Slashdot Mirror

First, check out: http://www.fuckedcompany.com/extras/efront_letter. cfm

As you can see, eFront's "legal department" is sending out cease and desist letters to anyone who is hosting or linking to the ICQ logs. Wonder if Slashdot will be hit by one?

If you have read the logs, you'll know that in a previous situation, eFront simply copied a cease and desist template off a web page to send. Look's like they've done it here as well.

I like this comment made by bored2 on Pud's website. He says:

regarding the letter:

* It's not signed by a person (but was sent by email? what was the email address in the relevant headers?) A lawyer would sign his/her name. or perhaps the current efront legal dept. consists of Sam in his boxers and a google search for cease and desist letters.

* It starts: "We are contacting you on behalf of eFront Media ("Company")." Umm, but I thought this letter was from eFront? Sam is obviously using a letter from a law firm writing on behalf of a client w/o having changed the relevant parts of the letter.

* "The unauthorized break-in and continued distribution and dissemination of this data violates the Federal wiretapping ***statues***."

With no citation to the relevant "statues".

* "The FBI office of Orange County is currently investigating"

There is a LA and San Diego division offices of the FBI; there is no office called the "Orange County Office." See: http://losangeles.fbi.gov/contact/fo/la/territory. htm

The rest of the letter is just crap, especially: "In addition, we are requesting that you shut down the entire forum for Efront, due to the criminal investigation and the illegal actions that have been conducted with the reading and gathering of such materials."

What is that last clause supposed to mean?

How pathetic.

Its clear from the logs that Efront are in some financial difficulty, it could be ironic that all this attention could give them the visitors to their sites to achieve their targets and make some money. However, according to those in the know they wont get nearly enough to save them, definetly not enough to clear the backpay. Those in the know are awaiting an investigation by the SEC for illegal trade of securities, though they seem more concerned with tying to keep the lid on it as this letter at Fucked Company shows.

Its clear from the logs that Efront are in some financial difficulty, it could be ironic that all this attention could give them the visitors to their sites to achieve their targets and make some money. However, according to those in the know they wont get nearly enough to save them, definetly not enough to clear the backpay. Those in the know are awaiting an investigation by the SEC for illegal trade of securities, though they seem more concerned with tying to keep the lid on it as this letter at Fucked Company shows.

Note that nowhere in the email do they deny the authenticity of the ICQ logs (they do say they "may have been edited, manipulated . . ." but not fabricated) or threaten action for libel.

Damn shame about mame.dk, glad I filled out my ROM collection recently.

The Internet is such a great thing, but one thing many seem to overlook is that it is not a neccessity. For years people have lived without the net, and while it does make live easier, it is just like a car, cell phone, etc., a novelty.

Mid to Late 90's Venture Capital firms went ballistic funding companies that were gone faster than they had came. Recent days VC is dried up as people are realizing their is no immediate ghastly halt of life for anyone without the Internet.

Keeping afloat is a hard thing to do when you have bills to pay and revenues from ads just wont cut it. Its not like television where a broadcaster can sell the rights to programs that are in syndication and make revenue off of reruns. Banner ads are not all they once claimed or hoped to be and many companies were under the impression it would last forever. Companies whose revenues fell under this scheme suffered and are suffering most, since there's much more competition meaning ads are flooded and are likely to be meaningless.

Yahoo has outlasted many dot.coms and the decision to step down as CEO was IMHO a wise move. Think about it, where else is Yahoo going to get revenue from, selling webspace, email accounts, stock quotes? There isn't much out there on the net right now, and until the next best thing comes along many other sites without a surefire business model will all end up on FuckedCompany

Free Porn (oh by the way its ad free too)

Sure, that was a slip-up on Egghead's part, but imagine it happening to them because of customers hacking the prices. No wonder Egghead.com has now made it to this list.

