The front page of Slashdot calls it ‘Particiagate’. It now turns out that HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn spied not only on her own board members, but on the news.com reporter who was the leak info recipient, as well as some who contributed to the report originally, and on the father of one of those reporters, a semi-retired physicist in New Mexico, whose connection to this whole affair remains unclear.
So now we have a chairwoman who spied, in an unethical and possibly illegal manner, not only on her own board members to find out who leaked a rather inconsequential bit of information to a reporter, but also on the reporters who worked on the story, as well as at least one person whose would not appear to have any obvious connection to the case, and to make matters worse, the board has refused to take action up to this point (save Tom Perkins) (but an emergency meeting is scheduled for tomorrow). Scoble appropriately calls this a cancer in the company. Dunn’s actions are so grotesquely offensive that the only possibly remedy to this is for her to resign. After all this, I would feel dirty using anything from HP unless they clean house. It almost looks as if Dunn believes she is above the law, or thought she could get away with it.
It’s quite a shame that this happened at such a great technology company with a long and remarkable history. Whatever this new version of HP is, it doesn’t look anything like the old.
links:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/09/08/hp-has-major-ethical-problem-day-3/
Generalized Nonsense 
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