Ruffin to Reckhow: I'm not your "Guy"

The mystery of who our lamented former friend "Guy" is -- s/he of the quickly-disappeared political insider blog "One Guy's View" -- got a bit more mysterious on Tuesday. (Though read this post to see if you can help solve the mystery.)

The Indy's Fiona Morgan posted an update at the alt-weekly's new regional news blog, The Triangulator, in which she dug up an email that Mike Ruffin sent to County Commission chair Ellen Reckhow upon the publication of the BCR post linking images from Ruffin's web site to the "One Guy's View" blog:

I don’t [know what is going on]. My only guess is someone is trying to make it look like the blogger is me. I’ve contacted the guy is manages my devotions.com website to see who might have hacked it and downloaded some files. The files that Bull City Rising uses are public files on my devotions website. Anyone can download them and repost them to their blog. I’ll let you know what I hear.

So, from Ruffin's own mouth, it seems, we have a denial of any involvement.

Though of course, our good county manager seems to confuse the idea of "hacking" one's web site with downloading public files. He is of course correct, we assume, that the files posted to the uploaded_files directory on One Guy's View appear to have come from his public site -- and it would be darned near impossible to figure out just who downloaded them.

The only other clue I have? The emails I received to my Bull City Rising account from "Guy," announcing the blog two weeks ago, and then encouraging some blogger link love from BCR to the new web site.

Pardon me for "geeking out" for a moment: I've got pretty limited computer sleuthin' skills myself -- enough to browse through full headers on an email message, for instance, but not really enough to get much further than that. So, hey, in the best interest of crowd-sourcing, I've decided to post those emails, with full headers, here on the blog.

Mind you, it's my usual policy to not post email messages I receive without the permission of the sender. Given that the County Manager is suggesting this was in fact a frame-up, though, I think "Guy" has lost whatever bounds of privacy I'd ordinarily afford a correspondent. (Download Guy-BCR-Emails.pdf)

So, sleuth away, gentle readers.

Comments

[etselec]

Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is, and why it's necessary to figure out who "Guy" is. I think it's a shame that the site is now down.

[Jeremy T]

I have to agree with etselec; why are you so concerned with this? Is the world any better now that you've removed Ruffin's (or whoever's) ability to comment anonymously? Does knowing who (probably) wrote the information on that site actually do anybody any good?

While this guy may have been sloppy with his site configuration, and you're certainly entitled to poke around at whatever he opts to make public there, I fail to understand how revealing this and driving the guy away helps anybody.

[Jeremy T]

I have to agree with etselec; why are you so concerned with this? Is the world any better now that you've removed Ruffin's (or whoever's) ability to comment anonymously?

[B]

I think there is a huge problem with a public official blogging about themselves and their conduct of official business in the third person under the pretense of being someone else, especially if their blogging turns out to be self-serving.

Please note that I'm NOT saying that a) Mr. Ruffin has done that, or that b) he had any intention of being self-serving if he did. But IF he (or anyone else) did, yeah, that's a problem.

[David McMullen]

For what it's worth, his host is "box463.bluehost.com", which resolves to an IP address of 74.220.219.63. BlueHost is a web hosting company based in Orem, Utah, and that IP address is part of their block. But "Guy" could be connecting to his host from anywhere.

The registered domain owner for "oneguysview.com" is a company called "PrivacyProtect.org", which lists an address in the Netherlands. It seems to be set up as a proxy to allow anonymous domain registration. They do have a web form which (they claim) will relay a message to the actual domain owner, but if the domain owner doesn't care to respond, it's a dead end.

So all I can say about "Guy" is that he's gone to some effort to prevent anyone from finding out who he is. There are probably people who could track him down based on the info above, but I'm not one of them.