--

If you follow FuckedCompany.Com you can get a rundown on all the companies that IdeaLab owns - and the fact that damned near all of them have failed or are failing as of late. In fact, I can't think of any of them offhand that is anything more than a spectacular failure, costing between $20 and $100 million each. These include: eToys.Com, Referer.Com, Cooking.Com, CarsDirect.Com, PetSmart.Com (yes, that's an IdeaLab funded one), Modo.Net, FIrstLook.Com, eve.com, and more...

Heck, here's the FuckedCompany search results on IdeaLab based companies - the funniest being the fact that IdeaLab owns the domain DogCrap.Com. Go fig.

FuckedCompany search for IdeaLab

In other words - this is move by IdeaLab to look like some sort of industry leader. Don't expect it to happen, or of it does, don't expect it to last very long - or for IdeaLab to last much longer. You can only pump so much money into a loosing situation before people completely give up.

One more thing. Check out F*ckedCompany and search for Idealab. Somehow I dont think they're going to make this work...

-----

Read it here: http://www.fuckedcompany.com/extras/valinuxemail.c fm

at 216.150.6.70

However, that's over with; I'm in college, and I'm majoring in Computer Engineering; a field that is almost immune to the FC syndrome.

(Notice I said almost; there's the engineering folly of the CueCat; even without its moronic policies and software, the first revision of the CueCat itself was a technological disgrace.)

From a Rambus business plan dated June 12, 1992: "Finally, we believe that Sync DRAMs infringe on some claims in our filed patents; and that there are additional claims we can file for our patents that cover features of Sync DRAMs. Then we will be in a position to request patent licensing (fees and royalties) from any manufacturer of Sync DRAMs. Our action plan is to determine the exact claims and file the additional claims by the end of Q3/92. Then to advise Sync DRAM manufacturers in Q4/92."

This was all part of their plan! They applied for patents on RAM technology, and when they were approved, they lied in wait like a tiger ready to ambush its prey. And then, they saw their chance in 1992. To prevent suspicion of foul play, they waited 8 years to sue the RAM makers. And when they did, they claimed that they had patents established well in advance.

IMHO, this was the perfect patent scam. They remained aloof while SDRAM proliferated in the consumer market, and then when computers all over the world were infringing on "their patents", they struck.

I hope they all fry in a vat of their own excrement (or they can just have numerous stories on FC). Such a despicable death is only fitting for this company of weasels.

I'm surprised nobody else on here caught this in the letter at F*ckedCompany that somebody else posted here, but SmartPlanet's employees are getting the axe too. But somehow they twist it around to say:

But creating courseware and handling customer maintenance as well as developing courses, is extremely resource intensive, and not a core focus of our business. We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date.

Huh? How do you lay off most of the staff and at the same time make it more successful? Unless most of the staff was involved in sending out the spam I usually got from them, I can't quite understand how that would work.

Part of the original strength of SmartPlanet was knowing that the people behind the tutorials actually knew what they were talking about. SP had guys with doctorates teaching the classes, and when you interacted with them, you walked away with the impression that they weren't just holding paper certificates they got through the mail. These were smart people.

So now they're going to downsize to a few monkeys and make it a better site? Huh? Hope my company doesn't take that same attitude.

Fucked Company has the letter sent to CNET employees about this. It's always a delight to read of the misery of others.

Anyone else notice that /. is starting to look like fuckedcompany.com?

If you signed a no disclosure agreement with the company the could turn around and say your offering priveledged information on a public place which could jeapordize their business.

"We suck!" is a trade secret? If so, then I'm afraid the cat's already out of the bag. Several companies have already made extensive use of the concept.

Want to see evidence of this? Here's all the evidence you need.

Even though their big money maker is the Rio, I feel that Sonicblue will make it to this list. A stupid name, their "lack of technical support" department, and their ventures that fail will just get them into trouble.

Good article in last weeks Economist on the subject. Those ignorant politicians didn't understand deregulation, and were more interested in appeasing lobby groups, and screwed it all up.

Living in San Francisco, I can assure you that the politicians aren't the only ones who don't get it. Most people here have heard of this whole "market economy" thing, but only in the way people in Indiana have heard of communism: they may not know much about it, but they know it's bad and dangerous and all right-thinking people should be against it.

