Corrections Policy

The obligation

Anything published daily will contain errors eventually. What is not inevitable is how they are handled. At Oton Technology an error is repaired in the open, quickly, and without hostility towards whoever found it. A reader who discovers a mistake we have left standing has learned something about every other page on this site, and rightly so.

Three labels, kept apart

• Correction. A factual error is being repaired: a wrong version or build number, a wrong identifier, a misread specification, a wrong price, date or figure, a feature attributed to the wrong product or tier. The corrected article carries a note at the foot saying what was wrong and what it now says.
• Clarification. Nothing stated was false, but the wording allowed a reasonable reader to take away something we did not establish. The passage is rewritten and the change is noted.
• Update. The story moved. New information has been added to a developing article. This is not a correction and is not labelled as one, because conflating the two hides real errors inside routine additions.

What we do not do

We do not delete an article to make an error disappear. We do not rewrite a published claim silently and leave the page looking as though it always said the new thing. We do not bury a correction where it will not be seen by someone who read the original. An article that was wrong and has been fixed says so on its face.

In the rare case where a piece is so comprehensively wrong that repair is not possible, it is retracted rather than removed: the page stays, the text is struck, and a note explains what happened and why.

Reporting an error

Use the contact page. The most useful message names the article, quotes the passage, states what the correct position is and points to something supporting it. You do not need credentials and you do not need to be courteous. The claim simply has to be checkable.

We verify against primary material before changing anything, because publishing a correction that is itself wrong helps nobody. That check usually takes hours. Where it requires a response from a third party it can take longer, and we will say so rather than going quiet.

Timing

Errors of fact are corrected as soon as they are confirmed, not batched or held for a convenient moment. Where an error is serious enough that readers may have acted on it, such as a wrong security severity or a wrong patch recommendation, the correction is made immediately and prominently.