Sockpuppets, Handles, and Tactics: The 2010 Campaign Against David “Lefty” Schlesinger

What this note is

In early 2010 David "Lefty" Schlesinger, a software-industry figure in the free-software world, became the target of a sustained harassment and defamation campaign on the Phoronix forums (a Linux news and hardware site) that also spread onto several blogs; much of the record is Schlesinger defending his reputation against it. A set of handles ran most of it. This note argues they resolve mainly to two people, Brandon Lozza and sandAlfoan, plus a third handle whose operator is unresolved, since a single coordinated operator cannot be fully excluded. The same actors recur in Brandon Lozza’s later record, which is why it is kept here.

This page is the overview. The detail for each actor lives on its own page (below), each sourced to quotes and archived links. Provenance marks used throughout: “per Schlesinger” = from Schlesinger, the campaign’s target, not a neutral source; “assessment” = our inference; “no source yet” = not backed by a retrieved document.

Pages

• Brandon Lozza — his handles (ender2070, boycottlefty, @atlasdx, pwnage admin), his pseudo-legal method, and the removal pattern (see also the Lozza timeline).
• sandAlfoan — the second person: his aliases, cross-platform attestation (2009-2016), writing style, claimed identity, his accusations against Schlesinger, and the Cypert relay. Alias stubs: ZQB, el_condor_pasa, Melanie Saffka, “victim of david lefty schlesinger aka stonemirror”.
• Schlesianer — the unresolved impersonation handle (leans toward Lozza’s side; not shown to be sandAlfoan).
• Victor T. Cypert — the relayed sworn-statement persona.

The people

• David “Lefty” Schlesinger is the target of the campaign: a veteran software figure who worked at ACCESS Co. (formerly PalmSource) and held roles in the GNOME and mobile-Linux communities. See his page, Schlesinger, David. In the forum he posted as lefty.
• Brandon Lozza is the subject of this database: in 2010 a Canadian IT technician and free-software blogger in Brampton, Ontario (see the Lozza timeline).
• sandAlfoan (the antagonist) is a separate, US-based person who by Schlesinger’s account had harassed him since around 2003, unrelated to the software politics driving Lozza.
• Victor T. Cypert is a name on a sworn-statement-style post that sandAlfoan relayed.

The forum regulars L33F3R, BlackStar, energyman, Remco, yotambien, and elsie are bystanders or opponents of sandAlfoan, not sockpuppets, and are noted only so researchers do not chase them (assessment).

Two others come up: Richard Stallman (“RMS”), founder of the Free Software Foundation, invoked in the smears (the campaign’s false claim that Schlesinger had branded Stallman a rapist); and Roy Schestowitz, who runs Techrights (in 2010 called Boycott Novell) and Tux Machines, and whose site amplified the campaign. The quarrel’s nominal backdrop was Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET then bitterly contested within the GNOME project.

The two hands

The campaign ran on two distinct writing styles, which is the main reason to treat it as two people (assessment): Brandon Lozza, clipped and legalistic, attacking through copyright and pseudo-legal process; and sandAlfoan, manic and profane, attacking through lurid defamation. They worked as a pair, Lozza running the respectable legal front while sandAlfoan supplied the raw defamation, including in the comments of Lozza’s own blog.

Conclusions and confidence

A caveat governs these: much of the picture of sandAlfoan as a distinct, older enemy comes from Schlesinger, the campaign’s target and not a neutral source (the real name, stonemirror.org’s specifics, the occult e-books, and the “accomplices” framing are all his). But sandAlfoan’s existence and grievance before 2010 are independently attested on LWN (see the sandAlfoan page).

• sandAlfoan is a different person from Brandon Lozza (well supported). Three independent lines: the registers are consistently different; sandAlfoan’s own posts claim a grievance with Schlesinger older than Lozza’s Mono quarrel; and the persona is attested on LWN in December 2009, before Lozza entered, treated by a third party as a long-standing foe. sandAlfoan himself, in a 2016 rebuttal, lists Lozza among Schlesinger’s “victims,” treating him as a separate person (assessment).
• The lurid defamation is observably sandAlfoan’s, not Lozza’s (well supported). On every readable document, including Lozza’s own blog comments, the rapist/pedophile/pornographer attacks come from sandAlfoan/ZQB, while Lozza’s own posts stay on copyright and procedure (assessment).
• Whether “Cypert is a sockpuppet of Lozza” cannot be resolved here; the statement was posted by sandAlfoan, so the question collapses into the sandAlfoan-versus-Lozza question above (assessment).
• A single operator running both registers cannot be logically excluded, but it is unlikely: the sandAlfoan persona and grievance are attested on LWN before Lozza entered (assessment).

Limitations

This attribution is impressionistic, drawn from samples in different genres (a legalistic blog comment, a forum taunt, an affidavit), where genre strongly colours style; no formal function-word or punctuation analysis has been done (assessment). The name-change identity and the pre-2010 history rest entirely on Schlesinger’s assertions and are not independently confirmed (per Schlesinger; no source yet). The archived forum captures come from Techrights, which preserved the pages after Phoronix removed them, and they redact the real names behind some handles. The removals that make the archives necessary are set out on the Brandon Lozza page.