There's a lot of value in owning a website that processes billions of requests per month. A lot of people rely on that website, what if he sold it to a malicious user? Tracking IPs or changing what they return?
I bet he can find himself in a lot of trouble if he republishes something slanderous. He would be a co-defendant with the site that originally published it.
Imagine a scenario where somebody makes a slanderous comment on some silly little web page that not very people know or care about. If his page becomes very popular, the financial damages may be almost entirely due to the fact that people saw the comment on his page rather than the original.
Anyway, didn't we banter about another company pulling an asshole move like this a while back? They set it up so it looked like companies that didn't use their service were neglecting their customers?
And hopefully developers / website owner engaging in breaching user privacy and collecting user data to give away to third party will be accountable before court.
Or maybe we could sugarface and kneecap them for being satan's little helpers.
this guy didn't merely cheat, he threatened. had he not crossed those (very obvious) bounds, i'm afraid this practice could have been fostered and tuned.
i can't help but wonder if the internet (Google, more specifically) could still help malicious businesses achieve disproportionate conversion.
Instead of fining businesses, perhaps the answer is litigation.
I’m not sure what their TOS says, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it protects from this, but yeah, the liability should be that you open yourself up to being sued if you erroneously remove a user from your platform, who is using it as their job
The bad actors are still liable. You go after them to force them to remove the original content that is being indexed.
Yes, it's whack-a-mole, but that will forever be the nature of the internet or any other tool that facilitates democratized content creation at effectively zero cost.
I had a nasty bout with an SEO marketer a few years ago. He had taken content from my website and other assets of mine without permission or advance request. I was willing to overlook it as an inevitable cost of doing business.
But when he started to steal my customer reviews word for word and posting them as fake reviews, I became irate. I guess I am OK with someone stealing from me but I felt the reviews were my customer's property, not mine. When I confronted him he started spamming my business and then wrote detailed fake blog posts about how I was criminal hacker that now works covertly for the FBI. My name and photoshopped images were posted on gay websites for bondage sex. I Googled very poorly for a while, especially my images. I lost many many nights of sleep over this and I probably lost a contract over it.
I eventually found where he lived and fortunately he owned his own home. I threatened to sue him and take his home. He removed all the libelous posts shortly after that.
After all had been settled, a few months later he wrote me asking if I wanted to partner with him on a project, demonstrating a pathological lack of awareness. Apparently tormenting me had just been another fun day at the office and not a memorable event. I ignored him and never heard back.
My personal experience does make me wonder if the subject in the parent article was motivated to kill his competitors just for profit. Or did he and his competitors have had a nasty on-going personal war that just kept escalating. Not that I would ever justify attempted murder. Just saying...
Not if that person is a trillion dollar corporation. If they're a business that's regularly stealing content and re-writing it for their customers that business is gonna go down. Sure, a customer or two may go down with them but the business that sells counterfeit works to spec is not gonna last long.
Intermediaries can (and already do) silently cause the content to be tracked, altered or otherwise modified against both your and the site owner's interests.
How would you feel if they inserted javascript to mine bitcoins?
The problem for him will be the burnt bridges. Similar allegations have been brought up against him and others in the past and the accused largely came out unscathed. It seems that the industry is far less comfortable with it this time around and there seem to be harsh consequences.
I doubt the consequences are an expression of shock, it seems far more likely it's just a way to protect your brand's reputation (like we've previously seen with advertisers on YouTube). If that's the case I find it doubtful he'll find it easy to benefit from his old contacts until this blows over.
Unless he's literally recording himself in his room and uploading to his website, he needs people to work with him. And even then he'd still be a the whim of a hosting company.
> Auto-populating content (fake users) and generating the illusion of activity
The other owner of a project of ours once suggested doing this. I rejected that because of ethical reasons. I also told that could mean legal trouble. Was I completely naive/wrong?
It's come out that for a few thousand, you can buy black hat's who will do crappy link building for your competitors. So, possible scenario: Safe Shepard stepped on somebody's toes and they retaliated by hiring (or creating) a ton of crappy back links to the website. Unlikely, but possible.
I have a software product. People resell it on marketplaces. They make €30~50,000 per year from doing this. When I contact the marketplaces they hide behind safe harbour - yes, they suspend the user account but the same user will register the next day under a different name and keep the same practice. The responsibility of the content published should be shifted from the author to the platform so abuse like this is not repeated.
I'm still waiting to see an argument for why a content provider who is making something available to others for free and without obligation has any obligation in return, either legally or ethically, beyond the same basic decency that we all owe to each other. I think a site that is neither actively malicious nor grossly negligent has satisfied that basic decency requirement.
Ultimately, it's just not realistic to expect every little store and niche blogger to either monitor every third party service they depend on full-time just to protect the users who are giving them little if anything in return or to discontinue using any third party services that are technically capable of distributing malware. The former is demonstrably impossible anyway, and if you take the latter to its logical conclusion you undermine substantial parts of what has made the modern web so successful, far beyond using ads as a revenue stream.
Put another way, malware writers themselves may be the scum of the earth, but I don't see why someone writing a blog about how to bake cakes and using a well-known and generally reputable ad network to fund the hosting costs is any more ethically responsible for the consequences of a malware incident than, say, a browser developer whose also freely offered product had a vulnerability that could be exploited in the first place. I don't see anyone calling for any browser with a track record of serious security vulnerabilities (which is all of them, of course) to be banned to protect users from malware, though.
This method primarily attacks innocent people. If someone is playing the author's game on another website then they likely don't know what the official website is. He has hurt his own players more than the people trying to make money off of his work.
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