remove office - Slashdot User

Submission + - Belkin's President Apologizes for Faked Reviews 1

Submitted by

remove office

on Monday January 19, 2009 @03:26PM

remove office writes: "After I wrote about how Belkin's Amazon.com sales rep Mike Bayard had been paying for fake reviews of his company's products using Mechanical Turk (Slashdot story here), hundreds of readers across the web expressed their umbrage. As a result of the online outcry, Belkin's president Mark Reynoso has issued a statement apologizing and saying that "this is an isolated incident" and that "Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this." Amazon moved swiftly to remove several reviews on Belkin products it believed were fraudulent, although now fresh evidence of astroturfing has surfaced. Now I'm curious: what steps do Slashdotters think that online retailers can do to protect themselves and their customers from fake reviews?"

Submission + - Belkin's Amazon Rep Paying for Fake Online Reviews (thedailybackground.com) 2

Submitted by remove office on Saturday January 17, 2009 @01:26AM

remove office writes: I recently discovered that that Belkin's lead online sales rep, Michael Bayard, has been secretly paying internet users to review his company's products favorably on Amazon.com and other websites like Newegg, whether or not they've ever used them. Bayard instructed the people he was paying to "Write as if you own the product and are using it... Mark any other negative reviews as 'not helpful' once you post yours." Ironically, he was using Amazon's own Mechanical Turk service to hire his fraudsters (did he honestly think he wouldn't get caught?). Are Slashdotters aware of other examples of other such blatant astroturfing on behalf of a large tech company like Belkin?

Submission + - CNN to Release 2008 Debate under Creative Commons

Submitted by

remove office

on Saturday May 05, 2007 @02:44PM

remove office writes: "After calls from several prominent bloggers and a couple of presidential candidates themselves, CNN has agreed to release the footage from its upcoming June presidential debates uncopyrighted. Senator Barack Obama was the first candidate to call for all presidential debates to be released under Creative Commons, with fellow Demcoratic hopeful John Edwards following shortly afterwards. CNN will be the first to do so with their June 3rd and 5th Democratic and Republican debates. The NBC-Microsoft co-venture MSNBC hosted the first presidential debates recently but refused to release it under Creative Commons, opting instead to post only commercial-ridden clips online in Windows Media format."

Submission + - Obama Boosts Broadband in 2008 Announcement Speech

Submitted by

Arlen

on Saturday February 10, 2007 @05:36PM

Arlen writes: "As many as 17,000 people (according to police estimates) watched Senator Barack Obama officially announce his candidacy for President in Springfield Illinois today, he mentioned several things that Slashdotters will be interested in. The Senator said he wanted to free America from what he called "the tyranny of oil," and went on to promote alternative energy sources such as ethanol (a big political winner in the midwest where he announced, because of all the corn farmers). He also talked about using science and technology to help those with chronic diseases, which is likely to have been an allusion to his staunch support of stem cell research. Perhaps most of interest to Slashdotters however is that Obama made the following statement halfway through his speech: "Let's invest in scientific research, and let's lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America. We can do that." Like nearly everything in his speech, this was met with robust applause from the crowd. You can watch a video of the entire speech at Obama's website."

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