But on Friday, after I confronted Barth with evidence that linked him to Kennedy -- I didn't yet know they were one and the same -- he assured me that although the two had worked together in the past, and in fact, now worked together at Devil Mountain, any allegations that he and Kennedy were the same person were ridiculous. Two hours later, I received an e-mail from Kennedy, who I'd e-mailed separately.

"Time to level with you," Kennedy wrote. "The individual Craig Barth doesn't exist. It's a pseudonym I created a decade ago while writing news copy for Windows NT Magazine . I resurrected it a few years back in an effort to separate my sometimes controversial editorial contributions to InfoWorld from the hard research content I was developing as part of Devil Mountain Software.

"What began as a simple e-mail exchange of benchmark data two years ago snowballed, as all such white lies tend to do, into the mess we have today," he added.

"Lie" it is, "white" it's not. And "mess" doesn't begin to describe the fall-out over Kennedy's disguising his identity to Infoworld , Computerworld , and other news organizations and blogs, including the , and .

Even before this revelation, last week's Computerworld story on had raised a storm of criticism as readers and Windows bloggers reacted with disbelief to the data Barth presented. He fired back, both in Computerworld 's follow-up story and on his Friday.