15 year Old Student Hired at Google
UPDATE: Lots of news relating to the fact that this is a giant hoax! Thanks to all the individuals in
the comments for dropping the bomb on this one!
According to I-Newswire, Tom Vendetta, a 15 year old student from just outside New
Jersey has been hired by Google to work on security flaws concerning Gmail. He was found via his blog, and Google liked his experience with JavaScript and AJAX. Supposedly Tom will be
receiving a "lowered salary", placing the funds into a bank account for future education. Tom would be working
from home in Jersey instead of at the GooglePlex.
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. #1: What about Writely or the official Google blog? :)
Posted at 9:48PM on Mar 12th 2006 by Chu
4. hmmm, sounds like a scam... "said Google CEO Larry Page" You would think their PR department would know who their CEO is.
Posted at 11:00PM on Mar 12th 2006 by stoph
5. Go read the Digg comments about this. Lots of healthy skepticism there. They also uncovered Tom Vendetta's MySpace page and boy is it scary.
Posted at 11:09PM on Mar 12th 2006 by Kevin Ballard
6. Do you know that this is totally fake ?
Read the blog.
http://tomtothevendetta.blogspot.com/
7. Hehe, oh this is funny. Yes, it's fake, apparently Tom here found a way on Digg to fool the Google News system and used it to get himself on Google News to impress his friends. It seems, Tom is a Google fanboy and dreams of one day working for them, and this was a way to sort of live that dream, if only for a moment in the minds of his soon-to-be fooled friends.
He's totally owned up to it on his blog and apologized profusely for it. I say we let it pass, and merely applaud him for hacking Google News' aggregator, I think many of us would have done it ourselves.
Now lets hope Google fixes this before something seriously bad gets put up.
Posted at 11:16PM on Mar 12th 2006 by Matthew Nitti
8. This is the digg.com story that the kid read about how to do it.
http://digg.com/technology/Spam_Google_News_By_Writing_Fake_Press_Releases
Posted at 10:10AM on Mar 13th 2006 by Justin Thorp
9. Just because one fool peed in the beach, you do not stop taking bath in the sea. Its sad that a mad youngster misused free press release and has discredited i-newswire. Google is playing big daddy and black listing i-newswire. If the youngster had written that he was hired by Doogle Corporation in Rajasthan as Security Expert would any one have bothered to verify? If the mad cap wrote that Rajesh Bachan died dancing to a holi song in Bollywood would anyone have bothered? Today society is mature enough to know what to believe what not to believe, whom to believe and whom not to believe, when to belive and when not to beieve, where to believe and where not to believe.
Let Google and the net community wake up to realities and not talk of non existent values in journalism etc.
Posted at 10:13PM on Mar 16th 2006 by BR Natarajan
1. Looks like Tom's blog was erased and or remodeled. I wonder if this happened because Google hired him and they'll just give him his own hosting seeing that he used blogspot for his blog.
Posted at 8:51PM on Mar 12th 2006 by Chris