Proven: Techdude is a fake (Added note)

We now know that Techdude -- the man who claims that he can prove that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery -- is himself a forgery. Although I do not yet know Techdude's true name, I know that he swiped his resume from that of a genuine professional, Adam Fink.

Fink is not Techdude. Rather, the dude (he no longer deserves a capital D) lightly rewrote Fink's professional biography and claimed it as his own.

Here is Techdude's listing of his professional associations:

Active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the American College of Forensic Examiners, Computer Forensics Volunteer Project, a Member of Federal Bureau of Investigation's InfraGard program, International Information Systems Forensics Association, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, and others.

Here is Adam Fink's listing of his professional associations:

Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, Computer Forensics Volunteer Project, Member of Federal Bureau of Investigation’s InfraGard Program, International Information Systems Forensics Association, The International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners.

The groups are the same. Moreover, they are listed in the same order -- and that order is hardly alphabetical. Only a fool would ascribe so exact a congruence to coincidence. Since Adam Fink has denied being Techdude, we must presume identity theft.

Techdude may not know much about Photoshop, but at least he knows how to use his word processor's copy and paste function.

If you go to the above-linked page, you will see a full refutation of the dude's methodology by a genuine expert named Dr. Neal Krawetz. The piece is titled "Bad Science: How not to do Image Analysis." As I suspected would be the case, the "anomalies" found by the dude are simple scanner dust particles, and they are all over the document, not just in the places which the dude considers suspicious. (Those particles are the second biggest bane of my professional life, the first biggest being the need to do actual work.)

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs claims "I know who Techdude is and I have checked him out thoroughly." I'd like to know just what sort of checking she did. Did she make even one phone call to former employers -- the same thing anyone does when checking out a resume?

I just now encountered his direct reply to me ("I just want to stick my finger in Joseph Cannon’s eye for a second..."), which you can see here. I've never seen such an accumulation of pseudoscientific gobbledygook mixed with unearned contempt. He thinks I've failed "Photoshop 101"? I make a living with the program, which I doubt can be said of him. I also operate under my own name, and have never claimed anyone else's c.v. as my own.

Hey, dude -- why the hell would you talk about saving a layered file as a .png file in Photoshop? That's what the .psd format is for. From Wikipedia: "PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not professional graphics..."

Here as elsewhere, little of what the man has to say makes basic sense. He's a flim-flammer, hoping to gull the technically illiterate.

This is indeed a disturbing development. What was the motive for this attempt to disrupt the PUMA movement?

Will Larry Johnson do the right thing and apologize for foisting this fraud upon his readership?

By the way -- my great Techdude challege still holds. Scroll down and you will see that I've hidden a Shakespeare quote in the COLB, using the same tactics allegedly used to hide Maya Sotero's name. If Techdude or any other analyst (professional or amateur) can tell me the quote, I will bow down in admiration. (I've already shared a large part of the solution with a disinterested party.)

Added note: I am now convinced that the blogger who calls herself Texas Darlin' is in on the con. More on her soon.

The fact remains that she has never published an image showing the actual results of Techdude's manipulations. The word FEMALE simply is not where Techdude says it is, no matter what you do to the image.

Once a competent forger has erased writing, it simply is not possible to tease those old pixels back into existence. The entire premise is false.

No-one has replicated his claim. The only people defending this man's nonsense are technical illiterates who pretend to understand his meaningless pseudoscience.