If you need proof, look no further than the bursting of the Internet bubble, which strikes me a much more authentic California product than cheese.

I just knew that Blue Nile would also be on FuckedCompany.com when I saw that Sun ad...

Well, though they did provide nice fodder for press and authors looking for the thousands of ways America's youth are being raped by corporate America, ZapMe recently found itself fucked. Now it appears that they're "committed to creating advanced vertical networks for small to medium-sized businesses worldwide," whatever that is.

Why does one need cheesy dotcoms to tell us what a directory is?

A directory search limited to U.S. newspapers immediately brings up, say, an explanation by Linda Chavez about her relationship with the illegal alien in question.

If one wants political news, one can go to a political news source. If one wants information on Linda Chavez, one can do a more specific search. If one wants political news about Linda Chavez, one can (this must be getting very complex for your average dotcom founder) search a news archive.

Here are some pics of the Fuckedcompany.com on the road tour in San Francisco. The online community is alive.

http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=148239 6&a=11168760

alias, Idealab. They've consulted with many companies that made it to this nefarious list. Also, Idealab has a tendency of making smarmy slogans/logos/names, so avoid them like a leper.

Okay, first off, you're doing it wrong.

You need to call their NOC, *NOT* tech support. Get their NOC number, which is according to my records, 650-556-5599. If that's not the NOC, you can get the NOC number from them.

Once you get to the NOC, make them create a trouble ticket, and get ready to use your "I'm NOT HAPPY WITH YOU" techniques. The ONLY way anything will be done about it is if you ride them. Hard. They probably have the TT from Tech Support, so have that number ready, and give it to them. Start riding them hard. Demand supervisors, etcetera. Remember, the NOC is going to be setup with a front line defense (NOC techs), second line defense (NOC NetEng, NOC Unix Admin, etc), third line defense (NetEng, Unix Admins), and finally supervisors. That's NOT how it's managed, but how it's going to progress. Escalate often. Just keep calling them.

That's the only way I've ever gotten anything done with Crack-Home or any other moronic overly large ISP. If they're big enough to have a NOC, then rest assured you'll only get things done if it gets to the NOC. The NOC will likely scream at Tech Support if they get TT's from them (I know we did when I worked in one) and generally have a fit, and ignore the ticket as much as possible. NOC and Tech Support typically do not get along.

Hope this helps, and good luck.
your company here.

Besides, then you have the joy of reporting your old business to FuckedCompany.com.

Hopefully, CMGI and their "@ventures" will collapse, and Bob Kraft will be left on his knees behind Governor Celluci, begging for more state funding since his largest corporate sponsor has dried up.

BTW, on an offtopic note, how does ArseTechnica sound as an Ars-spoof site?

This is just classic. Didn't CompuServe or Unisys try to pull something like this with GIF? I know there are several other examples of companies doing this as a last gasp.

Look, let's be honest. The ONLY reason this is happening is because CMGI can't make a dime anymore. They are a failed business. That's why all of their dot boms are closing down. Their stock has tanked. So, how do they make money? Sue everyone under the sun for using "thier" technology. Yeah. Good luck.

And you wonder why CMGI is a regular on fuckedcompany.com.

Okay, they give your 10$ worth of 'credits' to start playing. One would assume that you actually have to wager this to start getting money. Where do the prizes come from? Who funds this? Ads? Gamblers?

Jezus, this is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.

Quote:
Until further notice, all employees are required to be at their desk from 8am until 7pm, with 30 minutes for lunch. There are no exceptions.

Quote:
Until further notice, all employees are required to be at their desk from 8am until 7pm, with 30 minutes for lunch. There are no exceptions.

".. for small amounts, the process should be as simple as a single click."

So do we have a patent problem here?

Also, on a different topic: people make these kinds of donations now. Look at FuckedCompany's Edgewater victims fund: over $16K in just a couple of weeks, using PayPal. So perhaps we're not as far away as you think.

