Tuesday 9 October 2007

Dirty Chess Politics

Doing my regular trawl of the online chess news I cam across a story concerning a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed by chess identity Sam Sloan. Sloan is suing the Susan Polgar, and her husband Paul Truong, citing identity theft and forged postings on the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.chess.misc (and .politics etc). Certainly Sloan has a reputation on the net (and I've even met him in person), and this reputation has coloured how other people feel they can interact with him.
The Independent newspaper covers the story here, and there is also a mention in the New York Times (although you need to sign in to read that one).
I'm not going into the rights and wrongs of this case, but I suspect this is a case of one side being dragged down to the other sides level. For me the lesson from this should be "Don't argue with idiots"

5 comments:

The Closet Grandmaster said...

No problem with NYT (and for other papers).

Here's the solution: http://bugmenot.com/

Just find a log-in in there and you're set.

- TCG

Anonymous said...

Interesting discussion here (for those who haven't seen it).

TrueFiendish said...

Or to put it another way: "Don't feed the trolls!"

BTW, Shaun, perhaps your byline should be "a blog devoted mainly to chess"... That would satisfy the pedant in me.

AO

Anonymous said...

You may know Sam Sloan, but do you know Paul Truong?

Anonymous said...

In addition to Sam Sloan, there are also lawsuits from Ray Gordon, Marcus Roberts, and Brian Lafferty.

Of these, Lafferty has provided the most frequent reports:

"I spoke with the Assistant US Attorney in Springfield, MA this afternoon. He advised that the materials I sent him were sent to their main office in Boston for review by their computer crime analysts and prosecution review staff.

The Boston office has decided that they do not want to prosecute the matter but suggest that I send the materials to the US Attorney's Office in Tennessee that has jurisdiction over Crossville. The names of the contact US Assistants there will be given to me. I will do that when I receive the material back this week.

I would assume that if they are suggesting sending the matter to the US Attorney in TN, it's a decent bet that the computer forensics people in Boston did not have an issue with Mottershead's methodology.

I will keep everyone advised as the matter proceeds." -- Brian Lafferty