Yesterday morning (29-Jan-2009), my concluding SCN blog about a 3-day working weekend was attacked by an unknown person impersonating an SAP employee. As I had been warned of, and seen prior similar behavior, I knew immediately that the true SAP employee had not, nor would not, have made such disparaging remarks.
To me, the supreme irony was the content, griping about my network use, when (a) masquerading as another person is about the most useless and anti-community act I could think of, and (b) my post contained useful advice (for those intelligent enough to understand it) on how to minimize storage space, increase network throughput, and stop wasting others' time.
Fraud, copyright violations, and identity theft are very serious matters. Seeing electronic text from a person with a strong reputation may influence actions and decisions in the workplace, and at home. Finding out that you cannot trust whether any post is from the purported author makes your world a little colder, a little less friendly, and a bit scarier.
The title of this blog is taken from early American battle flags, quite appropriate as our conference planning meeting was held not far from the Liberty Bell; the flags depict a coiled rattlesnake.
Image courtesy of www.gadsden.info
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