I didn’t want to do this, I tried not to let it get to this point, but I’m done – and as much as I care about keeping my personal issues to myself this is the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
I’m putting this dirty laundry out 1 time, and one time only. I absolutely will not speak on this subject ever again after this post. In my last blog post I responded to this Plagarism accusation from Saumil Shah. I emailed every single student in the class, made them aware of the situation – apologized, and offered refunds to anyone that felt slighted in any way. For the nearly 180 students that are taking courses with me this month I’ve given 12 refunds and I’ll happily give a refund to any other student that requests it.
After that I tried to go on about my business, but this is getting to the point of sheer stupidity.
Saumil, for 2 years even though very mention of your name made my skin crawl I still praised you publicly, recommended you publicly (YES, EVEN IN THE COURSEWARE YOU SAY I STOLE FROM YOU – said that I learned this from you and I’d recommend that people take your classes).
Let’s get down to brass tacks here…
The truth is that Saumil and I have a financial dispute over a class that he taught with my company and a partner training company that I often work with nearly two years ago. The class wasn’t selling well so I lowered the price (literally cut the price in half) to get some sales. The company that hosted the training paid Saumil $9,000 when the class only grossed a little over 20K. Saumil wanted me to pay him 17,000. In total I paid him 15K when my cut was only 6K. So basically I lost 11K on the class and Saumil still wants the remaining 2K. And no there was no contract between us – it was a gentlemen’s agreement done without even a handshake.
When I was in the class I was so appreciative of him helping me learn the subject that I offered to rewrite my notes from his class, update the attack scripts and port them to python for him which was something he said he wanted to do in the future, and fully document lab manuals with step-by-step walkthroughs for each lab. I told him that he could have ALL of this for free and I would be happy to do it as it would help me learn the material better. I honestly had planned to work on future classes with him where he would teach the exploit development and I would teach the network/web attacks. I was excited about the potential and he was too.
When it came time to settle up I paid him more money than I took in for the class (more than double what I took in – $6,000 was all I made and he wanted $17,000 – nearly triple what I made). I was already in financial peril at the time because 3 customers had not paid for their penetration tests, and 1 customer had not paid me for a class so I was owed nearly $100,000 dollars. I was drowning financially so I paid him late, but even with paying him late I was still giving him money when I didn’t have it to give.
I got evicted from my home and even then I was still trying to pay Saumil for a class that I lost money on, a few months later I taught a class in Norway at HackCON and had my point of contact for the event give Saumil all of the money from the event when I had no home to live in.
At this point I was in deep financial peril at the time and felt like Saumil was being an asshole to me. What kind of human I kept thinking to myself would be this way to me when I was homeless.
At this point I now fully hated his guts – nothing would satisfy me more than punching him in the mouth in front of god and country. I only had a few thousand dollars left to pay at this point, and the only reason that I was going to pay it was because I didn’t want him to go to security conferences and tell people in the IT Security community that I didn’t pay my bills. I figured it would destroy my ability to speak at conferences, run classes, and basically ruin me.
At that point Saumil’s business partner Hiren Shah began calling our mutual acquaintances, and my contractors asking each of that what my financial situation was. How much money I had made on recent penetration tests, courses, had they been paid from me recently, and more.
This put me through the roof!!!!!!!!!
Here I am taking money out my family’s mouth, still don’t have a place to live, and struggling to pay Saumil just so I can keep my private life out of the security industry and now here we go. Too late for that.
At this point I didn’t care anymore, I was so angry with him for being such a cowardly bitch that I couldn’t stand it. I swore that the next time I see him there was gonna be some furniture moving. Yes ChrisJohnRiley THIS IS THE NEW BLACK I was 2 seconds away from whooping Saumil’s ass. I was ready to put my foot so far up his ass that his breath would smell like shoe polish!
I told him explicitly (yes that means I dropped a lot of F-Bombs) how I felt, and that I’m not paying him the remaining money because he and Hiren are both some bitches. After that – all of these notes I rewrote, scripts I ported from perl to python, lab manuals that I wrote – for him as a gift to show my appreciation that he mentions in his blog post, and yes his precious virtual machines – I used them in classes, webinars, and workshops I taught. I did it to spite him. I was pissed at him – immature I realize – but at least it’s the truth. I might as well try to make my money back after all of this mess.
Saumil and anybody else for that matter – you can write whatever you want about me. You can put me on what ever page you want, talk about me on twitter, but at the end of the day Saumil can have a hot steamy cup of FUCK YOU! At this point I flat out don’t care how many people you tell, how many people talk about this on twitter. I hope that every single human being on this earth learns how much of a whining wimpy little bitch you are, and knows that I can’t stand you and I would rather eat hot shit before I’d even acknowledge that you are a fucking human being let alone speak to you.
No I’m not paying you, and I sincerely feel bad for every single incident of a people loosing respect for me with regard to this issue, I know that I will never do it again because there is no HUMAN being that would ever be the way that he was to me, but I refuse to continue to talk to people like you are a good person when I know you are not.
So Saumil, and Hiren – I just want you to know what I think of you personally, and professionally.
From the bottom of my heart…
FUCK YOU!
Joe
joemccray
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