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The Software Awards Scam
jamie sends us to a blog post about the worthlessness of some download sites' "5-star" awards. Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words "This software does nothing" as an EXE and named it "awardmestars." So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are "just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords."
Just for the record, I have been very happy with OpenHosting (www.openhosting.com). You don't get A LOT of storage space like some of the standard non-VPS hosting services offer, but the price is quite reasonable, support and up-time is good. Now, of course, I'm not sure that random people on Slashdot qualify as reliable sources of review material... :-)