rootninja

Business Man - Dale Begg-Smith

Dale Begg-Smith was an Internet-savvy freestyle skiing prodigy, born and raised in Canada. But his coaches didn’t want him wasting time with computers, so he adopted Australia, which was in the process of building a Winter Olympics team of their own.

At first glance, I couldn’t wait for Dale Begg-Smith to fail, and solely because the Olympics commentators labeled him as a reclusive spam king - an unapproachable dual citizen of Canada and Australia that shunned the Canadian program for his own selfish reasons.

At this point I really had no idea about him or his past. After digging up articles about this guy and his previous conquests at the 2006 Winter Olympics, it seemed that the media was just hellbent on painting Mr. Begg-Smith as a villain.

An Australian newspaper asked, “Has there ever been a more unloved, more unlauded, more unpopular Australian Olympic champion than Dale Begg-Smith?” According to the Wall Street Journal, no regulatory agency is known to have charged him or his companies with wrongdoing, and marketing experts note that attacking advertising predates the invention of billboards, and that many modern-day critics decry all Internet ads as spam. By winning an Olympic gold medal, they note, Mr. Begg-Smith provided advertising critics a high-profile target.

And why? I think this is just their way of prodding him for an interview. But then I did some research into his business side and found out about things like FreeScratchAndWin and 2nd-thought. Notorious titles such as ‘Spam mogul’, ‘Spyware Lowlife’, and ‘Criminal Distributor’ are titles that will no doubt haunt this man for a very long time to come.

FreeScratchAndWin

FreeScratchAndWin is an IE spyware Browser Helper Object dressed up as a web ’scratchcards’ game. What exactly is available to be won, and whether anybody has ever won it, remains unclear. It also highjacks your home and search page settings to point to xzoomy, and complains if you try to change them back. Opens pop-up adverts every few minutes and tracks users’ web usage. Also downloads and installs arbitrary unsigned code as part of an update feature.

2nd-thought

2nd-thought is a web browser hijacker that will reset your home page and often redirect your searches to porn sites. Sometimes it will prevent you from changing your home page.

But in any case, Dale Begg-Smith has thrice won the World Cup and was ranked #1 mogul skiier in the world. However in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canadian Alexandre Bilodeau took the podium, winning the Gold. Not a sad soul was to be found in attendance at the medal ceremony that day.

A search for his websites is fruitless, as you’ll quickly find their content pretty much non-existent. I couldn’t really find much even in the wayback machine.

Dale’s Personal Life

There is a chance that he is a self-centered, arrogant prick, but he may well be the most friendly, honest person, in love with their sport that you’ll find, demonized by the press and the Internet community as a whole.

Perhaps if you were in his shoes you would break down and give an interview. Maybe you would tell the world how you’re just a regular guy that loves skiing and you’re tired of false accusations. Or perhaps it’s entertaining to see the colourful picture everyone paints of you. Maybe you’re just a wickedly evil Internet mogul with questionable morals that everyone already knows you as. In that case you’re already pegged and you really don’t have much to say.

Can you really associate his business practices to his personal life and morals? Maybe, maybe not. If he doesn’t want to be in the media spotlight, more power to him. But to the journalists: just make sure to spam him with more requests for comments please. I’d really like to hear what he has to say.