Seventeen-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky was publicly humiliated for allegedly cheating on his math test soliciting and accepting expensive gifts in exchange for press on a major online publication.
During his nine-month tenure as TechCrunch intern, Brusilovsky, who Valleywag hailed as the tech boy wonder, supposedly asked for laptops in exchange for writing about certain Web start-ups. (His mea culpa.)
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is apparently set on trying to make his blog resemble an actual journalistic outlet. He came clean on the news in a post Thursday night to “maintain complete transparency,” he wrote. Good for him.
In addition to the public statement, Arrington also deleted all of Brusilovsky’s posts from the site. That’s the wrong move. People have already read those posts. They exist in memories and online in caches. Leave them up and append a note to every one linking to the explanatory post.
The real question now is not why Brusilovsky picked a MacBook Air as his gift (seriously, what a stupid computer). We want to know which company (companies?) coughed up the gifts. That’s the transparency we need.
Who’s stupid business would we not have heard about if not for a happy and lucky boy who became one laptop richer?
Picture: Daniel Brusilovsky
What a stupid kid. He got the opportunity to work at a great company with a lot of well connected individuals and he blew it. And seriously, why is/was he hailed as a tech wonder? What has he done? Built a crap website with a WordPress MU Install? I don’t get it.
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