obstinate.org

Well ladies and gents, another year another new series of useless attempts from Certfirst to discredit me. You see, a year and a half or so ago I attended a Certfirst PostgreSQL training for a previous employer. It was bad, real bad. I won’t bore you with the details here, as I summed it up pretty well in my previous postings

• http://obstinate.org/computing/full-review-of-postgresql-certfirst-training-course/
• http://obstinate.org/journal/an-update-on-certfirst-the-postgresql-training-company/

Back while I still worked at said company, Certfirst was pretty agressive in trying to get me to take down my blog posting by leveraging a refund contingent on them asking me to take down the above blog postings. I agreed, but after I left said company (ironically I wan’t fired!) I re-posted the above, very useful information about Certfirst. In the interest of full disclosure:

Today COMPNAY received a partial refund from CertFirst for its failed training. Together with this refund, each party agreed to use “reasonable efforts” to protect the reputation of the other. Part of COMPANY “reasonable effort” involves my notifying relevant parties that the agreement includes such a provision, and further urging you to be conscientious in any discussions you have re: CertFirst/SaiFirst with third parties.

Today, I noticed that over the past few months my fairly unnoticed blog has had a flurry of comment activity. Specifically lots of comments on my Certfirst postings! I thought I would share them with you:

Now, you may question the ability of the above person(s) to post in complete sentences, and without caps locks. However, you might not question their ability to use different computers, and to not be SaiFirst / Certfirst Employees:

Wow, they are both the same person! Souchon B, and Alice Martin! Never mind that they posted 4 minutes from one another! It should also be noted that this website has gotten maybe a dozen comments (including these) in the past 4 years.

So if we check out these IP’s that the submissions came from:

#host 24.12.109.172
172.109.12.24.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer c-24-12-109-172.hsd1.il.comcast.net.

#host 173.15.103.142
142.103.15.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 173-15-103-142-Illinois.hfc.comcastbusiness.net.

It is very interesting that both of these supposedly anonymous posters are either duplicates, or from the same region! It is also interesting that both are from the very same region associated with CertFirst!

Certfirst mentions on their website that they are located:

CertFirst
2215 York Road, Suite 108
Oak Brook, IL 60523
PHONE: (877) 724-3477 [USA]
PHONE: 1-(630) 684-0355 [INTERNATIONAL]
FAX: (630) 684-0344

Looking at the whois records for saifirst.com and certfirst.com results that the Administrative contact for both of these domains are:

Soni, Sonia  sonia.soni@comcast.net

This seems to be the Owner / President of Saifirst / Certfirst. She uses Comcast residential cable modem service, she lives in Illinois, and has an extreme interest in trying to discredit me. The bummer for her is that I have no credit to begin with!

A few quick phone calls in the Telecom community would / will result in finding out who owns those IP addresses. Once I get a few moments to do so (luckily for me, I work in the Telecom Industry) I will report back!