Value of Openness, and Paranoia of Not

You know, I'm a paranoid old cuss.  I know that.  I'll divert from my intended path if a car stays behind me for more than two turns.  And I notice cars that stay behind me.  Sometimes, though, my "spidey-sense" gets going.  And I just have to dig to find out if it's working right.

I recently got an email sent to me offering a webinar on "The Value of Flexible Dedupe."  Presented by a site saying that their mission is "getting IT professionals unbiased, truthful information about their environments and the products that they might use in them."

Oh, really?  Well I'm going to change names but something tickled my brain about that claim.  Their presenter is listed as, "[J William Smith] is an expert in backup & archive systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. [Smith] is also an independent consultant and writer and has spoken at over 300 seminars and conferences around the world."

So imagine my surprise, or not, that a WHOIS lookup for these people wanting to provide "unbiased, truthful information" from an "independent consultant" named J William Smith, shows that the domain's name is registered by one "John W Smith."

Uh huh.

Mr Smith may, in fact, be a perfectly legitimate expert in Backup technology.  Maybe he's worked at it since 1993.  But, Mr Smith, I will not be attending your webinar.  To me, that hardly qualifies as independent *or* unbiased.  Consider yourself and your domain a permanent occupant of my spam filter.