Slashdot Mirror
Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site
An anonymous reader noted yet another story about credibility and disclosure on-line. An OLPC news site highly critical of the project was run
by an Intel employee who actually is working on a project that competes with the OLPC. Oh, and the site failed to disclose this pretty serious bit of bias. The article talks about the most extreme interpretation ("Intel secretly bankrolls blog that disses competitor") but even the less extreme version ("insider badmouths competitors anonymously at night") is pretty fishy. Just more reasons to never believe anything on-line, including me I guess.
Okay, after being forced to dive into the sources by lousy reporting, here is the story:
Christopher Blizzard has posted to his blog that Wayan Vota, a main writer for OLPC news is the director of Geekcorps. That Wayan Vota writes for OLPC news is not a secret (his name is on every post). And a Google search for "Wayan Vota" turns up the Geekcorps result as its third hit.
Now, on Geekcorps' website, of one their technology partners is listed as Intel.
I don't know about you, but that's enough to convince me that the black helicopters are involved! What a conspiracy.
BTW, is this the Digg effect? I notice more and more looney conspiracy stories over there all the time. Maybe it's spreading.
"never believe anything on-line"? As opposed to believing anything that is printed on dead trees? Just apply the same rule to the internet as to books or newspapers: Use your own brain.
Nope, I don't think the story is wrong:
US Dept of State
Sure, it's not pretending 'not to have a bias' apart from the bold-italic part at the top of every page that goes:
'Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.'
See the 2nd word there? Sure he can say what he likes, but he needs to disclose this blatant conflict of interest, which renders him very biased indeed.
Just in case anybody's wondering why Vota hasn't posted anything to explain this... I think he might be a little busy at the moment, since he's getting married today.
Not that that affects any conflict of interest either way, but he is a private citizen who's been running the blog in his spare time for at least a year. Sucks for him that this hits Slashdot today.
For my part, I've been reading olpcnews for a while and I think it's a serious stretch to call it "highly critical" of OLPC. Vota seems to love OLPC in general and has started a forum for Give-One-Get-One donors (like himself) to post hacks, guides, and help for the machines. He's pretty critical of Negroponte, but it seems that that's mostly because he (reasonably) believes that Negroponte's utopian rhetoric harms the project.
I'm not sure I've seen him weigh in strongly either way on Intel, but he's certainly very against seeing Windows on the OLPC, and has posted articles from other authors that are quite critical of Intel. So IMO: pro-Intel bias, maybe. Anti-OLPC bias, no way.
No jokes, please
Generally, any story they do directly about OSTG/SourceForge/etc includes that disclaimer.
They tend to be good stories anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I also took money from Intel in 2004: they paid my salary for the entire year. Then, when my division was closed, I joined with Nicholas Negroponte to start OLPC. Calling Wayan an Intel employee is like calling me one.
OLPCnews is a great forum for commentary on the OLPC project, they are sometimes critical of OLPC, and like all of us sometimes get things wrong, but they are mostly amazed by and very supportive of OLPC. OLPCnews is certainly helping build the OLPC community that has expanded as a result of OLPC's "Give One, Get One" program.
I think Wayan is doing a terrific job.
- Mary Lou Jepsen
(former Chief Technology Officer of OLPC)
I write of OLPC News. I am not Wayan Vota, but have known him form some months now as we exchange constant emails about subjects. This is a case of real bad reporting on slashdot.
1- Wayan Vota is NOT an 'Intel Employee'. Ok, in some point his company did business with intel, but to call him a paid blogger by intel is a long conspiracy stride by an uninformed net echochamber. He is getting married today, and I think this is not the wedding gift he was expecting.
2 - OLPCnews is not "anti-olpc" or "pro-intel". You have clearly never read o line of that blog. Some headlines:
3 - there is no number 3. Unfortunatley, althought I write for the blog in question my low"Classmate PC: Intel's Two Hour-Long Joke"
"Intel Can't Take the (Low) Heat & Power of OLPC XO"
"Halloween Horror Story: Nigeria Buys Windows XP Classmates"
I challenge anyone to find a post truly complimenting Intel for it's classmate. There are posts criticizing OLPC, but mainly criticizing some negroponte's statements, some of the foundations failures or something that was left unaswered, after all we are an independent news source. But never a post was written against the fundamental idea of one laptop per child and most posts on the XO are clearly praising it.
Alexandre van de sande
blog.wanderingabout.com