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.

Comments

Re:astroturf

[ubrgeek]

> How many times is this going to happen before corporations realize front organizations don't work on the Internet?

It'll happen about the same time people get tired of porn. That is to say, never. For every article that comes out revealing this sort of thing, how many aren't identified? Obviously it's impossible to say. So it will keep going on.

Re:The real story

[Locutus]

I've not seen where either he states he's an Intel employee or is listed as such. But, as was mentioned, geekcorps.com is where he's involved and that is listed as being created(whois) in 1999 with the goal of adding wireless infrastructure and Via computers to poor and rural areas of the world. Kinda sounds like where the OLPC is also going and if this is looked at as a BUSINESS, it is competition. If it's looked at as charity and with a desire to better the lives of others, OLPC would look like a partner. Vota seems to be looking at this as competition.

OLPCnews.com was created(whois) in Aug 2006 and is registered to Wayan Vota.

Oh, Mr Vota also owns Wayan.com was created(whois) in March 2000 and nowhere on this site does it say he is an Intel Employee. It does say that he's pretty much a marketing and sales guy.

IMO, after looking at Mr Vota's background and skill set, he's not someone to trust as a reporter, blogger, or speaker for a site with a name(OLPCnews.com) which sounds like it is a common site for general news on the OLPC project. His background shows that the OLPC, in his eyes, is a competitive project to his geekcorps.com and his employer( if he does work for Intel ).

Regardless of there being the ability for readers to dig all this up and figure it out, he is/was deceiving the public and his readers in a marketing effort to disparage the OLPC project. Vota, it's time for a name change buddy. And OLPC should claim the domain name because it was deceptively leveraging the OLPC name for competitive purposes. IMO. Let him purchase ClassmatePCNews.com since it isn't used yet.

LoB