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Andrew Ward Hayden was a young man on a mission to bring me down because of my comments about Virginia Tech’s abuse of power in covering up the many misdeeds of star quarterback Michael Vick during his time at the school.
Hayden, which is the name he used to open a web hosting account but which I also doubt is his real name, says he is not from Floyd County, but claims he has friends here and, with their help, he admits concocting a scheme to launch a web site called Floyd Free Press that would publish a number of scandalous stories about residents of the county and then be falsely linked back to me as some sort of outlaw pushing effort.
It almost worked. I linked to their site thinking it was a legitimate operation. They wrote about politics with what looked like insider knowledge. Then the stories turned nasty — a review of local bloggers that was particularly scathing towards one; a suggestion that a county official was having an affair with his daughter; a claim of alcohol abuse by another prominent citizen.
Sean Pecor, an alert reader, discovered that running a traceroute on the site appeared to point back to one of my web servers based in Blacksburg. But when I ran a trace based on the site IP it routed back to a server in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Hayden, who says he has a degree in computer science, admits he created a script that sat on his leased server space and sent false traceroute and ping information that pointed back to one of my servers. It was, he admits, part of the plan to eventually falsely claim Floyd Free Press as something I had created.
It didn’t work. At my attorney’s request (a demand actually), Hayden’s web host shut down his site and suspended his right to use it. After we explained the legal ramifications of what he had done, and the penalties he could face, he agreed to admit responsibility for his efforts and apologize to the residents of Floyd County. The apology was posted on the Floyd Free Press web site for one week and the web site is being taken down.
This incident should serve as a warning to all who publish on the Internet that you can’t always hide behind fake names and false pretenses. There are ways to discover who you are and expose your true intentions. I’ve been the target of such smear efforts before, usually aimed at my involvement with the political web site Capitol Hill Blue. Most of the time I ignore such attempts but this one could not be ignored because it involved people I know and respect and it tried to affect where I live and my relationships with friends.
If you mess with me I may ignore it but if you mess with my friends you will pay for that foolish mistake.
The Roanoke Times is a sponsor of FloydFest. That’s right, a newspaper — a new organization that is expected to provide objective coverage of an event — is also a sponsor of the event.
In the news business we have three words that describe this situation: Conflict of interest.
Any time you see a news organization taking a financial stake in a public event you immediately wonder if that organization will treat the event objectively. Will The Roanoke Times, for example, provide more news coverage because they are sponsoring the event? Will they overlook stories that might place the event in a controversial or negative light?
Good questions. On opening night of FloydFest 6, the talk on the grounds centered around the gestapo-like tactics of The National Park Police and their "Criminal Interdiction Team" brought in from Asheville to profile, harass and arrest festival attendees. Didn’t see a word about the problem in Friday’s Times. Some gosh, gee-whiz feature stuff about the event but no hard news coverage.
The old Roanoke Times, the one I worked for back in the 60s, would have avoided such a conflict. The editors would have said that such sponsorship creates the "appearance of impropriety."
And they would have been right.
The mystery surrounding a new web site about Floyd has been solved and, as happens too often with the Internet, it turned out to be not what it claimed.
Someone with a hidden agenda leased web space on a web server and then installed a script that sent out a false redirect and tried to point the phony site back to a non-existent server that used one of my domain names. I’ve removed my links to the web site and urged others to do the same. We sent a cease and desist notice to the company that really hosted the web site and it was taken off the web within 15 minutes of receiving the notice.
I suspect someone was trying to cause embarassment to Floyd’s blogging community but their plan has backfired because an alert and tech-savvy reader brought the ruse to my attention.
The lawyers take over now and payback will be a bitch. The person or persons behind this debacle are around to learn an expensive and painful lesson in web ethics.
No, you did not hit the wrong link by mistake. This is Blue Ridge Muse, or at least the latest evolution of it.
Muse is evolving, straying futher from its beginnings as a photo blog, moving more into the realm of an eye and ear of the community, a place where people can come to visit and discuss the issues of the day.
The newspaperman in me can’t leave well enough alone and I can’t write Chamber of Commerce pabulum. I need to delve into issues, devote time and effort to probing the who, what, where, when and why and examine the how.
Thanks to the help of Bernie Coveney, Don George and David St. Lawrence, the massive Epson 9600 printer now resides in its new domicile on the second floor of our home.
The 9600, which prints up to 44 inches wide, is a monster printer and requires a lot of effort to move. It also is a unwieldy machine to lug up the narrow stairs in our house but Bernie, Don and David managed to wrestle it into David’s van and then into our home.
They then hauled a couch that once dominated our second floor den down the stairs and took it to Angels in Attic as a donation.
Over the years, I’ve looked down at Linux as a second-rate operating system. Much of this stems from an early use of the software on a RAQ server some years ago. So I’ve stuck with Windows and Sun Solaris operating systems for my servers.
Sean Pecor over in Franklin County has long suggested I take a second look at Linux, noting that Google runs its giant operation on the system.
The exhaustion that led to taking some time off weekend before last morphed during the week into full-blown bronchitis with a dash or two of other illnesses that can easily knock a 58-year-old man (soon to be 59) off his feet.
After a week of taking it easy, I honored a commitment to shoot the girls’ basketball game at Floyd County High School Friday night. Big mistake. That brief trip into arctic air increased my body temperature and added to the already dangerous level of congestion in my lung.
I’ve resurrected one web site from my sordid past — American Newsreel — and turned what once was my company URL — DougThompson.Com — into a commentary site.
Newsreel will, as it did before, examine the absurd, inanane and unusual in America.
DougThompson.Com will be a place for commentary on subjects that are not covered in my column in Capitol Hill Blue.
If you get a chance, check both out and let me know what you think.
Friends whose opinion I value greatly have talked to me recently about our decision to close our studio at The Jacksonville Center and, as a result of their urgings, we have decided to remain.
The decision to close the studio, which never really reached what we felt was its full potential, was a difficult one. We were one of the original tenants at the Center and it has been part of our lives since coming to Floyd in 2004. My mother was a volunteer at the time and she brought the center to my attention when we were looking for gallery locations.
Sadly, Amy and I have decided to close our studio, Blue Ridge Creative, at The Jacksonville Center. Our departure ends a three-year stint as one of the original tenants of the Center.
Opening the studio brought us to Floyd — a homecoming for me and a new home for Amy. But the studio never evolved as we envisioned. I had hoped to use it as a quiet refuge to work on video and photo projects and catalog 40 years of work. Amy hoped to use it for sculpture.