Steven Forrest – the hopelessly biased blogger of Free2Innovate (aka Free2Fabricate) – has been outed as Bill Hobbs, a right-wing political blogger who receives payment for anonymously pushing corporate lines.
It’s long been known that Steven Forrest is a pseudonym and it has been widely assumed he was in the pay of VeriSign for the simple reason that every single blog posting over the past few years has agreed with VeriSign’s corporate line, and that Mr Forrest has frequently acquired information that only an internet insider would know of, yet he never attends meetings and no one has ever met him.
Kevin Murphy discovered that Steven Forrest was in fact Bill Hobbs well over a year ago, and my investigations led me to the exact same conclusion but having been unable to find any evidence that he was being paid by VeriSign, let the matter drop.
The next time I decided to out Steven Forrest, the dotnet contract issue blew up during which he did a series of hatchet jobs on various stories that I wrote that, incidentally, proved that ICANN had knowingly and consciously bent the system in order to hand the contract back to VeriSign. I decided to hold off until the storm blew over in order to avoid getting into a mud-slinging match.
And again, three months ago, I considered doing the same after Mr Forrest’s posts again became ridiculously biased (coincidentally, concerning the hugely controversial decision to hand VeriSign the dotcom contract in perpetuity). I fired a warning shot across Mr Forrest boughs, and he shut up for a few weeks.
It appears that Kevin, and, as it turns out Brett Fausett, have considered outing Bill Hobbs before but for some reason it has never happened. Until today when something has clearly annoyed Kevin and he thought ‘what the hell?’
He’s right as well. Steven Forrest has provided such inexcusably biased coverage of Internet issues for so long, often willfully distorting facts and quotes, that it’s about time it was brought into the open.
To be honest, I’m not sure that Bill Hobbs is on the VeriSign payroll anymore – if he ever was – because he doesn’t appear to receive insider information any longer, but if you want to know more about the man, visit his website at BillHobbs.com.
Kevin Murphy
July 18, 2006 at 1:19 amI’m curious Kieren, can you pinpoint the exact period, down to a month or so, when you think Hobbs stopped getting this info?
Kieren
July 18, 2006 at 8:14 amNo. But he used to get hold of documents and produce original content, whereas now he just links to other stories and misrepresents them.
The first is a strong indication that he is being leaked stuff, the second that he’s just massively biased.
Kieren
Where has Bill Hobbs gone? at kierenmccarthy.co.uk
September 8, 2006 at 8:55 am[…] Kev’s piece – in which he suggested that VeriSign might be the company picking up the tab – was soon followed by lawyer and [tag]ICANN[/tag[ observer Brett Fausett concluding the same along with a picture of the man but, being a lawyer, avoiding any accusation that he was paid by VeriSign. And this was swiftly followed by my blog posting in which I went further and suggested that he was being paid by VeriSign (but then this is because about 6 months ago I compiled some stats on Forrest’s bias which provided an intriguing 99 percent pro-VeriSign bias so I *knew* I was on safe ground). […]
RIP Steven Forrest at kierenmccarthy.co.uk
November 18, 2006 at 2:22 pm[…] However, all posts on the site stopped in July this year when journalist Kevin Murphy, followed swiftly by blogger Brett Fausett and myself, outed “Steven Forrest” as Hobbs. Nothing else appeared after a 25 July posting which ironically quoted some article I had written. […]
Bill Hobbs breaks cover - and piles on the coincidences at kierenmccarthy.co.uk
January 31, 2007 at 8:47 am[…] It was bound to come back to haunt him at some point, but Bill Hobbs has been forced to break cover after people in his home town of Nashville came across the various posts by me, Kev Murphy and Brett Fausett that fingered him as being Steve Forrest – the most-biased man in showbusiness and the brawn behind Free2Innovate.net. […]