Alienware Admit Trying to Fiddle Reviews

An anonymous reader writes "Alienware seem to have admitted threatening review sites with no future hardware unless positive reviews are written about their products. Hexus.net attempted to obtain a recent Alienware system and were rebuffed in an email claiming that their last review had scuppered the chances of them getting any hardware to review in the future. Follow-up emails confirmed this was part of Alienware's global marketing strategy. " I've read through the whole article and it would appear that the above is what the rep said. Now, granted, one would hope that's one person in that company, but still bad form.

Comments

How is this any different from what

[QuietLagoon]

Microsoft is doing with the Vista EULA and has done in the past?

...Just by way of example, what about a security researcher who a year or so from now wants to compare the buffer overflow vulnerabilities of the original version of Vista with the inevitable SP1? Under Microsoft's rules, the researcher could not make public the results of the older version of the software. And if you think it highly unlikely Microsoft would actually object to the benchmarks in such circumstances, think again. In 2001 Microsoft came down on an independent lab that was about to go public with performance benchmarks comparing Windows NT and Windows 2000 (). Since neither the NT or Win 2000 EULAs had censorship clauses at the time, Redmond even went to the extreme of invoking the clause in SQL Server, since it was used in the lab's tests.