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Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.)

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?

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