Thanks Silky. I understand that there are innocent reasons that people may be on the same IP but I think it's probably a lot rarer than those who would manipulate the system would have us believe...

Perhaps a polite message to those people when you see it, asking why they might be sharing an IP with another account. If innocent then they might say something like "we work in the same office" or even "I have no idea" - no problem - but if guilty they will at least be aware that it has been noted. It's often when multiple bits of circumstantial evidence come together that the truth becomes obvious as in Hush's case. Shared IPs + all thought Hush were great + all disappeared the day Hush did...

It is tricky I agree. Like I say, I think as long as people with the same IP know that it has been noted, and better still disclosed on the forum, so we are all aware, that is probably as much as you can do without additional evidence.

Is the cross checking of IPs a completely manual process for you? ie in the the last 24 hours, does this involve looking through a list of 823 IPs and seeing if you can spot duplicates?

I see the same topic is apparently still being discussed but I also see that it's still being dealt with along the lines of a few broad brush strokes, ie. same IP = probably same person, the sole purpose of it therefore being to hype an artist, thereby "manipulating a system" <- I think I've read this phrase now almost as often as we all read "WMD" a few years ago and we all know where that lead....

Anyway, it seems to me, as long as this keeps getting talked about in these sort of broad terms the less likely it is that the actual "substance" of these accusations is going to get an airing. Now, with that in mind, I asked in the last thread this was being discussed in, whether any one had actually bothered to go back and read all the posts by mainartery, uac, and the other one (I forget the name now, olly?), Well?

I did, and if the content of those posts is what is being termed as "hype", "manipulating the system" etc. etc. then it seems to me that it doesn't take a great deal to constitute hype as the posts by those couple of people (mainartery etc) are - if they're even about Hush in the first place, I would hasten to add and the majority of their combined 150 odd posts have nothing to do with Hush!! - along the lines of "nice work", "love it" etc etc whenever a print or whatever has been shown up on the forum. To me, the content of those posts constitute nothing more or less than has been said by others about a huge number of artists and certainly in no way not what I would term as hype.

So in order to understand the statement made in one of spirit's posts above (and I'm not picking on you spirit, or anyone else), viz. "It's often when multiple bits of circumstantial evidence come together that the truth becomes obvious as in Hush's case." Why (as is my point) are we talking about circumstantial evidence....?? Everyone has all the evidence they need if they're really interested in getting to the bottom of this "hype" and in order to judge for themselves whether it indeed IS hype.... simply go to the members section and scan through the posts from mainartery, etc. etc. and make up your own minds.

Its because i've gone to the trouble of doing this for my own information that I'm extremely perplexed to see that this is being discussed in the same broad terms as before (ie. without the detailed evidence, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered posting again on the subject) as it seems to me we're being told "a horse has four legs, a cow has four legs, therefore a horse is a cow" merely because that's what the "circumstantial" evidence tells us.

Good post
It seems some people are determined to do this Hush/Opus subject to death.
Personally i don't care if Hush did hype up his work it would be my decision in the end if i was gonna listened only to the hype and buy his pieces.
In fact if Hush hyping up his work caused his whole show to sell out and had people buying his next print blind then hey good luck to him he must be salesman of the year.

Perhaps its a bit old fashioned, but I've always had a hard time drawing a line related to what constitutes as an acceptable level of fraud. For me, any deceit has always been too much. Perhaps in this case, it was only a little fraud as some have suggested... only a marginally deceitful so whats the harm. I suppose I hold myself to a certain level of integrity and I expect that of those around me regardless of what the setting or motivation.

I also take exception to the notion 'some people were so fast to start spreading the muck', because in my eyes it is more worrisome that people are/were so quick to try and brush the issue under the rug rather than taking a hard look at the facts, circumstantial or otherwise. I wonder what the motives were for that.

yawwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnn

banksyforum.proboards82.com/index.cgi?action=viewprofile&user=uac



"AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH I want to see the new Hush prints:)"

-

"Hush, Progression!!!

Anyone seen a piece called graf geisha lately???

Hush seems to have an exponential talent it terms of artist progression. I certainly look forward to the artists future works."

-

"Buy anything by him, he's going to be huge, thats my advice:)"



And that's just the tip of the iceberg

[quote author=seidbereit board=general thread=20432 post=308062 time=1212429820
Hi spirit, it's not that I don't care who they are (the three other accounts) but it's also been mooted by several other forum members with much more IT nouse than I possess that the fact the posts came from one IP address does not give conclusive evidence that the three posters were one and the same person so on that basis alone it seems very presumptious to say that "someone was pretending to be someone else" as the IP argument alone doesn't support this conclusion to the full. I wish I knew another good cow analogy but the best I can think of is that the situation we have is a corridor with three doors behind which we can hear mooing however we don't know if it's one big room housing one cow behind three doors or three smaller rooms housing one cow each behind a single door a piece. Similarly we don't even know if it's really a cow in there or whether there's just a tape recording (or three tape recordings) of mooing in the rooms. Enough about livestock though.

My personal assumption is that they are probably separate people but as I cannot prove this one way or the other anything more I say can only be empty speculation and there's enough of that already, I feel. As for their not having shown up since this was all revealed: I don't know why - but I am curious - however I can also very easily imagine they'd prefer to avoid being rounded on by a mob (which I'm not suggesting you or anyone else will be the ringleader of) so again I can only speculate as to the reasons for their absence and, again, speculation is not something I'm going to add to.

