TR EMERITUS

From our Correspondent

[Read our latest rebuttal to Mr Geoffrey Pereira's second article on 13 November 2009 here]

Straits Times journalist Geoffrey Pereira’s article – “Attack on Temasek Review – not SPH” has won the distinction of being the “most commented” of all the ST blog articles with 28 comments so far! (The average number of comments on Temasek Review articles is 50, with its “most commented” at more than 200)

Mr Pereira had published the article on 6 November 2009 blaming Temasek Review of being “ignorant” of IT matters and “maligning” SPH of launching his imaginary DDOS attack against our site.

His misleading article was demolished almost immediately by us with an article 3 hours later followed by subsequent write-ups explaining the technical aspects of the controversy.

As soon as the matter was cleared up, Mr Pereira’s blog was bombarded with a deluge of comments from netizens lampooning him and SPH for the utterly deplorable piece!

John questioned the IT knowledge of Mr Pereira:

“reading the writers blog seems to suggest that he got his knowledge of IT from reading WIKI and Google….”

Office Tea lady encapsulated our sentiments exactly:

“TR was talking about you guys grabbing TR contents that were archived since 2008. They were NOT talking about you grabbing content SINCE 2008.

What needs to be archived anyway since 2008? So one can do a search? But you can always do that with google. Not unless you want to have copies for safekeeping.

Now you understand why the TR guys are agitated Hahaha. They all say it’s silly. I know. But speakers at the speaker’s corner normally get agitated when the police starts making video records. We’ll be on the loop.”

Freedom house does not mince his words:

“This is one of the most atrocious articles I have ever read about DDOS and DOS violation in any press. There are so many wide sweeping assumptions which are clearly invalid.I can only assume this must have been a rushed piece. In which case one really needs to question the internal controls in SPH to ask as to why this ill written piece was even allowed to see the day of light. Where may I ask was the editorial checks?

Next time if you have no idea what you are talking about. Please dont write about it. A newspaper is supposed to inform, not to mislead.”

James took a dig at Mr Pereira’s spelling mistakes which were corrected subsequently:

“Geoffrey, your designation is stated as “VPN Journalist, Editorial Systems Suport”. It seems like you don’t have enough support as it is missing a “p”?
Perhaps the ground you’re standing on is not so solid after all. “

Neutral criticized Mr Pereira for not getting basic facts right:

“”In fact, from midnight on Nov 1 to about 6 am, (covering a period of the alleged attack) no one from SPH accessed the TR site.”

Please lar, didn’t even bother to get the date of incident correct : [TR] FACT #2: Timing of the incident occurred between 31st October 2200 hours to 1st November 0100 hours. How to believe what you write like that? ”

Steve Wu quizzed Mr Pereira on his understanding of IP spoofing:

“Well, well. The fact that Geoffrey Pereira is not a techie has worked against him; I have little doubt that he is lying.

Let’s set aside the doubts about IP spoofing and the hit rates for the time being. There is other damning evidence.

I understand that TR uses Apache, so the HTTP header called User-Agent for each request is logged by default (check e.g. /var/log/httpd/access_log). If Pereira and his colleagues were just casually browsing TR as he claimed, the User-Agents which were logged would consist of normal browsers like IE, Firefox, etc. There should be no spiders and other creepy crawlies.

It will be easy to confirm if Pereira is lying. In fact, one may even identify the type of spider that SPH uses, being armed with a more complete list of User-Agents found at http://www.user-agents.org .”

Sysadmin sympathizes with Mr Pereira though:

“Pity this guy really, kenna arrow to write on something he has ZERO knowledge about.

But then who to blame? Want to wayang also must do some reading up. Now kenna thrashed by readers from TR left right, up and down.”

Since the publication of Mr Pereira’s article which is a pretty obvious attempt to discredit us completely, we have been inundated with emails of support and encouragement from our readers.

The Temasek Review team would like to express its heartfelt gratitude to our readers who have stood stoutly by our side during this difficult period of time.

Our editor has written to SPH CEO Mr Alan Chan to seek clarifications on the matter. We have yet to receive an official reply from him or any SPH staff.

We would consider the matter closed and would not comment further on it unless SPH decides to release any more statements through its VPN journalists from Editorial Systems Suport…oops, we mean Support.

Related articles:

>> Open letter to SPH CEO Alan Chan

>> Debunking Mr Geoffrey’s claims in his misleading article: “Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH

>> Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH

>> SPH IP caught grabbing “content” from Temasek Review

>> Debunking Mr Geoffrey’s claims on “IP spoofing”

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