Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site 193
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.
Re:astroturf (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So...... what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny thing about conspiracies (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just another OSS vs SCO/MS/Sun type angle being able to OLPC vs OLPCNEW/Intel. I would also not be surprised to see MS in this, but that has zero proof.
I can't say I care. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's only a blog. It's not pretending not to have a bias. It's a blog. They're all biassed.
He's allowed to say what he likes. He was critical of the OLPC when Intel were amongst its proponents, so it seems pretty likely that this is his personal opinion. as such it would have been a bad idea to mention his affiliation with Intel since that may have suggested it was the company's views rather than his own.
Re:So...... what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So...... what? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What matters is what was said, not who said it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry to put it bluntly, your point is completely absurd, who gives criticism is completely relevant, since their position has a grand impact on how they themselves perceive events.
Re:astroturf (Score:4, Insightful)
Although these things certainly can bring negative backlash when discovered, part of the problem is that these things do sometimes work. Perhaps we should be asking every website to provide a street address, phone number, and ownership report. That would be very difficult to enforce since some would simply host elsewhere. Perhaps a good start would be to require any site advertising on radio or television to provide that information in the ads. (The text size for ads that maybe be shown on secondary SD DTV channels needs to be bumped up too. Many of those channels seem blurrier than NTSC to me, although part of the problem is use of analog satellite sources)
With elections coming in many areas, I would not be surprised to find a number of front organizations providing misinformation online. I've already seen several of the "forward this to your friends" mudslinging emails around. The combination of semi-anonymous and dirt cheap makes these abuses too easy.
It is a bit surprising to see this sort of thing from a company that's doing pretty well with their product lineup. Perhaps it is more about fighting pressure on prices than about getting the business for low cost machines?
Re:And (Score:1, Insightful)
There is even a link to SourceForge. There it is pretty easy to see that promoting OSS is one of the main interests of the company.
Re:So...... what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, its exactly that kind of conflict of interest: if a site that purported to be a "Windows News" site, that was highly critical of Windows, didn't disclose that one of its primary writers was a RedHat employee, that would also be an unethical conflict of interest. When you hold yourself out as a news source on a subject, and have personal financial interests that are indicative of a natural bias (or print material from someone who does), the ethical thing to do is disclose your (or the source's) interest so that readers have a fair opportunity to consider it when interpreting your reports. Failing to do so is unethical.
Re:astroturf (Score:3, Insightful)
For every one on the floor, there are ten in the walls. Slashdot is actually owned by Hormel Foods. You didn't think about spam that much in the 80s.
Re:The real story (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:How is this any different (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, other people do unethical things. That's no excuse to ignore the specific instances of people doing unethical things. In fact, its why it is important to take note of them.
No, undisclosed conflicts of interest are always newsworthy, to the extent that they relate to a subject that is itself a focus of attention in the community in question. The OLPC has been the subject of attention on Slashdot, and OLPC News has been a frequently-cited source in Slashdot discussions of it (and, IIRC, also the source of several of the front-page Slashdot stories regarding it, though I'm not going to bother going back and checking at the moment.) The undisclosed conflict of interest at OLPC News is, therefore, worthy of attention at Slashdot.
Re:The defense from the astroturfer is sad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do remember that it was only but a few weeks ago that Intel was on the OLPC bandwagon, is it a conflict of interest then? Prior to then? How about now? So you see, context is important here. Now that Intel is out of favor, suddenly it's astroturfing. This little bit of news has actually been around a while and honestly, I could care less and I still read his site.
Please. There have been numerous stories in the last couple of weeks about how Intel was acting in bad faith through the entire partnership, even going to the point of trying to talk people out of signed contracts. If they are willing to do that, keeping a slander blog up for the duration of the partnership that was "deniable" is the least of their efforts.
The grave mistake that most people make is the failure to acknowledge the massive bias in all media outlets. Once you realize they all have it *cough* advertisers *cough* editors *cough* owners *cough*, you can read the media and use your brain as an intelligent media bias detector.
The logical failings abound. Because there are inherent biases in everything, we should ignore an explicit conflict of interest? Whatever, Wayan.
But, once again, please answer this one question: How many "personal" blogs have you bought Google ads for?
Re:Do I have freedom of speech? (Score:4, Insightful)
People are not as dumb as you might think. If you disclose the potential conflict a reasonable person can evaluate what the potential issues are; if not there is always the question regarding what axe you are grinding. If you disclose a reasonable person would at least feel that he is being told what the viewpoint of the person is.
Senator George Mitchell once said when being evaluated for a position as a special envoy to Ireland to negotiate a settlement between the IRA and British government that the conflicts of interest that you have to worry about are the undisclosed ones.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased observer. The best thing is to know the biases so you can evaluate the work in the correct context.
OLPCnews.com much worse than Mike Rowe Soft (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't read olpcnews.com often but I thought it was VERY well written. It took me over 15 minutes to get a nagging feeling that something was very wrong with what I read (and I hadn't heard of the site before, I found it while googling for OLPC; olpcnews.com sounded more appropriate than "laptop.org"). I think it is quite difficult to impart on your readership the feeling that a project is well-meaning but delusional ("trust me, I've worked in the third world" - ffs).
What annoys me personally is to find this anti-OLPC criticism site BEFORE finding the project website [laptop.org]; it really doesn't bother me too much that this Wayan person tries to wipe the floor with the OLPC project; in case it's fair criticism it can be used to improve and strengthen the project, and else, well everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
But I think it's really bad that he chose to deck out the website in OLPC-XO green and white and doesn't have a clear disclaimer saying he's working for a direct competitor, because it may confuse some of the readers (say, oh, ministers of education) that this is a more or less independent source of information.
BTW if you made an anti-Microsoft site microsoftnews.com, using Microsoft's logos and colour schemes, run by a RedHat employee, I think you'd get sued by Microsoft for trademark infringement (Mike Rowe Soft [cnn.com], anyone?). But maybe I've seen too many American lawyer drama's.
P.S. it seems microsoftnews.com is still available, I just checked to see if it was a RedHat-run covert operation ;-)
Re:astroturf (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah but how many people read that blog in the first place? If even 1% of the people who are familiar with OLPC at all hear that an Intel employee is the one secretly behind a well-known blog criticizing it, the PR hit would overwhelm any gain for Intel even if 100% of the actual blog readers remained ignorant.
Re:astroturf (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Soory cmd taco but this is bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)