The Games People Play

The various SYS-CON Media websites are among some of the most visually and aurally annoying on the web today.

That doesn't matter, they're easy to avoid...

Or are they?

Sybase has a portal called MySybase that shows a "Latest Blog Entries" widget on its home page:



There we see that Chris Pollach has posted an item PowerDesigner Viewer at 20:17 GMT on February 28.

So far so good, really fresh stuff, at least it was when the screen shot was made (the same day).

The only trouble is, that particular item was actually published two days earlier, on February 26:

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What's happening here?

What's happening here is that a Sybase website is being spammed and scammed by one of SYS-CON's properties (Chris Pollach's blog), and that just ain't right.

Several other blogs, published by Sybase itself, have posted articles dating later than that, in particular Glenn Paulley's and Jason Hinsperger's.

But they don't show up in the MySybase "Latest Blog Entries" widget because SYS-CON keeps shovelling fake feeds Sybase's way every few hours.

Here's the latest (as of this writing):



I've heard two stories about this: first, that the practice is unintentional and will be fixed momentarily, and two, that it's been going on for a long time with no action taken.

We shall see... later tonight. A new fake "PowerDesigner Viewer" post is being created every 11 hours or so (the latest at March 2, 2009 08:47 AM EST) and is picked up by MySybase some time thereafter.

The obvious question is, why is Sybase accepting a feed from SYS-CON in the first place?

What's next, ads for SYS-CON's Adobe Flex Journal?