Ever bought anything from Devil Mountain Software? Probably not. But you may have come across Craig Barth (though not, until this post, on the Guardian) as the "chief technology officer" of that company, which said it offered software that would analyse the performance of your computer when running Windows.

Thing is, Craig Barth doesn't exist. He was in fact Randall C Kennedy, who blogged about.. um, Windows performance.. for the news technology site InfoWorld, part of the IDG group.

According to Gregg Keizer of another IDG publication, ComputerWorld,

"Devil Mountain's data, derived from a network of PCs whose owners have voluntarily downloaded and installed a stripped version of the software the company has sold to financial service firms, Wall Street traders and government agencies, has provided some interesting insights into PC use and behavior: Internet Explorer is more popular than most believed, or most recently, that Windows 7 machines are twice as likely as XP systems to run low of memory. Barth's data was unique: Microsoft rarely divulges details of the telemetric monitoring it does on Windows PCs. Microsoft declined to comment or to make someone from their Windows or telemetry teams available for an interview, for example, to respond to the memory claims."

But over at ZDNet, some of the experts didn't really trust what was coming out of Barth, or Devil Mountain Software. So they did some digging. And some more. And it turned out that it was those little web footprints that really tripped Kennedy/Barth up:

"The current XPNet.com design debuted in early 2007 and was captured by Archive.org on April 30, 2007. It does not now and never has contained any reference to either Kennedy or "Craig Barth." By September 2007, Kennedy was using the page to publicize content he had posted on his new blog. Links from Xpnet.com at that time went to an early version of the Blogger-hosted exo.blog. By combing through those posts using the Wayback Machine, we were able to determine that the Research Staff profile originally belonged to Kennedy. Some posts written in 2007 on that blog contained the Randall C. Kennedy by-line. All of those posts were later changed so that the by-line was "Research Staff."

"Kennedy was more careful after 2007 not to allow his identity to leak into the exo.blog site, but on at least two occasions—in November 2007 and September 2008—he slipped up by posting graphics to Blogger using the wrong login. Those graphics were uploaded to Google's image servers and are tagged with the ID rkennedy01ca."

They also found that the "Sentinel" software offered by Devil Mountain Software wasn't as secure as it claimed and that the data from individually identified machines could be inspected. That's quite scary - especially as its Ts&Cs said that "Performance data will be shared in aggregate only and never identified as linked to your individual account."

And besides that, is the company's software really used by big Wall Street firms to analyse Windows performance? It seems unlikely - though that's yet to be refuted by ZDNet. (Await an update...)

So all the pieces fell into place: Barth and Kennedy were the same person, and Windows Sentinel (as InfoWorld was redistributing it) didn't quite do what it said on the tin. ZDNet told InfoWorld last week.

So all those things that Keizer said about the company above - the interesting findings and so on - should be discounted. You can't rely on them.

Seems that Barth/Kennedy couldn't quite resist hanging on to his alter ego, though. As Keizer recounts:

"on Friday, after I confronted Barth with evidence that linked him to Kennedy -- I didn't yet know they were one and the same -- he assured me that although the two had worked together in the past, and in fact, now worked together at Devil Mountain, any allegations that he and Kennedy were the same person were ridiculous. Two hours later, I received an e-mail from Kennedy, who I'd e-mailed separately.

""Time to level with you," Kennedy wrote. "The individual Craig Barth doesn't exist. It's a pseudonym I created a decade ago while writing news copy for Windows NT Magazine. I resurrected it a few years back in an effort to separate my sometimes controversial editorial contributions to InfoWorld from the hard research content I was developing as part of Devil Mountain Software."

Aaaand - that's him out of the door of InfoWorld. A terse blogpost said that Kennedy is gone. But has his content gone?

"Over the past 10 years, Kennedy has contributed valuable information on Windows performance and other technical issues to InfoWorld and its readers -- insight and analysis we still believe to be accurate and reliable."

Hmm. It seems that there are a few results on InfoWorld for Craig Barth (at the time of this posting, five including the "get out of here" posting). No doubt they'll get wiped out soon. So we'll only have the Wayback Machine to rely on. George Orwell would laugh.

So fess up: have you come across Devil Mountain Software, or used Windows Sentinel via InfoWorld?