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Comment by Hrundi | Hacker News Reader

This is the user, but I'm having a rough time trying to identify the offending edits: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/kane123/edits

Has Google released any statement beyond the one that said "We were mortified to learn that a team of people..."?

I'm overly curious on the results from Google's investigation. I can see the connection with Mocality being mentioned, but vandalizing seems odd.

I would venture that this is coincidental.

Pick any branch office of a large enterprise or government and run a search for the IPs they use to access the internet. You'll find vandalism on Wikipedia, ancient guestbook messages, mailing list postings, etc.

I'm certainly not a Google apologist, but this just seems fishy.

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Some more detail here: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2012-Januar...

If these are the same as the Mocality people, I wonder how long before Google audits and fires them? I also wonder if we'll find out about any more wrongdoing.

Hopefully Google shuts them down soon.

I'm really suspicious of any claim that the top brass at Google honestly knew nothing about it... (What would these employees even have to gain? It's not like they have much to gain if Google's stock goes up, and if they're hiding this from management, they're not getting paid for it.)

Define "top brass". If you're saying some upper-middle management at Google India, possibly. If you're saying that this is being done at the VP level, I think that's a bit tin-hatty for what we've seen so far.

Regardless of whether or not you think Google is strategically sabotaging other projects, I think we can all agree that if it were under the direction of Google's top brass, they would have been smart enough not to use their own IPs. It's not an organization to which one would attribute less technological accumen than your average Wikipedia vandal.

>I'm really suspicious of any claim that the top brass at

>Google honestly knew nothing about it...

If Google Management knew of this, wonder why they would let this happen from Google IP addresses...

Because Google employees generally have latitude to do whatever they want with their Internet connection at work. Even bad OSM edits.

If we start blaming whoever an IP resolves to for vandalism, you're going to find that pretty much every major corporation has vandalized Wikipedia. (When I worked at BAC, our proxy was perma-banned for vandalism.) Not to mention the ISPs; Comcast is a notorious Wikipedia vandal (by this logic).

What would these employees even have to gain?

Should we apply this logic to all open source contributions, and view with suspicion everything that doesn't have a price tag attached?

In a past life, I've vandalized Wikipedia. I did it because it was funny to me and the people around me at the time.

(To be fair, it was John C Dvorak's page. But the point is, I didn't do it for money.)

It could also just be a broken bot. You'd think Google would be smart enough to know not to POST 100k times to an outside service, but it's possible there's someone in the ranks who just doesn't know what they are doing.

The 100,000 hits by 17 accounts took place over a year could be 99.9% valid contributions. They mentioned that number because they have recently noted 2 accounts vandalising and so it's probably wise to check the other interactions in case they are subtle vandalism by the same person/people that went unnoticed at the time but that it'll take time to confirm either way.

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