Verily I say unto thee, that nessuno@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx spake thusly:
>> Belkin paying 65 cents for good reviews on NewEgg and Amazon?
[...]
> Didn't flatfish say he had gotten very rich trolling for Microsoft?
> Let's see...65 cents per post, extra quarter for every new
> nym....yep! It adds up!
And DooFuS goes on and on ... and on, about the glowing Vista "reviews"
on NewEgg. He probably wrote all of them.
Not that long ago, suggestions in COLA that the trolls were hired shills
was treated as hyperbole at best, and loony ravings at worst. Given what
we now know for a /fact/ about Microsoft's "evangelism" strategy, Paid 2
Post agencies, and well documented evidence of corporate astroturfing as
a standard business practice, I think it's pretty clear that theory is a
bit more than just idle speculation and paranoia. Maybe we can't say for
a fact exactly /which/ of the trolls are shills, or which are k00ks, but
it's a dead certainty that at least /some/ of them really are being paid
2 post positively about Microsoft, and negatively about everything else.
Of course, there are some pretty obvious candidates.
At least some of those pro-Windows/anti-Linux posters seem to be located
within Europe, which means if they are being paid by Microsoft to attack
Linux then they are breaking the law. Presumably EU law has provision to
facilitate investigation of astroturfing by demanding logs from Websites
and Usenet servers, etc., so there is the very real possibility that the
European based astroturfers could actually be shut down, and prosecuted,
and (even more importantly) used as evidence in antitrust investigations
against Microsoft. So ironically, the more the shills post to COLA, then
then more likely it is they will eventually be caught, and the more they
will have damaged Microsoft's reputation (not to mention bank balance).
I can just picture the memo from Sweaty: "Kill all EU TE ops now".
I hear the US is set to follow suit.
No place to hide.
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
| is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William
| Pitt the Younger
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
05:38:59 up 74 days, 13:21, 5 users, load average: 4.00, 4.06, 4.24
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