Fake Steve Jobs Unmasked?

No,wait! That last one was nothing. You call this one a news item?

The evidence is still circumstantial and we don't have a signed confession, but the net seems to be drawing closer and it may be just a matter of days or even hours. We'll get to the suspect's name in a minute, but first...

If you haven't been reading the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs or joined the crowd of literary sleuths trying to smoke out the anonymous author who poses as Apple's CEO, do yourself a favor: click here and spend a few minutes catching up on some of Fake Steve Jobs' greatest hits. I like him best when he goes off topic and writes about, say, Hillary Clinton shaking down Silicon Valley VCs for campaign cash or Yoko Ono putting the kibosh on the Beatles deal.

And if you're a fan of FSJ and don't want to risk spoiling the fun, you should stop reading right now.

For those who are curious about the latest evidence and to whom it points, the envelope please...

Ihnatko, for those who don't read his tech reviews in the Chicago Sun Times or his back-page humor columns for MacWorld, is a self-described "Boston-based geek and writer who works for anyone foolish enough to pay him." He's written for everybody from Playboy to Roger Ebert (who credits him as writing at least a third of Ebert's Little Movie Glossary).

You don't have to read much of YellowText ("The weblog of Andy Ihnatko! Possibly not the least-beloved technology pundit in the land!") or his Colossal Waste of Bandwidth site (tag line: "'Better' is the enemy of 'good' --Voltaire, I think, or, umm, somebody") to see the similarity.

There's plenty of Ihnatko prose to study in YellowText ("The weblog I've been doing since way before there were even weblogs, by cracky, gol-durnit... "). It's fun to read and probably packed with time-stamped clues if anyone wants to pursue them.

This is not the first time Ihnatko's name has been put forward as a suspect in the great Fake Steve Jobs hunt. Nick Denton offered Ihnatko up in his first effort to smoke FSJ out in the May 10 Valleywag, along with Harry Shearer, Charles Jade and Owen Thomas (see Contest: Who is the Steve Jobs impersonator?). Two months earlier someone with the initials JD posted "Ihnatko, the longtime mac pundit" in the comment section of Rich Kirlgard's Aug. 2006 "Who is Fake Steve Jobs" piece in Forbes. Diego Barros who writes the Radio Active Code Blog, has been telling anyone who will listen for months now that he thinks Ihnatko is FSJ (see "I know who Fake Steve Jobs is").

Even the Fake Steve Ballmer (yes, there is such a thing) has got into the act. In his June 13 post he wrote:

I've had our security people working on this ever since I launched this blog. Results: "Andy Ihnatko"! I can't reveal the details of how we tracked down FSJ but I can say it involved some arm twisting at Google, IP address route tracing, post back-tracing filters and surveilence. I can assure you that this washed-out hippie looking loser is FSJ. Spread the word! (link)

So what's new? Why do we believe the Fake Steve Ballmer any more than we believe the real?

The latest evidence, as reported on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (tuaw.com), comes from a clever trap set by the folks at a Nashville-based web design company called Sitening and some sleuth work by Diego Barros. But we'll let Mike Schramm of tuaw.com tell the story:

If you checked out Fake Steve Jobs's site yesterday, you might have seen a short post about a marginally funny iPhone Haiku site. I've still got the post in my Google Reader, as you can see in the pic. [see right] Seems harmless, right?

That's what FSJ thought. But apparently, the link was sent to him by the guys at Sitening (who also created the Haiku site as a lark), and the link he was sent was a specially created link, made up just for FSJ by the Sitening guys. See where this is going? When he clicked the link, they tracked his IP, and here it is: 68.160.21.224. That IP traces back to a Verizon service, which the Sitening guys say is in Boston, MA.

And then the story gets even stranger. Diego Barros at the Radio Active Code Blog posted a comment on FSJ's post about the tricksey linkses, and then the post itself was removed completely. FSJ usually seems pretty easygoing about this stuff, so the fact that he actually took it down gives credence to Barros' suggestion that FSJ is on the run. (For the rest, see On the trail of Fake Steve Jobs.)

Schramm dropped Ihnatko a note about the rumors, and we wrote him as well, asking Ihnatko point blank if he is Fake Steve Jobs. So far, only silence.

http://blogs.business2.com/apple/2007/07/fake-steve-jobs.html