The following article is Re-posted in it’s entirety with permission from Sunbelt W2KNews Electronic Newsletter which is published by Sunbelt Software who is the creator of great software tools like IHateSpam.
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I was surprised to learn that a few websites that position themselves as independent resource & review sites, are really a hidden marketing vehicle for one of the players in our tools market.
First of all, let me start with a full disclosure. We try to make sure everyone knows that W2Knews is published by Sunbelt Software as a service to the NT/2000 system admin community. We write about the market, events and the tools we sell. We are open about it. Sunbelt also publishes WinXPNews, which is for consumers running WinXP. The ads in there often are “house ads” that refer people back to the Sunbelt OnLine Shop. Sunbelt has always been above board with its marketing. So far so good.
Now, how about some other sites? Are they as overt about their marketing? Some apparently are not. I got a bit suspicious, as I tried to place an ad for iHateSpam Server in the msexchange.org site. Our emails were never answered, but the products of a competitor of iHateSpam Server were prominently and consistently featured.
Then I started to do some research on this site, simply by googling it. Turns out it is run by a gentleman by the name of Stephen Chetcuti out of Malta. Now, Malta is not your ‘next door’ and logical location for a site or a site operator like that, (the island of Malta is south of Italy):
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Malta
Moreover, he seems to be very active and runs several sites, that link back to each other often. Here they are:
www.ISAserver.org – Positioned as:
“The #1 unofficial ISA Server resource site”
www.msexchange.org – their banner states:
MSExchange.org is in no way affiliated with Microsoft Corp.
www.serverfiles.com– Presents itself as a Server software directory for Network administrators & IT professionals, and rates products by “votes”. Products of one specific vendor are very often #1.
www.windowsecurity.com – I quote: “WindowSecurity.com provides Windows security news, articles, tutorials, software listings and reviews for information security professionals covering topics such as firewalls, viruses, intrusion detection and other security topics”. The site features individual authors, but does not make any statements about affiliations.
Turns out all these sites are run by the same organization called ‘isoftmarketing’ that hosts its sites at Rackspace in San Antonio in Texas: I found them here: www.isoftmarketing.com and who is behind all these sites? The same Stephen Chetcuti. Google shows this definitively, put his name in the search box and click through a few pages.
Now, all these sites somehow magically have products from one company advertised, featured, and often voted on as being the leader in their category. The company? Sunbelt’s competitor GFI Software who has their European headquarters in… you may have guessed it by now: Malta. And guess who is on the payroll of GFI Software? The very same Stephen Chetcuti, also from Malta. You can see over here (end of the page) that he also contributes to sites with his GFI credentials:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Chetcuti_GFI
Then we started looking a bit more in detail, and found this article:
http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=031117TB-Chetcuti_More
A quick search on the author of that article Alex Zammit shows that he’s a GFI employee (search Google groups). So a GFI employee posting articles on that site, but without mentioning where they work…
A bit of surfing on these above sites will show you what I mean. None of these sites have any disclosure of the fact the site owner works for GFI, they just claim that they are sponsored by the advertisers. This may be true, but the content on these sites needs to be filtered with this new knowledge in mind. So, whenever you are on the Net, and browse a site, keep in mind the old expression “consider the source”. Buyer Beware!
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Geek News Central completly agree’s and thought it important that out readers be able to get the perspective from a vendor that is being above the board where as some of his competitiors are what I would call being very scrupulous Buyer Beware!