I think the Internet bubble burst is just starting. Many will die, a few will survive. The stock market may tank more (at least the stocks... and there's the supposed Economic Slowdown (TM) looming).

And we can watch it all with a front row seat at fuckedcompany.com. God I love that site.

You're kidding right? You shouldn't stick with a sinking ship. The CEO's don't even do that anymore.. they'll jump ship with their golden parachutes and land in another CEO job at some other company and the employees will just be another headline on fuckedcompany.com. I don't think I could handle working for a company where I didn't know if my next paycheck would bounce or not. ;-)

How long will it be now that Napster has commercialized itself, that it'll end up on F*ckdCompany. Does anyone even use Napster anymore last I checked most of my friends were ditching it after lenghty complaints of not being able to access songs the way they once did.

According to the prior posting here as well which states most Napster (l)users actually purchased more music, do folks over at BMG still make it to be the devils tool or are they hoping to ride the coattails and make up the money I forsee them losing?

What was Metallica's final view on it after all the hooplah they caused? I haven't read much about the mention of the two after trials either. Do they see it as a good thing now that royalties may be heading down the way or did commercialism butter their attitude and bring forth Napster in a whole new light?

FreeBSD Spoofed

...pre-emptively submit the death of iCopyright.com to FuckedCompany. $1.6M in funding? 66 employees? I give them until 3Q2001... maybe 1Q2002, if they're frugal.

Well, I think a larger N just widens the bell curve, and somebody has to tether the low end, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be these chuckleheads.

More seriously, this model won't last. First, it's too hard to enforce - even if you could automate combing the weblogs and finding out who the rogue linkers are, they couldn't possibly claim that their dumbass content-control terms had jurisdiction in Estonia. A serious monkey wrencher might exacerbate this by setting up an anonymous re-linker in Finland - the idea being to link to anywhere, from anywhere, with the host's log showing the re-linker's address.

Second, while a real content provider might have revenue streams other than bogus link charges, any company that uses this as the underpinning of a business model is bound to wind up on Fucked Company. People writing web pages will just say, "Gee, that's fucking stupid", and find other content to link to. The era of companies specializing in this form of parasitism will be short indeed.

OK,
- B

--

All of the sudden, I'm seeing dead companies rising out of the grave and "refocusing" their strategies. B2B is the usual goal for being repurposed, but a network of communications satellites repurposed for scientific research? That's certainly a new one. Maybe some of those companies on FC can take Iridium as an example.

Well, I figure since I've had to deal it with almost 100% of my career, I may as well toss out my $0.02USD.

Spam isn't as easy to stop as most of the 'tech savvy' /. readers claim, say, swear, or demand it is. First off, you have several types of spammers.

First off is your atypical newbie moron spammer, who gladly gives you all his correct information, gets online, and fires away, gets disconnected immediately, gets blacklisted.

Next you have the more technical spammer, who has an array of fake credit card numbers, false names, false addresses, and so on. He'll setup six or seven accounts on one ISP, usually something like AOL or UUnet, and bounce around with these accounts, spamming. On and off before they can catch him in the middle of it.

Third, you have the guy with a pile of lawyers working for him, that's going to negotiate and hardball his way into a contract with an ISP that lets him spam.

The only remaining spam-friendly ISP was AGIS. Why 'was'? That policy was changed due to something like 60%+ of their customers cancelling after the announcement. Remember Spamford Wallace? He was the guy they hooked up first, and he was the guy that lost them a lot of business. Companies blocked AGIS - my employer at the time filtered all of AGIS' netblocks immediately, to prevent incoming spam. Some providers, ie; PSInet, have negotiated contracts with 'big name' (aka LOTS of spam) firms that allow them to spam to their heart's content.

