Convicted monopolist resorts to astroturfing This is scandalous, yet hardly surprising. It confirms all those remarks that I made about OLPCNews in the past. Last week we posted a quick update on Microsoft's and Intel's corruptions that are used against OLPC. The OLPC project is a charity. Intel is astroturfing to fight this charity as we have just revealed. Here is another new one for New York antitrust investigators to look at:

The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop project headed up by Nicholas Negroponte. [...] So it doesn't take too much of a conspiracy theorist to believe that Intel is secretly bankrolling the OLPC-News website. Adding insult to injury, OLPC-News is buying advertising on Google to attract visitors to its website.

In the text quoted above, mind the use of the term "conspiracy theorist", which sparked a large series of arguments recently. So, all those conspiracy theorists who said that OLPCNews must be some campaign against OLPC are not so 'crazy' anymore, are they? They were right on point, all along. It remains to be seen who -- if anyone -- is behind LANCOR's lawsuit against OLPC.

“It hurts everyone who is an honest blogger.”As Joel Sposkly once argued, astroturfing such as the above from Intel gives a bad name to blogs. It shatters credibility, lacking clear disclosures. It hurts everyone who is an honest blogger. Interestingly enough, Spolsky was referring to Microsoft's acts. which he then also described as "bribery". Just like Microsoft, Intel resorted to using fake voices on the Web (yes, Microsoft does this all the time). It even used its own employees. This is criminal behaviour, assuming one is not above the law. Here is a lot more to this, but it escapes the scope of this Web site. How about some example incidents from Peru?

Oscar Becerra Tresierra, general director for educational technology at Peru's Ministry of Education, says that after the country recently agreed to buy 272,500 OLPC laptops for primary-school students, an Intel sales representative tried "to scare us" by claiming the machines and their power adapters didn't work. "I don't feel very happy about it," he said. "We wouldn't like the project to fail because somebody is spreading gossip about the machines that doesn't turn out to be true."

Nick Negroponte says more on this:

Negroponte said Intel even tried to undo a deal One Laptop had already sealed in Peru by citing flaws in the One Laptop "XO" machine and telling government ministers "we ought to know, because we are on the board." Such hostile comments were prohibited, Negroponte claimed, under the July peace treaty that brought Intel into the One Laptop Per Child camp. "I want to say we tried, but it was never a partnership," Negroponte said. "There's not one single thing in their contract or agreement that they lived up to."

I would personally not support chip makers that fight charities. Intel is now astroturfing and using scare tactics. Its products probably ought to be avoided, at least for the long-term public good (price, ethics, competition and development). Microsoft's role in this smear campaign and the sabotage of OLPC was hardly mentioned in this post, but the most outrageous thing here is that Microsoft now wants to virtually eat the lunch of that whom it shot. We recently cited this guy who welcomes Microsoft's hijack of a project that people have donated to. Always remember this admission: “Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software [...] Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

--Bill Gates

When poor people and children are seen as customers, then you know the world has gone awry. When a company as wealthy as Intel attacks a charity, then you barely have hope for decent human behaviour. This following has been said before, but it is worth repeating, expanding on, or rephrasing. When people look back at this as a history lesson, they will not 'get' the real story. The literature and press is so strictly controlled by corporations such as Microsoft, so all one will see are the smear campaigns against Nick Negroponte. This includes attacks on him which were launched by secret Intel blogs and Microsoft mouthpieces like Rob Enderle (he too has attacked the OLPC many times before). How appalling. â–ˆ