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A media hoax?
Finance, by Anja Horvat, anja.horvat@finance-on.net
and Joze Biscak, joze.biscak@finance-on.net February 22, 2001, 22:14 The victory of Matjaz Rogelj at the world computer championship can not be substantiated. As it now seems, the doubts that the 23-year Matjaz Rogelj, a student of the 4th grade of the Ljubljana Faculty of law had beat several Ph.D.s and M.Sc. had been well founded. Obviously this is another media hoax, similar to the one perpetrated some time ago by the controversial Miso Alkalaj, when the Institute Josef Stefan in Ljubljana was supposed to be carrying out biogenetic research on humans. Then the news was "global", but the "hoax" only "local" - only Slovene media fell for it. Well, something similar is happening now. The news of his victory was released by Matjaz Rogelj himself, while nothing is known about the matter in Brazil where the established Sat 5 Institute was supposed to organize the championship. The institute's web page does not function, the address in Rio de Janeiro can not be found in web directories (neither can the seat in New York), and Matjaz Rogelj is unknown to Slovene computer experts. Well, maybe one of them knows him - Miso Alkalaj. He should not take offence that we have suspected that he might be associated with the hoax, since the method was the same as in the past. We called him and asked him to comment on the reporting of today's Dnevnik (newspaper). He answered "I know nothing about it." About what? Did he know what we were asking him about? Well, after the initial "communicational complication" Mr. Alkalaj suddenly found himself "in concrete" where his mobile phone was very poorly heard. He said only "If this is truly a hoax," then Matjaz Rogelj is a "smart guy," but that he could not comment on the matter since he had not read anything about it. Matjaz Rogelj himself was today no longer accessible on any phone, so we will have to wait for him to appear in Slovenia. Of course, he may have been on the sunny side of the Alps all this time, since the web page of the "established institute" was updated last week at an early morning hour according to Slovenia time zone. When we visited the Rogelj family, Matjaz's mother opened the door and told us that she had herself heard about the allegations of a hoax from the media and that she does not know anything about it. She said that she had tried to call Matjaz today but could not reach him. But in her story she entangled herself with contradictions when she did not know even with whom her son had cooperated for the last four years, who had sponsored him, where he did his preparations. But the most interesting aspect was what she had evidently missed in her story about Matjaz Rogelj: that he had lived at home during all the time of his preparations for the world championship, while experts from all of Europe prepared for him almost 100 thousand pages of materials that he had to receive somehow and study, but unbelievably he does not even have internet access at his home. At the same time the mother claimed that he had not been assisted by any Slovene institution during his preparations. So the question presents itself: did the top computer specialist communicate with his collaborators by regular postal shipments? The phone number we got from his parents was supposed to be the number of his hotel. But when we call it, a male voice says that it is the Sat 5 Institute. We have checked the information with the Brazil telephone information services and found out that it is a number of a Brazil mobile phone. <
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