THE TEMASEK REVIEW

From our Correspondent

Straits Times journalist Geoffrey Pereira appeared to have lost his cool as he fired another round of tirade against Temasek Review. (read article here)

Last Friday, Mr Pereira published an article on his SPH blog attacking us for making “baseless” accusations against SPH.

His article was completely dissected and debunked point by point by us. Not only did Mr Pereira tried to obfuscate the matter by putting words into our mouth, he even got the basic facts wrong such as the time during which the alleged “grabbing” of our content occurred.

Perhaps peeved at being outwitted, outgunned and outflanked by a group of anonymous amateur bloggers, a visibly upset and emotional Mr Pereira continued to keep the issue alive by writing another (more) diabolic piece against us on his blog with the aim of destroying our credibility.

While we have exercised utmost civility, restraint and courtesy in addressing Mr Pereira in our articles, Mr Pereira chose to resort to name-calling in a desperate attempt to demonize us which is completely uncalled for.

Mr Pereira began by claiming that we have hurled “another piece of the usual nonsense at the company, often from the cover of anonymity.”

Since Mr Pereira regards our articles as “nonsense”, why is there a need to post two articles to rebuke them on his blog? Surely readers will be smart enough to judge for themselves whether the articles posted on Temasek Review are coherent or not.

Mr Pereira claimed that all our articles except our letter to SPH were “belligerent in tone and designed to ridicule his and his company.”

Mr Pereira took issue with the points we tried to made:

- TR never accused SPH of having a go at its server;
- he got the timing of the alleged attack wrong;
- he got the explanation, involving spoofing in Denial-of -Service (DOS) attacks, was wrong.

We don’t see how our detailed explanation to defend ourselves was misconstrued by Mr Pereira to be an affront to his status as a SPH journalist.

Serious allegations were made about us by Mr Pereira in his article. Just like we gave him the opportunity to defend his stance, surely we should be allowed to clarify the issues he raised as well?

Nowhere in the original article, be it the title or content did we accuse SPH of launching a DDOS attack against our server. Because the “grabbing” incident occurred a day after our server was down, we took extra pains to explain what DDOS meant exactly.

Mr Pereira obviously got his timing wrong. It was stated clearly in our article that the incident occurred between 10pm on 31 Oct and 1am on 1 Nov, but Mr Pereira claimed that no SPH journalist visited our site on 1 Nov from 1am to 6am. Did we write anything wrong by pointing out the factual inaccuracy in his article?

Furthermore, we did not accuse Mr Pereira of getting his explanation about IP spoofing in DDOS wrong.

Mr Pereira should have read our article thoroughly and carefully before jumping up and down again: IP spoofing is a common tactic used in a DOS attack, but in this instance, we are referring to content “grabbing” and IP spoofing is technically out of the question as we have already explained here.

Mr Pereira then went into a detour about the other articles we had published such as in ‘25 SPH employees “caught” surfing Temasek Review in 3 days’, published on Nov 7.

With due respect to Mr Pereira, we do not have to seek permission from him to publish any article we like on our site and it is really none of his business to interfere with our editorial policy.

Before he ended, Mr Pereira took another dig at us for capitalizing on the controversy to increase traffic to our site.

If Mr Pereira is a regular reader of our site, he will realize that our spat with SPH amounts to no more than 10 per cent of the articles posted on our site in the last one week.

Our main focus for the week was on the issues of immigration, rising prices of HDB flats, Chiam See Tong’s decision to move to a GRC and Mr Robert Amsterdam’s White Paper on political repression in Singapore.

Our traffic has been increasing for the last few weeks without or without this extra “publicity” from SPH. We can’t help it if Mr Pereira chose to divert traffic to our site by linking his blog to ours.

Strangely enough, Mr Pereira found fit to take issue with comments posted on his blog which was re-posted in an article on TR and accused us of “pelting and roasting” him:

“On Nov 10 yet another article from TR…..This was a compilation of anonymous comments, mostly poking fun at my original blog, and which TR filed under “Top News”. It was back to pelting and roasting.”

If Mr Pereira is unhappy with the comments poking fun at him, he should have deleted them in the first place. We did not post the comments and neither did we edit them with the intention to ridicule him.

In the last sentence of his article, Mr Pereira wrote:

“Our checks found that neither SPH as a company, nor any employee as an individual, launched a DOS attack on TR’s web server. There was also no attempt to “grab” TR material in a way that could overload its server.”

We have already clarified repeatedly that SPH did not launch any attack on our server and have apologized for any misunderstanding which may have resulted, so why is Mr Pereira still harping on it to divert attention away from the crux of the matter?

As far as we are concerned, it was a non-issue from the very beginning. It was Mr Pereira who chose to blow it out of proportion on his blog.

Perhaps, the sentence highlighted above in red can shed more light on what exactly happened.

So is Mr Pereira implying that SPH did “grab” TR material, but not in a way that could overload our server?

Well, that’s what we have been trying to find out all along: whether content from our site as early as 2008 was “grabbed” by anybody or anything from SPH!

Again, we did not accuse SPH of overloading our server with its “grabbing”: it didn’t because the software firewall on the server itself banned the offending IP address minutes into the action after the IP address exceeded 60 connects per minute, the threshold set by the system administrator.

Since Mr Pereira had admitted that some “grabbing” did take place, who are the culprits and what are their motives for doing so?

Can Mr Pereira or anybody else from SPH please answer these two questions point-blank without throwing smoke-bombs to confuse the public again?

Lest that Mr Pereira accused us of “ridiculing” him again, we must stress that the gist of this article is not to put him or anybody down but to clear up the misconceptions about the case. We are sorry if we bruise Mr Pereira’s fragile ego in the process.

From the tone of Mr Pereira’s article, it seems that he is more interested in ridiculing us and putting us down than engaging us.

Mr Pereira should really cool down and don’t forget the fact that he is a journalist by profession.

As for his comments that what we are “wayang” and what we have published is “nonsense”, we leave it to our readers to judge for themselves.

Related articles:

>> A freudian slip by Mr Geoffrey that SPH staff did visit TR during the period when the alleged “grabbing” took place?

>> Debunking Mr Geoffrey’s claims in his misleading article: “Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH

>> Attack on Temasek Review: not SPH

>> SPH IP caught grabbing “content” from Temasek Review

>> Debunking Mr Geoffrey’s claims on “IP spoofing”

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