Windows metrics source lies about identity

dmex · Feb 21, 2010

Craig Barth, the chief technology officer of Florida-based Devil Mountain Software, a company that makes and markets Windows performance metrics software, is, I have discovered, nobody. He doesn't exist.

Barth is, in fact, a nom de plume, which is a fancy, French way of saying "alias." The real man behind the curtain is Randall C. Kennedy.

Windows metrics source lies about identity

pezzonovante · Feb 22, 2010

Ha ha, RCK is a fraud. Surprise, surprise!

rck01 · Feb 22, 2010

And how, exactly, am I a fraud? Because I used a pen name when dealing with an overzealous reporter? What about the IDG cover up? You don't really believe that they knew nothing about this, do you?

For the record, I informed InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman of the "ruse" over a year ago. I told him it was necessary since the "shock jock" content they were encouraging me to write was tarnishing my own image and made it impossible to produce hard research content at my own xpnet.com site.

Hence the decision to use the name Craig Barth, which technically is my name - my middle initial C stands for Craig, while Barth is an ancestral name on my father's side that I'm legally allowed to use. At the end of the day it's a "mountain out of a molehill" type of scenario - no data was ever fudged, no conclusions skewed unfairly. It also reeks of Microsoft's meddling - shades of Will Zachmann back in the early 1990's.

They got to him, too, when he started hurting them financially. So, they wanted me "shut up" - what they didn't bargain for is the fact that I have no intention of rolling over. I will continue to collect data from our network of nearly 24,000 registered IT sites and report on the key trends I see developing across the Windows community.

Randall C. Kennedy

Tews · Feb 22, 2010

rck01 said:
And how, exactly, am I a fraud? Because I used a pen name when dealing with an overzealous reporter? What about the IDG cover up? You don't really believe that they knew nothing about this, do you?

For the record, I informed InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman of the "ruse" over a year ago. I told him it was necessary since the "shock jock" content they were encouraging me to write was tarnishing my own image and made it impossible to produce hard research content at my own xpnet.com site.

Hence the decision to use the name Craig Barth, which technically is my name - my middle initial C stands for Craig, while Barth is an ancestral name on my father's side that I'm legally allowed to use. At the end of the day it's a "mountain out of a molehill" type of scenario - no data was ever fudged, no conclusions skewed unfairly. It also reeks of Microsoft's meddling - shades of Will Zachmann back in the early 1990's.

They got to him, too, when he started hurting them financially. So, they wanted me "shut up" - what they didn't bargain for is the fact that I have no intention of rolling over. I will continue to collect data from our network of nearly 24,000 registered IT sites and report on the key trends I see developing across the Windows community.

Randall C. Kennedy

FAIL...

SGT Oddball · Feb 22, 2010

Randall C. Kennedy = FAIL

Exposed as the lying useless hack he really is :roflmao:

Tews · Feb 22, 2010

dont hold back sarge, tell us how you really feel!! :roflmao:

pezzonovante · Feb 22, 2010

rck01 said:
And how, exactly, am I a fraud? Because I used a pen name when dealing with an overzealous reporter? What about the IDG cover up? You don't really believe that they knew nothing about this, do you?

For the record, I informed InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman of the "ruse" over a year ago. I told him it was necessary since the "shock jock" content they were encouraging me to write was tarnishing my own image and made it impossible to produce hard research content at my own xpnet.com site.

Hence the decision to use the name Craig Barth, which technically is my name - my middle initial C stands for Craig, while Barth is an ancestral name on my father's side that I'm legally allowed to use. At the end of the day it's a "mountain out of a molehill" type of scenario - no data was ever fudged, no conclusions skewed unfairly. It also reeks of Microsoft's meddling - shades of Will Zachmann back in the early 1990's.

They got to him, too, when he started hurting them financially. So, they wanted me "shut up" - what they didn't bargain for is the fact that I have no intention of rolling over. I will continue to collect data from our network of nearly 24,000 registered IT sites and report on the key trends I see developing across the Windows community.

Randall C. Kennedy

I don't know if you are the real RCK, but you surely are just as egoist as him. You think you are hurting Microsoft financially by publishing troll articles? Give me a break. Don't tell me you have achieved what the whole of crApple and all the LinSux fanboys put together have not been able to do for 25 years.

As far as your article regarding Windows 7 RAM issue is concerned, it's full of crap. You have no idea about SuperFetch. Grab yourself a copy of Windows Internals 5 by Mark Russinovich.

