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Beware the electronic dung heaps
August 20, 2007
Want to parlay your technical skills into fame, if not exactly fortune? Just write some useless programs. From today’s Washington Post: “UK computer programmer Andy Brice was proud of the awards and accolades his software had won from his peers online. That is, until he noticed that pretty much everyone else's software received the same ‘5-star’ rating and high praise from various software directories and download sites. Curious about just how thorough the sites are at reviewing software, Brice submitted a fake program that did absolutely nothing…. To his amazement, the do-nothing program came away with top honors—complete with official-looking seals of approval—from at least 16 download sites.”
The technical details: his program was nothing but a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all" repeated a few times and with the extension changed to “.exe.”
Says Brice of the “seals of approval" his software garnered, “Some of them look quite impressive, but none of them are worth the electrons it takes to display them…The truth is that many download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords.”
Posted by Rick Nelson on August 20, 2007 | Comments (0)
