Talk:Christopher Boyd (IT security)

message: First section ('Computer Security') has two paragraphs which make no reference to the person, and instead speak generally about security issues.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.114.164.41 (talk) 23:12, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Unrelated material?

message: I think I'll reduce this to a stub, this guy is barely notable.
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I'm not sure I understand why this article has been cited as being about a "non notable" individual, when the article in its last version prior to edit clearly contained numerous third party examples of the work done by this researcher, and how they would count as "notable" in the field of security or how the above (clearly trollish comment) is accepted at face value. Especially when the user
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Buyable
has a (brief) history of page vandalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Buyable
I move for the article to be restored, this is page vandalism disguised as "editing". though a trim couldn't hurt.Ginza 10:39, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Notability

message: Reference 12 says that the company was given information by an informant. This is not the same as independent discovery.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Spatulacity (talk • contribs) 10:49, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: "Every reference is a news article which effectively advertises his own company."
This is plainly nonsensical - the first eight or so articles refer to finds Boyd made *before* he started working for his current company - when he was an independant researcher. Even after that, it is clearly referenced in both articles linked to (and articles about the same stories that aren't linked to but found via googling it) that Boyd either made the finds himself or was involved as the catalyst for the events that would then take place (such as being tipped off by someone with regards the Carder Botnet.).
In addition, even after working for the mentioned company, Boyd still published (and continues to publish) research that has no point of origin with his company. For example, the Zango on Myspace story linked to on the very Wiki article you're referring to? 100% independant of research associated with his "parent company". The persual of the people behind the scam, and the subsequent reveal that Zango were sending out newsletters saying how webmasters could profit from Myspace? Published on his personal blog. The Yapbrowser story linked to on the wiki page you're referring to? Again, it originated from his personal blog. The hacker known as "Yogangsta50" who was "chased offline" after he was tracked down to a site revealing his name and photograph?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/19/2044244&threshold=-1
The initial find of the executable was detailed on his company blog, and the subsequent chase and takedown of the hacker (which is what made the story interesting in the first place) was another one from his personal blog. His endless stream of recent writeups concerned with taking down large groups of game crackers / phishers? It appears nowhere else other than on his personal site.
If news sites mention the finds, they're obviously more likely to call him "Chris Boyd, Facetime" than "Paperghost" because that would be pretty weird for mainstream press to do that, right? Even in the context of working for his company, he's still clearly credited with making the finds, from the Orkut worm in 2006 to the Skype worm that could jump across networks. Its about as spurious as you can get to accuse his research of simply being adverts for his company purely because he's going to be referred to by his name and job title in the bulk of those pieces.
This article is actually well out of date, and missing lots of more recent finds by the researcher in question. In fact, from his blog there's a link to this site:
http://cboyd.co.uk/
Which details a lot more findings for the year 2007. A quick readthrough provides links to more articles that credit Boyd with more finds off the back of his research, both related to his company and individual work.
"As a spokesperson for this company, would it not be expected that his name would appear as a researcher?"
If he found the thing being discussed, then yes, of course his name would appear. As he is in fact credited with these things, why are you suprised that he is the one being questioned about his finds and not somebody else?
"To be honest the notability of this individual is stretching a little thing."
As far as I'm aware, the article was already rated "Start class" (or something similar) after a similar discussion following what appeared to be drive-by page vandalism. It seems the sensible thing to do if questioning "notability" would be to mention it on the page, but not change the notability already established for the page without providing reasonable justification (as per the Assessment FAQ), however what you have "provided" is a collection of (at best) faulty assumptions, which makes it look less like a genuine edit and more like another piece of drive-by vandalism. For this reason, I'm reverting your changes as everything you've said is either incorrect (asserting that there is no mention of "independant research" when the first half of the links provided are just that) or really weird logic (being surprised that news articles would indeed refer to him as "chris boyd of X company" as opposed naming him without giving any context to what he does and who he does it for).
In fact, from a quick check of your User Talk page, you seem to be applying rather haphazard "edits" to a number of security specialist pages - combined with the frankly bizarre comment left there ("I am working my way through the computer security specialists list. Wow there are a lot of self promoting individuals.") which simply makes you sound like someone with a grudge of some description, as opposed to making rational, non-emotional edits that would offer some additional value to the articles edited. Are you claiming the inviduals you've edited are "self promoting" outside of Wikipedia? On Wikipedia itself? How so? Can you provide some factual evidence of this, or is it merely another assumption?
On the Sarah Gordon page, you've simply said "nothing here notable" and flagged it with a notability tag, without providing anything in the way of reasoning or verification which would substantiate your claim. "Two of the first concept Viruses for Microsoft products" sounds interesting enough to be notable to me.
Did you look into this to help the community to establish the worth of this information? Or simply dismiss all information there as "not notable?" purely for the sake of it? A quick google search, and:
http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/timeline.htm#1996
"Still another notable virus caught the attention of the anti-virus marketing community. This was Laroux. Laroux is notable as the first virus to successfully infect Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. It was first discovered and analyzed by Sarah Gordon of Command Software Systems."
The first virus to infect Excel spreadsheets sounds notable to me.
Horrorlemon (talk) 14:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reverting your edit with regard References / Notability 

message: I do not see the article clearly asserting notability, many of the references do not mention Boyd at all, and there are remarkably few mentions of this person on Google Book Search, Google Scholar, etc. The discussion above strongly suggests that this ia a vanity page. Mousepad9 (talk) 10:47, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've removed the tag placed by this first-day user, the assertation of notability is clear.  If he would read this page more closely (especially the edit history of the first "contributor"), he'll see that much of it deals with dirty-tricks editing to discredit Boyd.  If he'll read the article references more closely, I think he'll find that if they don't mention Boyd by name, they mention his  Paperghost alias, or his web site.  --CliffC (talk) 16:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  It feels odd being addressed in third-person, but the notability is asserted by having an MVP, being cited in "at least" one book, being quoted in a handful of articles, etc - which does not clearly meet the criteria as applied to IT. Also, many of the references provided do not mention Boyd at all, or do not establish any further notability (for example, neither [2] not [3] are related to the claim of personal contributions made in section titled 'Computer security'). Most biographies in this category with similar problems have notability templates attached to them. I am not really willing to argue here, but the article seems superficially valid, but in dire need of improvements at the very least. Mousepad9 (talk) 20:19, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Notability 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061210135200/http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/04/HNmyspaceworm_1.html to http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/04/HNmyspaceworm_1.html
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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018)