Kevin Murphy, a British IT journo based in the US, has done a review of my Sex.com book on his blog.

He likes it. Which is nice since he is one of roughly three journalists in the world who understand the domain name system and its history. You can read it all here.

I like the opening line: “This is easily the funnest tech industry book I’ve read in a long time.”

I’m still don’t know where things are at with the US publisher, or this bloke in New York was interested in making a screenplay out of the book, or if I’m ever going to make any money from the book. Still, what does it matter in the wider scheme of things? I managed to write a book and people seem to enjoy it.

Steven Forrest – the hopelessly biased blogger of Free2Innovate (aka Free2Fabricate) – has been outed as Bill Hobbs, a right-wing political blogger who receives payment for anonymously pushing corporate lines.

It’s long been known that Steven Forrest is a pseudonym and it has been widely assumed he was in the pay of VeriSign for the simple reason that every single blog posting over the past few years has agreed with VeriSign’s corporate line, and that Mr Forrest has frequently acquired information that only an internet insider would know of, yet he never attends meetings and no one has ever met him.

Kevin Murphy discovered that Steven Forrest was in fact Bill Hobbs well over a year ago, and my investigations led me to the exact same conclusion but having been unable to find any evidence that he was being paid by VeriSign, let the matter drop.

The next time I decided to out Steven Forrest, the dotnet contract issue blew up during which he did a series of hatchet jobs on various stories that I wrote that, incidentally, proved that ICANN had knowingly and consciously bent the system in order to hand the contract back to VeriSign. I decided to hold off until the storm blew over in order to avoid getting into a mud-slinging match.

And again, three months ago, I considered doing the same after Mr Forrest’s posts again became ridiculously biased (coincidentally, concerning the hugely controversial decision to hand VeriSign the dotcom contract in perpetuity). I fired a warning shot across Mr Forrest boughs, and he shut up for a few weeks.

It appears that Kevin, and, as it turns out Brett Fausett, have considered outing Bill Hobbs before but for some reason it has never happened. Until today when something has clearly annoyed Kevin and he thought ‘what the hell?’

He’s right as well. Steven Forrest has provided such inexcusably biased coverage of Internet issues for so long, often willfully distorting facts and quotes, that it’s about time it was brought into the open.

To be honest, I’m not sure that Bill Hobbs is on the VeriSign payroll anymore – if he ever was – because he doesn’t appear to receive insider information any longer, but if you want to know more about the man, visit his website at BillHobbs.com.