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Free Software Mag Interviews Sys-Con Publisher 279

NW writes "Tony Mobily, editor of the Free Software Magazine recently interviewed Fuat Kircaali, founder and publisher of Sys-Con Media. The interview revolves around the recent controversy surrounding the article written by Maureen O'Gara attacking Pamela Jones of GrokLaw."
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Free Software Mag Interviews Sys-Con Publisher

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  • Re:A Chilling Effect (Score:5, Informative)

    by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75&yahoo,com> on Friday May 13, 2005 @08:53PM (#12526041)
    This is really chilling and scary how people can bully others into submission over one opinion piece.

    What MOG did was not an opinion piece; it was, in fact, illegal. PJ is, by her own words, considering her legal options right now, but nobody has the right to a) trespass in another person's home (as MOG all but admits she did in her article, commenting on how the interior of PJ's home looks, noting she was not home at the time), b) list the addresses and telephone numbers of relatives, and c) slander another person publicly with unverified information.

    I note that you're an anonymous coward so you obviously do not want us to know who you are. I wonder why?

    What MOG did was beyond sleazy; it was illegal, journalistically unethical and personally immoral, and if she was silenced for that, she has nobody to blame but herself.
  • by fred fleenblat ( 463628 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @09:00PM (#12526079) Homepage
    I get the humor, but just for the record, that would be a Bill of Attainder [wikipedia.org] and unconstitutional.
  • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @09:03PM (#12526096)
    The CEO is content to run a "tabloid trash" type of website, where reporters can harass and intimidate people. That answers everything.
  • by DrJimbo ( 594231 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @09:22PM (#12526188)
    He has suffered enough. Add the following lines to your hosts file:

    127.0.0.1 coldfusion.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 dotnet.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 eclipse.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 issj.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 itsolutions.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 jdj.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 linux.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 linuxbusinessweek.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 mxdj.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 pbdj.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 symbian.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 weblogic.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 webservices.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 websphere.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 wireless.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 www.sys-con.tv
    127.0.0.1 xml.sys-con.com
    127.0.0.1 www.linuxworld.com
    127.0.0.1 www.sys-con.com

  • by man_of_mr_e ( 217855 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @09:24PM (#12526196)
    I think their servers are capable of withstanding a slashdotting, as they've been listed in numerous articles before this. In order to bring down a site with that kind of infrastructure, it's got to be a deliberate attack.
  • Re:A Chilling Effect (Score:3, Informative)

    by putaro ( 235078 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:10PM (#12526397) Journal
    I don't think anyone is really after O'Gara for trying to find PJ and have a face-to-face with her. The article (have you read the article?) is just crap, though, with lots of ad-hominem attacks, speculation, innuendo and addresses of people who may or may not be PJ and no real information of any kind. It reads like something an 8th grader would write after they got told off on-line.
  • by j_w_d ( 114171 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @11:44PM (#12526837)
    If you actually go through PJ's posts, she is generally very careful to insist that religious stereotyping be eschewed. Other Groklaw members and ACs have indeed debated whether Mormonism had any role, but the general consensus has been to argue that attitude down.
  • Pamela Jones EXPOSED (Score:0, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13, 2005 @11:48PM (#12526850)
    Who Is Pamela Jones?
    By Maureen O'Gara

    Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.

    The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.

    Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.

    Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.

    See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.

    Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.

    Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.

    But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."

    He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."

    She was also missing and had been for weeks.

    Nobody there knew where she was.

    She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.

    Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.

    The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.

    Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.

    Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.

    That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.

    Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westches
  • Re:A Chilling Effect (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 14, 2005 @12:08AM (#12526946)
    a) trespass in another person's home (as MOG all but admits she did in her article, commenting on how the interior of PJ's home looks, noting she was not home at the time),

    MOG could have looked through a window. Sleazy I agree, but you're jumping to conclusions when you claim MOG trespassed.

    b) list the addresses and telephone numbers of relatives

    The only phone number in MOG's "story" was one that was published in a Medabiliti press release from 2003. I see no evidence that the number MOG did publish was a relative's number.

    The MOG article is getting harder to find; it is effectively being deleted from the Internet. However here is a google cache copy [66.102.7.104]. The only phone number in the article is 914-761-7423. If you google for that number you can find it in another google cache [66.102.7.104]. The second cached copy is a press release submitted by Medabiliti to PR Newswire.

    What MOG did was despicable - there's no doubt about that - but let's not start falsifying what she did. The facts condemn MOG enough as it is without having to make things up.

  • by gclef ( 96311 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @12:20AM (#12527000)
    I prefer this way:

    named.conf:
    zone sys-con.com{
    type master;
    file sys-con.com.blackhole;
    };
    zone sys-con.tv{
    type master;
    file sys-con.tv.blackhole;
    };

    put an SOA for sys-con.com and sys-con.tv in the respective files, and a wildcard A record pointing to 127.0.0.1.

    Poof...sys-con's gone. Doesn't matter what they change their names to.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 14, 2005 @01:00AM (#12527187)
    Looks like a few of the LinuxWorld editors saw the interview, and you can bet that they aren't happy. Here [linuxworld.com], here [linuxworld.com], and here [braingia.org].
  • by blackbearnh ( 637683 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @01:18AM (#12527249)
    Yep, I was at my 25th High School Reunion when this broke today, here's my initial comments [linuxworld.com], more to come later in the weekend.

    James Turner
    Senior Editor
    LinuxWorld Magazine

  • by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @02:13AM (#12527466) Homepage

    Because, moron, MS DID fund SCO's bullshit lawsuit, albeit in a roundabout way (which is exactly the way these things are done.)

    And given that Darl McBride has made a point of attacking PJ and suggesting she was "not who she seems to be", and given that O'Gara had access to SCo documents unseen by anybody else, it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that she is indeed an SCO shill and either on direct or indirect orders or on her own decided to pull this stunt.

    Which makes you an innocent moron...

    I'll bet you click on spam, too...

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 14, 2005 @02:28AM (#12527524)
    Check this [linuxworld.com] out! Apparently the editors got fed up.
  • http://turner.linuxworld.com/read/1278212.htm [linuxworld.com]

    The Other Shoe Drops

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    Senior Editorial Staff of LinuxWorld Magazine Announce Resignations

    MONTVALE, New Jersey, May 14th, 2005 --- The entire senior editorial staff of LinuxWorld Magazine has today announced that they will be leaving the magazine, effective immediately.

    The following statement was released by the group. "We regret that Sys-Con Media has been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."

    FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

    James Turner

    turner@blackbear.com

    603-552-2020

    Dee-Ann LeBlanc

    dee@renaissoft.com

    (604) 898-8433

    posted Saturday, 14 May 2005

  • by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @05:03AM (#12527993)

    James Turner, former senior editor of LinuxWorld wrote Fred Brown of the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Commitee. Here is what Fred Brown wrote:

    James,

    I agree with you. That piece by O'Gara definitely is outside the norms of good journalism. It's bullying, insulting and harassing, and I, for
    one, really don't get the point of it. That's not to say that other journalists are sometimes guilty of those sins, but that still doesn't make it
    good journalism.

    So I don't think you did the wrong thing in using you First Amendment rights to call for O'Gara's ouster or reprimand or whatever. The SPJ Code of
    Ethics says ethical journalists should "expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media" and "abide by the same high standards to which they hold others."

    Fred Brown

    Co-chair, SPJ Ethics Committee

    http://turner.linuxworld.com/read/1277987.htm [linuxworld.com]
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 15, 2005 @03:56AM (#12534339)
    and you can reach him at 954-943-3281

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