does not excuse us from the responsibility to point it out.

D Ocean: Why did this information need to be made public?

I can think of one obvious reason. It now appears that JBoss will, from the top down, have a policy to eliminate this type of behavior. Hopefully, others to think twice about doing this in the future.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

I would really like to know more about how this is implemented. If I post something from the same IP as somebody else, like because I was in the same hotel he was and I plugged in my Laptop there, or if I was attending the same conference and posted from that conferences WLAN, will I now show up as being one of his "duplicates"?

I would strongly suggest for everybody to concider things like that, and to have some more information about this "feature" first, before making any accusations based on that alone.

I'm sure I'll seem self serving in saying this, but it is a little deciving. By this feature, Steve Lewis and I must be the same person. https://theserverside.com/user/userthreads.tss?user_id=103370

I have met Steve in person (which probably explains how we became linked). He has more hair than I do. He also finds JCA interesting, where I do not. He posts to TSS often... I post next to never. (and never have been a frequent poster)

This kind of scares me because it means that by posting to TSS I could inadvertantly violate an NDA by linking myself with a client.

I agree, it would be nice if the feature was clearer and showed correlations better (and perhaps if the algorithm was explained). But I don't want to see it go away.

This kind of scares me because it means that by posting to TSS I could inadvertantly violate an NDA by linking myself with a client.

It's part of the protocol - you should be aware that anytime you post your IP can be captured (and should assume that it will be). You should be aware that login sessions and cookies can be correlated to this IP information.

Such information is regularly collected by many web sites. For people who want to protect their confidentiality, they need to be aware of what information about them is exposed and take appropriate action. So if you are, for example, posting to TSS from a client site, then you are exposing a link between yourself and that client. If you're browsing any site where you have cookies the same is true. So turn off cookies at client sites, be careful of where you browse to. Or, perhaps - don't cruise sites like TSS when you're with a client :-)

     -Mike

Would nto a better solution be to actually ask why anonymous posting was allwoed in the first place and doe sit stil have the saem community value?

Would nto a better solution be to actually ask why anonymous posting was allwoed in the first place and doe sit stil have the saem community value?

Actually, a more important feature would be a spellchecker.

--
Cedric

Actually, a more important feature would be a spellchecker.-- Cedric

Exactly: 'spell-checker', or maybe even 'spell checker', but certainly not 'spellchecker' in any serious dictionary I could find.

Thanks for the meaningful contribution, Cedric.

...though I guess only time will tell whether it will improve the quality of the discussion.

One suggestion I think is worth considering on TSS is the moderation system employed on /. - even though TSS doesn't get the volume of /. it does get a similar variance in quality - and the main aim of the mod system is to "improve quality, discourage crap".

Rich Sharples
Sun Microsystems

Dear sirs and madams,

I suffer from multiple personality disorder. Each one of my personalities is treated as a person under modern psychiatry; therefore, I should be allowed to use more than one account per IP or subnet range. It is not my fault that I suffer from this disease, it is the abuse I have received in my life and the way my brain deals with that abuse.

Yours Truley, Orion Blastar, CyberPsychopath and Multiple Personaloty Disorder and multiple account user. :)

The idea that grouping by IP address is the same person is just plain wrong.

Only idiots (& attention whores) post from a real IP address, everyone else uses an anonymous proxy.
I have mozilla, firebird, firefox, and opera all set up to use different proxies and I can post similtaneously under 4 different ID's with 4 different IP's. The absurdly easy access to anonymous proxies and free email accounts makes it simple and necessary to cover-one's-ass in a litigious world.

Block my IP and I just change to a different anonymous proxy server. Cancel my account and I'll just start another one.

And companies using fake accounts to post FUD &/or raves? All I need to say is, "microsoft," and you know what I'm talking about. MS is the bullshit capitol of the world. They have to be, with their lousy products it's their #1 survival strategy.

The linkage may NOT be due to fake accounts (as mentioned above), so please do not jump to any conclusions.Cheers,Dion

It looks many people in this thread did not fully read the previous sentence or did not understand it.

While the new piece of information can help in linking many accounts to one person, it has severals flaws that make it next to useless on it's own. The fact that easy workaround (proxies for example) exists so that fake account poster can circumvent the correlation (in the future) will make that information even less useful.

If one really want to deter fake accounts, I believe that analysis of the posted text to detect writing patterns (people tend to structure sentences the same way, make the same grammatical errors over and over, ...) and common retoric from different accounts (one can always start from all the accounts linked to the same location) would be a better approach. You can augment that with an ego search using Google or WebCrawler.

Now is that worth the effort? I don't know. Maybe the fact that the controversy is brough to light a bit more will make the fake account posters less active... Maybe I'm too optimistic.

Anyway... Good day (or night) to all the real and fake people :-)

I've read all these cute blogs about this damn Marc guy pretending to be me. Well he is not. I am the real Chip Tyler! I am a movie star in a movie called Coming Home which is an epic story of gay love. Marc, you seem like the kind of guy who might want to someday star in another movie with me. How about it? From this post it seems you might be into that sort of thing.

And since I know this is coming and I don't care if you all find out who is really posting this, I will make it easy for you...
I am James Ward and I love JBoss.

You all are like a bunch of 13 year old girls. Quit your whining and do something productive. If you hate JBoss, fine, go write something better.

In parting, I quote a post on /. "That site [TSS] is full of so much flaming and mindless shrieking, it makes me wonder how Java gets anywhere. Seriously, there are a few exceptions, but the average quality of comments there make Slashdot seem like a community of polite geniuses by contrast."

All these years of millions of downloads of JBoss, and it never took off. One must wonder if they also faked the download numbers.

personally, i have downloaded jboss 6-12 times over the years. i'd give it a shot, get frustrated by the lack of docs (compared to weblogic) & configuration hassles, and then abandon it. later, i would see a new version out so i'd download it and begin the cycle again.

so there numbers could be valid after all, it is just a very small percentage actually adopt it after downloading it.

Every one knows why this feature was implemented.
Now, why Mr fleury don't post any comment: guilty or not?

* allez mon gars, un peu de courage, on est tous très intéressé sur ton point de vue sur cette affaire.

J2EE/WLS Infrastructure Admin:

Must haves:
- Overall 5-6+ yrs. experience
- Good experience of BEA weblogic Administration, versions 6.1 to 7.0 to 8.1....2-3 years desirable....Clustering knowledge will be helpful
-Hands on experience of Solaris platform
-Good understanding of J2EE space...servlets/JSP/EJBs/JDBC/JMS etc.
-Good understanding of oracle database and JDBC communication.
-Good client handling, communication and troubleshooting skills

Differentiators:
Performance tuning tools like Jprobe/optimizeit
General J2EE application performance tuning.
Load Testing experience with tools as Loadrunner etc.

Nice-to-Haves:
Some experience in monitoring tools as sitescope, topaz etc.
Shell scripting
Java/J2EE Development.

It's a great opportunity for a fortune company in CT area and is a very stable consulting contract which goes until end of Dec 2004 and has a great chance for going through the next whole year. This opening is for my group.

People who are willing to switch employers need only apply. will process H1 visa, if required. Please email your resumes ASAP to wlsjobs@yahoo.com