August 17, 2007

In tandem with my last ranting blog post ...

I've decided to post the whole thing. Why, cuz it's got some GREAT links in it.

Here is why I am so upset, people miss the great lengths the ptb has gone to to protect the wealthy and THEIR criminals in recent years. This one is a case of a guy who refused to pay his employees among other things.

Give this a little testdrive .

put in TEXT ANALYTICS into google

and see what you come up with.
Too lazy? press the link.

TEXT ANALYTICS is this great tool that the PTB/CIA are handing around to the Great Entrepeneurs of the day. and it is directly relatable to this little fiasco, which is not REALLY a tempest in a teapot. It shows what happens when the pursuit of profits and greed totally takes over and even consumers, which they NEED, incidentally are denied knowing even the most egregrious type of wrong are committed. IF YOU SIGN a contract with someone you should be forced to honor it. Afterall, corporations are held responsible same as individuals who sign contracts .. or are they?

There is an increasing number of tools on the market to ensure that such is NOT the case.

It pisses me right off.

Ask yourself this question:

Why does wikipedia,

A supposedly user driven media,

allow certain IP addys to post at all?

I did a bit of a questionnaire about user driven media

and their certaily seems to be some reasons
to be concerned with them as they grow ..

EA Staffer Attempts to Alter Wiki History

Aug 15, 2007 9:37pm CST
Someone at EA doesn't want you to know about Trip Hawkins, the publishing giant's original founder. On multiple occasions, a user with an IP address of 159.153.4.50--within a range registered to Electronic Arts' Redwood City headquarters--has tried to remove several references to Hawkins' legacy from the Electronic Arts Wikipedia page.

Shacknews made the discovery using a tool called Wikipedia Scanner, made by Cal Tech grad student Virgil Griffith and detailed in a recent Wired article. The tool cross-references the anonymous Wikipedia editors' IP addresses with a WHOIS IP query and other data.

The most damning evidence stems from an extensive "cleanup" by the aforementioned EA IP address on November 20, 2006. A side-by-side comparison of the revisions reveals the removal of Trip Hawkins as founder of the company from the "key people" section of EA's Wikipedia description box.

The EA Wiki user also removes a reference to Trip Hawkins' founding of the company in the main description of the entry, and cuts a paragraph from the "History" section detailing Hawkins' business plan.

Seemingly unsatisfied with the entry a few months later, a user at the same Redwood City IP address attempted to further purge Hawkins' name from the introductory paragraph in the "History" section on April 5, while adding a paragraph emphasizing the achievements of Larry Probst, former EA CEO and current chairman, when he became sales VP in 1984. Though by this time, the references to Hawkins as founder of the company had been added back to the Wikipedia entry.

Other changes made by the user in the November cleanup focused on clearing out controversy associated with the publisher's business practices. A user at the Redwood City IP removed a line--"The company has also been the subject of criticism, most notably for its business tactics and its employment policy"--from the end of the introductory description of the company.

In addition to removing several paragraphs from the "Criticism" section, the user deleted references to the notorious ea_spouse debacle and spun the class action lawsuit brought on by overworked, undercompensated employees to portray the company in a good light. The new text would describe EA as having "led the industry in reforming work/life balance issues that are endemic to the software industry." And a line tacked on at the end would add a consolatory but unattributed statement: "Since that time, many other game companies have been struck with similar lawsuits."

The IP in question is the most active Wikipedia user among the IP addresses registered to EA, accounting for a third of the 1,351 changes made by the lot of them. Many of the changes attempted by this EA-registered IP have since been reversed by the Wikipedia community. It's certainly in a company's interest to correct mistakes regarding its operations on a publicly available Internet information site, but one has to wonder where the line should be drawn.

Shacknews contacted EA about the issue but did not receive a response.

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