Now, you've got a spammer. We'll say your typical type 2. And you want to shut him down. Not that easy. Because you do NOT have a common factor, including where they're dialing in from, they can CONTINUE to abuse your service, and there's not much at ALL you can do about it till they slip up somehow, which most sales droids are NOT going to be aware of. They'll just keep bouncing around and evading. And if the ISP gets blackholed or filtered all over, they'll just jump ISPs entirely. These are the pricks that cause the most damage to ISPs. They usually also use the ISP's SMTP server - best thing you can do is to disconnect them the second you see it, and pray they don't have more accounts. I've had to deal with a couple of these in the past, and we had one guy sign up for *SIXTY* accounts in *ONE DAY*, all with different information. When we FINALLY figured out who it was, we were ONLY able to kill the accounts because we had relatively few (around 2,000) and knew when they were added.

Now, say you have someone who bought a leased line and ordered it up deliberately for spam. You can't prove it beforehand, and some of the software out there makes it incredibly hard to find the true source. You have to catch them in the act most of the time. And the best you can HOPE to do is to do a shut on their interface. That's assuming you don't have a legal department that you MUST consult before disconnecting a customer for a contract violation (ie; spamming) and who MUST sign off on the disconnect order - I had to deal with this before. In some of the larger shops, ie; UUnet, AOL, etcetera, you have to go to your legal group and get them to sign off on a disconnect, then you have to go to your engineering department, who may or may not have to schedule it as a change management, who may or may not have to get their managers to write off on it, who may or may not have to go further up the chain. In other words, typical corporate bull will typically tie up a spam disconnect for over a week. It's the cold reality. If you disconnect a customer who WASN'T spamming, they can and likely WILL nail you for breach of contract on a leased line, and that could cost your company MILLIONS. Legal wants proof, engineering wants time and to be left alone, management just wants the mess out of their hair. Plus the overworked abuse departments do not help, as most complaints go there. Where I worked, we had a two person abuse department, who typically had a three week turnaround on initial reply.

You have to take all these kind of things into account. I'm certainly not saying UUnet is doing a great job - they aren't - but they're doing the best they can. I'm not personally aware of any contracts UUnet has negotiated permitting spam, and they usually *do* disconnect a customer for spamming. Other providers are far worse. You can whine, scream, complain, and moan all you want, but spam is not going to go away overnight, and policies at these places don't get changed overnight, if at all. UUnet has their policies, as do most other providers, and the tech that ignores them and just unplugs that spammer is going to find himself out of work almost immediately.

A lot of the posters definitely need a good dose of reality, because this is how it is. It's not just unplug the guy. Maybe the Mom & Pop ISPs have that luxury with dialups, but the other ones? Not a chance. So you're just going to have to live with it. Build your own filter lists, update them, etcetera, and quit whining about these companies being unable to stop it immediatley. You want it fixed? You go get a job in management and fix it yourself. No amount of your screaming is going to change a thing.

=RISCy Business, who doesn't give a damn what you think.
your company here.

Perhaps a better slogan would be "Turning your web into a TV set." By filtering what this guy calls crap, he is excluding some of the best information repositories from his index. It is the non-commercial, private sites that are interesting for end-users (and often hard-to-find). If I want to buy stuff, there's already lots of portals for me to choose from.

As I'm testing this thing for missing sites, I have a hard time finding one that is listed. Slashdot, RIAA, no relevant hits. Microsoft, the first relevant hit somewhere at the bottom: "http://www.microsoft.com/office/outlook". The result list doesn't have ratings, doesn't show URLs in output either. So what is it exactly that took you two years? Ah, "filtering the crap", and adding the descriptions, I suppose. Thanks, but no thanks. If this wasn't December, I'd think this is an April Fool's joke.

I think we have a potential fucked company here.

--

Opera's move is equivalent to treason in the browser world. You don't charge for something that other companies provide for free. That's like charging $20 for a cup of water at a marathon when the tables are providing them for free.

After seeing this story, I hope that Opera makes it onto this list.

If you own the god damned CD why would you not just rip the cd instead of paying 45 bucks. Frankly ripping software is so good this company is so stupid. I sence a new company for Fucked Company dot com.

Numbers are great for routing, but when it comes to user interfaces, Names are the way to go. Making phone numbers as pointers to websites is as advancing as not using IP for 2nd Generation wireless.

