It looks like there’s a new sherriff in town: UTOPIA Watchdog and Broadweave Watchdog. The sites are registered anonymously, but the information posted leads me to believe that the person(s) operating them has been following both systems very closely and plans to not hold back at all. For instance, the websites allege that Provo intentionally over-valued the video headend in an effort to prevent UTOPIA from exercising the right of first refusal. (That would go a long way towards explaining the acrimony between the two over this shared asset.) I’m sure that as time goes by, we’ll see some interesting developments popping up on these two sites.
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Hey, Capt. Video, I love the new sites.
I thought it was the Captain too, except one area of the website refers to him in the third person and specifically voices disagreement with some of what he has said. It could be a red herring, but I’m not so sure.
I would guess these are Utah Taxpayer’s Association sites.
This line from one page would seem to suggest (perhaps as subterfuge) that it is not directly affiliated with the UTA:
“*Dog Bite: While the Utah Taxpayers Association is a known foe of UTOPIA and all municipal networks that compete with private businesses, the edited information above appears to be factual. The Dog is attempting to get a copy of the original audit to confirm the accuracy of the numbers.”
Lassie maybe?
Holy Crap!
That’s well beyond my opinion…and I think just plain wrong on some of the iProvo and Provo City claims!
Someone paid by Qwest, Comcast or the Tax Payers Association?
Often “grassroots” organizations are fronts for powerful voices…sort of like the Utah Taxpayers Association is a front for business interests like Qwest and Comcast?
UTOPIA has one when they started too. I can’t remember the name?
They do seem to have considerable inside info, but most of it could have just come from monitoring this site or talking to a few disgruntled former iProvo and Dynamic City employees….no shortage of either around.
I don’t get anything but coming soon at the UTOPIA Watchdog site?
Looks like they didn’t like the attention and took it down for now. Google still has a cached copy.
Ah, Astroturfing.
What integrity these two site exemplify.
And now they’re both gone. Seems really fishy.
Now that’s weird and makes no sense?
Jesse, from your post it looks like you did a whois on the domain’s but did you do a whois on the IP’s they were hosted on?
ok, I guess I should whois before I post. 1&1 I was thinking it would be gone before I was able to whois. Not what I was hoping for.
On another note I wonder if this is another Google alerts bites again. Who was it before you caught with Google alerts Jesse? The blog that was public but not ready yet.
Actually, I caught the website via referring traffic in my site stats. I saw that the registration was done via 1&1’s anonymous registration service and ARIN shows that the IP is owned by WestHost, a local hosting company. It’s a whole lot of dead ends.
Even more interesting at least they were driving traffic to this site.