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Comment by danko | Hacker News Reader

Google is precisely the brand that a non-Google third-party would use to launch a scam like this, so I'm going to wait a few hours before getting the flamethrower out. This really doesn't seem like Google's style from a technical quotient, even if you ignore the ethical angle.

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According to the main source (http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...), after setting up the sting, there were a bunch of hits straight from google HQ.

    These new accesses were coming directly from Google’s network.
    The IP address 74.125.63.33 made 17,645 requests (15,554 to BusinessProfile.aspx). Activity really kicked off on 22 December 2011, with 8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux: The top 3 are :
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7 11249 64.268982
    Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1 4247 24.264412
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.04 Chromium/15.0.874.106 Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2 1000 5.713306
    Search for “tag=mo.request 74.125.63.33″ from 20 December 2011 to 9 January 2012. Found 17,049 requests

Granted, but there's a potential that this is being launched by an enterprising Google employee, and not as a part of a corporate stratagem.

Of course, if it is corporate strategy, I suppose the big G could always get an employee to take the fall and tar them as a "loose cannon" for press purposes, but I guess I'm still clinging to the shards of "Don't Be Evil".

I'd hope enterprising Google employees had bigger ambitions than selling small business web hosting for $2.50 per month via call centres.

As for the corporate behemoth themselves, if they wanted a better directory of Kenyan businesses, then buying Mocality would hardly dent their acquisitions budget. It would certainly be a far more effective way of obtaining it than manual browsing and data collection via call centre operatives' personal gmail addresses. The idea the world's largest provider of free internet connectivity is looking to branch out into paid webhosting in LEDCs doesn't pass the smell test either.

How much of a Google apologist are you to even consider that? Rogue Googler calling Kenyan businesses to sell them web hosting? Seriously dude?

I've seen people justify this saying that it might be an app running on Google App Engine.

I wonder though if the GAE data center (or part of it) is in Google HQ.

Moreover, as someone (EDIT: the article's author) mentioned in the comments of the article When an IP address registered to Google HQ's internal network is fed a unique phone number, and one hour later that phone number rings from someone who claims to represent Google, and repeats fraudulent claims that have been made for months from entities selling a Google product (that has no affiliate program), it is reasonable to infer that this is taking place with Google's cooperation.

Which is indeed suspect.

EDIT: as this comment below shows, it cannot be GAE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460663

It's not GAE, but it is still possible it could be someone using the Google OpenSocial proxy[1]. Not many people know about that though, and I'm not sure it is flexible enough to set the header.

[1] http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=Introduction_to_m...

I see an IP allocated to Google. How do you go from that to "google HQ"?

The boingboing article explicitly states that it is an IP range that Google has used for international business before.

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