I finally got around to Googling “Microsoft Astroturf” (because I had somehow never heard of it; or, more accurately, I’d heard of the tactic, but I never knew what it was called) and I’m not sure whether I should applaud their cleverness or castigate their connivingness—or both:

“The Los Angeles Times (which blew the cover off a major Microsoft ‘astroturf’ campaign a couple years ago), has published details of another phony letter writing campaign attempting to show popular support for Microsoft’s position vs. the Department of Justice.

An ‘astroturf’ campaign is so called after the artificial grass product AstroTurf^tm since it artificially simulates ‘grass-roots’ support.

In this case, a great deal of effort was expended to make the letters look real and individual, so the intent to deceive is obvious. Each was on ‘personalized’ stationary [sic] and used different type faces, but some included mistakes (coming from dead people and towns that didn’t exist) and a number of them included identical sentences. They were, in fact, composed by a Microsoft lobbying front, Americans for Technology Leadership.”

(source article: http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M010823.html)