To go back to your other point though.

Integrity: Yes this is an issue and I sympathise with both your's and jam's point on this matter however at the same time I can't help feeling you can't look at the integrity issue without gving some thought to what exactly Hush stood to gain from having extra accounts in his name (under the assumption that the additional accounts indeed came about at his instigation) since surely to breech the normal rules of integrity you need some sort of motive.

The only motive I can think of from where he would have gained anything from overstepping the normal bounds of intergrity would have been to up his profile or, in other terms, to create a hype.

This was the reason I looked through the other posts (by mainarterys etc.) and it was there that I found that there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of hype going on so there are only two conclusions to be drawn from that (a) it may indeed have been all about hype but was conducted so subtley as to completely fail in creating a buzz and therefore render itself wholy inneffectual or, (b) it wasn't about hype at all.

In the event that it was (a) then yes, your point about integrity stands and there should be answers.

For the record, my personal assumption is that there are 3 or 4 mates/aquaintances/whatever in one building or using one server, one of whom is Hush. Obviously none of the others will unnecessarily diss Hush - why should they? but at the same time none came out and gave the "gushing" or "glowing" (I forget which it was) reviews of his every brush stroke as was claimed in another post on this subject, but rather just used the odd unremarkable phrase such as "love it", "Hush is the dog's nads" etc. etc.

DAMN, I tricked myself into speculating!! [/quote]

Fair play Seid - A very well reasoned and rational post - (although I did get a little lost in the mooing corridors!). Your assumption at the end is certainly something that I consider a possibility - but if that is the case then the the shocked/offended, 'how could you possibly think such a thing', attitude that Hush took when he left was not really on was it. He could have juust said 'it's not me but it is my mates' and that would have been that. Instead he took his ball and went home. Anyway - nuff said! :-)

Aye i found that reaction a little strange myself and a lot of this discussion and guesswork could probably have been avoided if such an explanation had been forthcoming from the start. Anyway it is as it is for whatever reason. I thought the cows in the corridor thing was genius myself.

OK, so if it looks like a goat, has five legs and goes moo.....ohhh fuck it. ;D

Do a search for the last 100 posts of 'uac'. It makes for an amusing read. I love his top 5 artists, with Hush mixed in next to Neate, Parla, Choe and Lister. At the time, I remember thinking "WTF", but it makes a bit more sense now.

[Of course, not all the posts by 'uac' are about Hush. He may be a bit dim (as well as dishonest and a coward), but he isn't completely retarded.]

Good tech info aginghippie. As I acknowledged in other posts, I understand that the IP alone isn't an end all proof of duplicate users. I believe it is important for administration to actively follow up on any concerns over these issues by using registration details to cross reference if suspicion arises. As you pointed out, post analysis is also useful in routing out abusers of the forums. I took those details into consideration when the IDs in question were called out for their common IP address on WK. In reviewing post content as well as the times/dates, it looked like there was a pattern related to the questioned IDs activity and subject. I also believe it would be a strong coincidence for all four users to have the same IP also share a common interest in banksy.info and specifically, Hush threads. A stronger issue for me is that Anthony from Opus claims to have "personally spoken to two of these members in the past" and that "one lives on the other side of the country". I would imagine the shared IP address would be more a localized chance, than a national one. Would it be plausible for a user at one end of a country to have the same IP as one on the other end? For me most telling detail, is the fact that Hush, Mainartery, Ollys and UAC all seem to have gone on hiatus since being questioned about the multiple user ID issue, none have visited the forum since they all were on at separate times May 17th... that means not one of those IDs have posted in some 17 days now. The user 'Ollys' was never even mentioned until Silky pointed out that ID as being one of the 4 using a common IP address, so the fact that the 'Ollys' ID has been showing similar posting habits/dates as the others that were mentioned (then skipped off) reinforces the suspicions many people have.

So the golden question is now, what sort of IP was it, and if it is a common house/small office account, you need to remember that even if you turn your PC off, the router holds the connection, so it's not like with dial up where your IP changed a lot more frequently, on a normal sky account you would have to unplug power from your router for longer than a minute to get a new IP and even then your operating system might request the old IP it had before your router went down, so the odds do go up exponentially.

So just reverse lookup the IP, if its behind a home account it's shady, if it's behind an anon proxy it's shady and if it is behind some sort of major regional node on the internet, then you don't have a case.

Edit: One more thing, because I know some "expert" is going to say it, you can have multiple hostname assigned to an IP, but in the case sky example above, that isn't the case, and it's the same with most stable broadband countries with most large volume end user providers. Mm'kay

come on every one needs to chill out none of the above comments would have me running to spend money on a Hush unless i really liked the piece.
Plus if you think about it the comment
"Buy anything by him, he's going to be huge, thats my advice:)"
is quite prophectic, when that comment was posted the general view of this board and WK was that Hush was a poor Faile wannabee now he has a sold out show that despite the tits up on the print sale has had generally favourable reviews from those who attended he has also sold vast amounts of his new print blind.
I think this all adds up to Hush being huge ;D