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The 3hgroup site is hosted through Powertel (Sydney), but the meegos poster came through TPGI (Also Sydney) - so they don’t necessarily use the same provider - but they do live in the same town. Turns out apnic is a better resource than xpenguin et al.

about Meegos.

Choice quote from one of the astroturfer’s posts:

funny how people with no job but to knock everyone else think that they have authority in many topics that are internet related

Whoops! I’m a web developer and systems administrator, and have been involved with the Internet in one way or another for over ten years.

Next time, attack someone on geocities.

I’m laughing so hard.

Okay, so a quick google search tells me that my blogging software WordPress records the IP address of every comment. So I search the database and lo, all the “meego” comments (i.e. by user meego) are from the same IP. No big deal. So I search for the IP. And I find another comment from the same IP:

Wow Meego ur like heaps smart! I hope I can be as cool as you one day!

PS Fat chicks rock!

WTF?? I thought that was a sarcastic dig at meegos, but it was actually meego praising himself.

So I dig a little deeper. The IP address of the poster is in Milton, NSW - according to xpenguin.com. This is because he uses TPGI broadband to access the ‘net. That’s where they’re based, or near enough.

Alright, we know where the poster came from. Now I wonder who owns meegos.com? A little check of networksolutions’ whois service tells us it’s one Dave Heysen, on behalf of the 3hgroup.com. So I find out the IP address of 3hgroup.com, and guess where they’re based… yep! Milton, NSW.

Amazing how supportive the locals can be, eh Dave?*

Dave Heysen turns up all over the ‘net - a while ago he was the director of Soulmates Technology / match.com international (Sydney). He created matchmaking software for the TVMates Optus interactive broadband dating service, which according to the press release saw “high number of visits and transactions from trialists” and then sank into a mire of nothingness.

Now he’s at 3hgroup, presumably because he is “heaps smart”, and according to their site has strengths from a “financial and personnel management perspective”. Does managing your personnel include astroturfing, Dave?

Anyway, I’ve had enough fun for now. Let the issue rest, 3hgroup. All you’re creating is an indelible log of your fruitless and cynical attempts to market loathsome pap on a consumer base that’s already way ahead of you **.

3h == har har har? ***

* for the record, I’m aware of just how unreliable geographic IP locators can be, but in this case can you really say “well, that’s just a coincidence!”? I’d say that they’re a fairly strong indicator that the meegos astroturfer and 3hgroup belong to the same ISP, which in turn hints at them being the same person. Of course, this is pure speculation - but isn’t it fun?

** Create avatars for free through the flash program available at www.mess.be. Example:

*** I’m also the top non-official english-language post for the seach “meegos” on www.altavista.com.

(For those who have been out of the loop, meegos are fucktastically stupid little icon things that ninemsn is foisting on a new generation of adolescent and pseudo-adolescent schmucks eager to make up for their lack of a personality with “cool” MSN avatars. I used to think they were cute, but irrelevant. Now I’m a whole lot more opinionated.)

I love the web, despite all its flaws (exploitation, abuse, commercial saturation, etc) and one of the things I love most is that in concert with tools like Google, it levels the playing field. Why, even a humble blog read by almost no-one can be instantly elevated to the level of “popular resource” by virtue of PageRank ™.

So when I read this post:

I’m pretty sure meego not only sounds like propaganda from MSN, but IS propaganda from MSN. Yes, sir, they must be pretty busy at the NineMSN campus (three old cardboard boxes in a dirty alleyway not far from Nine studios) if they can pay people to fail to refute arguments on blogs with, like, a dozen readers, none of whom would ever be so 12-year-old as to pay for an ugly little avatar.

I immediately checked my rank on Google. Yep, I am the third relevant hit. The only pages ranked above me are the official Meegos pages themselves. I’m not blowing my own trumpet here - I know my page is a pile of random and irrelevant claptrap that no-one reads. The very fact that I wrote about something as lame as Meegos just proves how irrelevant it is. However, if I was the chief executive of meegos.com, I’d be very, very interested in what was posted in the first non-official meegos hit on the most popular search engine in the world. And I’d be as careful as possible to make it look like the comments I put there look like some ordinary (but passionate) individual who just happens to know an awful lot of detailed statistics about the meegos user base.

Crazier things have happened.

Now, if you want your meegos for free, be sure to go to http://www.mess.be/ and download their utility to remove the blue stripes.

Check out my original post to catch up with this increasingly hilarious topic.

In recent times, I’ve discovered in myself a heretofore dormant trait to give a shit about anything other than sex. One example of this is my near-fanatical hatred of the SCO Group. This has come about for several reasons. Initially, it was because I was the systems administrator of a server running SCO Openserver 5.05, an operating system so rooted in 1980s technology that it should be shipped with leg-warmers and a copy of Forever Your Girl. It’s one thing to concentrate on stabilising software instead of adding new features, but it’s entirely another to simply be lazy. Openserver (and their other major UN*X offering, UnixWare) were looking severly dated even in 1997, and there have been precisely zero major updates since then.

But now there is a new, and oh-so-much-more compelling reason to loathe the shell that has replaced SCO: their blatant and cynical attempt to claim ownership of Linux, a free operating system kernel that, together with the GNU system software and contributions from developers all over the world, has grown into a major competitor in the operating system industry. Now, you would imagine that in supposedly free, democratic nations such as the USA, any group of individuals would be able to create their own operating system and do whatever they like with it. Right? Wrong! Companies like the SCO group are actively trying to outlaw the GPL, the license upon which Linux and other GNU software is based, calling it “un-american”. Their lies never seem to end.

Anyway, back to my point: SCOX is paying like a bitch for being such an asshole to the software community. The total amount of money they made from their scheme to charge people for Linux: $11,000. Cost to SCO of gaining a reputation for suing their own customers: priceless.

Observe, their stock chart over the last six months:

It’s good to be alive. Unless you’re Darl McBride. Then again, it’s not McBride who’s lost his life savings, is it?

We can only hope that at the end of this sordid tale, the bastards (and bitches? no, methinks just bastards) who run SCO Group get their asses slammed in jail. In the meantime, it’s just nice watching them get spanked.