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Carbonite Stacks the Deck With 5-Star Reviews

The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"

2 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I know quite a few people that do that. by 1mck · · Score: 0, Troll

    Was he an asshole? If he was, then it's great if you expose the fucking cocksucker for the fraud that he is! I worked as salesman for a high tech software company, the CEO was the biggest fucking asshole that the world has ever seen, and it took a year, and 3 months before I couldn't take anymore of his shit. Unfortunately, he didn't do anything like what your boss did. If he did, I'd be outing him for the piece of shit that he was...but that's me:-)

  2. Re:I'm not surprised... by Firehed · · Score: 0, Troll

    I know I shouldn't feed the troll here, but RAID is most definitely a backup when you're using it to store all of your backups. Or are you suggesting that Mozy, Carbonite, Amazon S3/JungleDisk, et al are all running JBOD?

    That said, you still want something offsite, which "Build your own Damn Ubuntu RAUD sever, damnit!" doesn't usually address.

    --
    How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?