One last advice, you can still recover from this embarrassment if you are man enough. The perfect example is in front of you - Tiger Woods.

z3r010 · Feb 22, 2010

That is the real RCK

SGT Oddball · Feb 22, 2010

rck01 said:
And how, exactly, am I a fraud? Because I used a pen name when dealing with an overzealous reporter? What about the IDG cover up? You don't really believe that they knew nothing about this, do you?

For the record, I informed InfoWorld Executive Editor Galen Gruman of the "ruse" over a year ago. I told him it was necessary since the "shock jock" content they were encouraging me to write was tarnishing my own image and made it impossible to produce hard research content at my own xpnet.com site.

Hence the decision to use the name Craig Barth, which technically is my name - my middle initial C stands for Craig, while Barth is an ancestral name on my father's side that I'm legally allowed to use. At the end of the day it's a "mountain out of a molehill" type of scenario - no data was ever fudged, no conclusions skewed unfairly. It also reeks of Microsoft's meddling - shades of Will Zachmann back in the early 1990's.

They got to him, too, when he started hurting them financially. So, they wanted me "shut up" - what they didn't bargain for is the fact that I have no intention of rolling over. I will continue to collect data from our network of nearly 24,000 registered IT sites and report on the key trends I see developing across the Windows community.

Randall C. Kennedy

Yeah that definitely the real RCK, you can tell by the crap he posts.

That's another fail for the fatboy :roflmao:

Bare Foot Kid · Feb 22, 2010

What a shameless hack.

smarteyeball · Feb 22, 2010

I just want to say thanks Mr. Kennedy - you have given me a lot of laughs over the years.

Please keep it up - for you Sir, are comedy gold

thefabe · Feb 22, 2010

Off topic cause enough has been said quite well also. I just wanted to say to smartyeyeball excellent use of the tattoo posted for your avatar. Gotta love it. Fabe

stormy13 · Feb 22, 2010

Likes to talk about himself in 3rd person as well,

http://www.sevenforums.com/news/19372-bug-windows-7-rtm-6.html#post209645

http://www.sevenforums.com/news/17846-randall-kennedy-has-clearly-lost.html

smarteyeball · Feb 22, 2010

'Journalistic' Credibility = ZERO

Comedic value because of it = PRICELESS

dmex · Feb 22, 2010

Hi Randall,

Im a developer for Process Hacker a Task Manager replacement and alternative to Microsoft's Process Explorer, I was reading your exo.blog and become confused by a section of your post from "What took you so long?":

"Which is why we factor all three of the above counters into our final Peak Memory Pressure Index calculations. Because when these three counters climb above the thresholds we’ve defined for the WCPI calculation process, it means that your PC really is running out of memory."

Whats the threshold you defined and how exactly do you calculate (code based) the 'Peak Memory Pressure' from these three counters?

As our development team understands memory, calculating a PC 'running out of memory' requires consistently monitoring 7 different counters, we have always refereed people to this guide for basing calculations: Ask the Performance Team : An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues

As seen from the above information, monitoring three performance counters are not indicative of memory pressure or running out of memory. It is necessary to monitor other counters, such as those mentioned and displayed in the graph from the article above, to get the complete picture of what is happening in each users particular case.

We had a feature request for identifying memory issues, during development of the feature we found it was nearly impossible to reliably report 'out-of-memory' problems because results are skewered by a user casually running memory intensive tasks like VMs or CS4 for a short time during long periods of sampling and vice-versa running memory intensive tasks for long periods during short periods of sampling. We found it best just to report the counters and refer users to that guide so they can make their own calculations and decisions based on their individual and particular application and Windows usage.

Im curious about how the threshold value is calculated and if it's hard-coded in your reporting application, instead of being dynamic and an example of how it takes the three counters and preforms the calculations? Does it take x and x memory counter and a count of processes for a % of memory use then divide by its own start/run-time or something?

If you can briefly explain how it works it would be appreciated by many users on this forum and many others elsewhere who discredit and currently rightfully distrust your "85% of Windows 7 PCs are under performing" findings, this would help clear up the confusion for many people and I would be inclined to join the exo.performance.network knowing its calculated correctly.

Steven

Scotteq · Feb 22, 2010

SGT Oddball said:
Randall C. Kennedy = FAIL

Exposed as the lying useless hack he really is :roflmao:

You forgot "Unemployed"

Scotteq · Feb 22, 2010

dmex said:
...this would help clear up the confusion for many people and I would be inclined to join the exo.performance.network knowing its calculated correctly.

Steven

I would highly recommend against that...

Apparently the app transmits complete and uncensored user data over an unsecure port. While it is arguable whether that data may or may not be used for other purposes; or whether ZDnet's testing is valid. Having acknowledged that... Knowing now what it does, that the creators are working out of private residences, and that there is undeniably a shell game being played with the identities/pseudonyms of the protagonists...