The goal is to advance technology... not to regress to a bad system.

Unfortunately, this is the goal of the Geek, not the goal of business. The goal of business is to make money. This is commonly forgotten by geeks, and hence people point and laugh at the non-bisiness business model most web companies use.

Lets consider the technological make-up of the world today:
1. We have the 3rd world. Yes, these people are untapped "web" resources, but the reality is that a TRS-80 is considered high-tech for some of them. Whole towns don't have power, running water, and/or phones. Do you think that these people really care about reverse lookup DNS tables? These people are off of the eBusiness radar.

2. On the other extreme We have the Uber-geeks. These people are all about making everybodies lives easier - as long as they hold the secret knowledge as to how everything works. Why pay for a phone call, when you can email them? Why email them when you can ICQ them? why ICQ them when you can use voice over ip for free? ...and so on... For many, a phone is becoming outdated technology. For us to remember an email address or a website no problem... for us to find a website or an email address... well there's google, 411 and maqpuest so that about covers finding almost any company or private informaton necessary.

3. Then there are people like my inlaws... Who have internet access and a slough of questions, but don't care to listen. They waited patiently for 3 months until I was around over thanksgiving to remove a stuck CD becuase they didn't feel comfortable with a paperclip. Anyway, they can enter in a URL from the TV screen, but when toyota doesn't say www.toyota.com on their advertisement - they don't think to type it in. Some day they may figure it out - but I figure I'll have a few more trips out there before then...

4. People who aren't don't know anything about computers at all. There are actually a few people in business that still don't use a computer - and not all of them are auto mechanics. A lot of them are older, and very set in their ways. A phone number is a familiar item. They can punch it in and they know what they can expect to hear - someone from that company on the other end of the line. They can type it in on a computer, and amazingly it would take them to the website. Not only have you adapted current technology now to a familiar frame, but you have actively encouraged someone else to see your business model. This are the largest untapped but available customer base for online companies PTFMA.

In addition, a telephone crossreference fixes many problems with domain squatters, two companies with similar names/different prodcuts, and provides most of america with an existing directory structure to find the company they are looking for (the Yellow Pages).

Lastly, I personally prefer to shop locally when I can't get a better deal elsewhere. I could run through (617) business lines for the product I wanted. This would allow me to shop online - and have the convenience of doing so - but put the company close enough that if it broke, I could easily return it or exchange it.

anyways... phone numbers aren't a bad system - just one you wouldn't think to use given the current direction of technology. I however, see where this could be useful - and hence, profitable.

-

That's just an amazing waste of ~$30/year. If I wanted a numerical way to see a website, I'd do like others have said and use the IP address. Besides, what kind of mess would we have if we ran out of these addresses? I live in Southern California, and we seem to split area codes every few seconds. They just want money, I can forsee them profiled here in the near future.

On CityTV they bleep out "fuck" and "motherfucker" during the day, but after a certain time (I think around 8:30PM or so) they only bleep out the "mother" part of "motherfucker". I'd always thought it strange that the innocent word "mother" somehow made a swear word even worse somehow.

ObFuckDomain: fuckedcompany.com

The censorship seems to be restricted to US English usage... just tried NSI and it quite cheerfully offered to register (with advance apologies to our French speaking readers) encouler.com, and while poofter.com is taken, it suggested pooftercentral.com which is available.

Also, what about that famous site parodying Fast Company magazine and cataloguing the demise of silly .com startups? They must have registered somewhere.

Why not find out who http://www.fuckedcompany.com registered their domain through. If that URL didn't trip alarms, then you've pretty much got to be ok.

TheGeek

When you do a search for such a domain (fuckedcompany.com for example) they give the following rules:

- Use only letters, numbers, or hyphen ("-")
- Cannot begin or end with a hyphen
- .com, .net and .org domain names cannot exceed 67 characters total
- Other domain names cannot exceed 22 characters, not including the extension
- Domain names are not case sensitive
- Domain names cannot include spaces

There doesn't seem to be anything there about 4 letter words.

kc.