I wouldn't touch an app like that. Not Ever.

Source: Why we don't trust Devil Mountain Software (and neither should you) | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

We registered as users and downloaded copies of InfoWorld’s Windows Sentinel tool and XPNet’s DMS Clarity Tracker Agent.

Based on our tests, the InfoWorld Windows Sentinel and the DMS Clarity Tracker Agent are identical. The screens that appear during setup (including the end user license agreement) are the same. MD5 checksum hashes of the file downloaded from XPNet and the one from Windows Sentinel match perfectly. The only difference is a single letter in the file name of the executable.

As for the software itself, the installer is not digitally signed. It installs two Windows services: Cfwtracker.exe and Cfwupload.exe. The tracker program adds information at regular intervals to a database (in Microsoft Access format) stored in the user profile of the currently logged-on user. The upload module periodically sends that data to a remote server.

At its website, DMS claims that the software transmits data securely:

******************
Running in tandem with the DMS Clarity Tracker Agent, the Tracker Upload service spools collected data to the exo.repository for later review. The service uses an SSL-secure web connection that is compatible with most enterprise firewalls and proxy server implementations.

******************

We found this claim to be untrue. In our tests, using machines in widely separated geographic locations, the DMS software made simple (non-secure) HTTP connections on port 80, transmitting data to a server at IP address 66.115.28.220. The IP block at 66.115.28.* has DNS A records that point to devilmount.com, xpnet.com, and csaresearch.com. All of those companies are registered to Devil Mountain Software and include the name Randall C. Kennedy in the registration information.

When we attempted to use a browser to make a secure connection to https://xpnet.com, we received two certificate errors. The certificate associated with the site, originally issued by Equifax Secure Global eBusiness, had been issued to a different domain, csaresearch.com. In addition, the certificate had expired on September 7, 2009.

XPNet.com has no privacy policy on its site. Its license agreement contains no privacy information whatsoever. InfoWorld, however, made a prominent claim about privacy on its page that, until this weekend, offered the Windows Sentinel program:

***************
Performance data is uploaded to the exo.performance.network, where your most recent one week of data is stored for viewing and analysis. Performance data will be shared in aggregate only and never identified as linked to your individual account.
***************

The Feb. 19 exo.blog post appears to have violated that policy in a big way.

We conducted tests using the software downloaded from InfoWorld’s Windows Sentinel page and from XPNet.com and found no differences in their behavior. In both cases, the captured data was sent to the same server, which is under the control of Devil Mountain Software. As noted previously, InfoWorld pulled the software over the weekend.

dmex · Feb 22, 2010

Scotteq said:
dmex said:

...this would help clear up the confusion for many people and I would be inclined to join the exo.performance.network knowing its calculated correctly.

Steven

Click to expand...

I would highly recommend against that...

Apparently the app transmits complete and uncensored user data over an unsecure port. While it is arguable whether that data may or may not be used for other purposes; or whether ZDnet's testing is valid. Having acknowledged that... Knowing now what it does, that the creators are working out of private residences, and that there is undeniably a shell game being played with the identities/pseudonyms of the protagonists...

I wouldn't touch an app like that. Not Ever.

I dont think that app works in the slightest, I mean it doesn't even correctly obtain memory usage from the right performance counters. but I would like to see Randall answer my question but I doubt he will considering he's a bit spineless when asked direct questions from poeple with more experience programming on Windows than him. His tool is a complete failure because results are skewered by a user casually running memory intensive tasks like VMs or CS4 for a short time during long periods of sampling and vice-versa running memory intensive tasks for long periods during short periods of sampling.

I didn't see that story and I have yet installed or used that software because of the above reason and now that story too, I also did suspect some nefarious uses of the software.

One of the more useful features of ProcessHacker is injecting dlls into a process, When Ive got time I guess I should intercept internal calls its been making at specific addresses and offsets (trivial to find thanks to PH's feature set) and see what its upto in a virtual machine.

rck01 · Feb 24, 2010

Confessions of an Internet "Shock Jock"

Randall C. Kennedy comes clean about his past, his relationship to Craig Barth and how it all came tumbling down. Includes an inside look at the politics of IDG and why you can never trust an IT publication that's as obsessed with page views as InfoWorld.

exo.blog: Editorial: Confessions of an Internet “Shock Jock”

CarlTR6 · Feb 24, 2010

Interesting read and I am glad I was able to "hear" your side of the story. For folks like me who are not in the IT world, who use a computers as tools and for recreation, personal integrity is the bottom line. As you admitted, you compromised your integrity and destroyed your credibility.

Windows metrics source lies about identity

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