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Yet another company has launched a public bug bounty program to lure in hackers in an effort to find and eradicate vulnerabilities. Yelp is the latest company to do such a thing. Specifically, they are inviting hackers to dissect its websites and mobile application and look for vulnerabilities that could affect reviewers and businesses. In return, they will pay "researchers" who find vulnerabilities, starting at $100 and maxing out at $15,000 "for more complex and critical exploits." TechCrunch reports: "The program, which Yelp is coordinating through the bug bounty platform HackerOne, is a public extension of a bug bounty system that Yelp has privately run for two years. The private version was open to dozens of researchers, who uncovered more than 100 vulnerabilities for Yelp and earned $65,160 in total, and focused primarily on Yelp's main website. Now, Yelp is inviting everyone to test Yelp sites and products. Yelp, which averages 73 million unique visitors to its desktop site and 63 million unique visitors on mobile each month, is asking hackers to cover broad ground -- the bug bounty program includes the company's main website, yelp.com, as well as its business-owners website, apps, reservation platform, corporate blogs, support center, and API."

New submitter goodboi writes: A Silicon Valley building contractor is suing 8 of its critics over the reviews they posted on Yelp. The negative reviews were filtered out by Yelp's secretive ranking system, but in court documents filed earlier this month, Link Corporation claims that the bad publicity cost over $165,000 in lost business.

njnnja (2833511) writes In an incredibly misguided attempt to reduce the quantity of bad reviews (such as these), the Union Street Guest House, a hotel about 2 hours outside of New York City, had instituted a policy to charge groups such as wedding parties $500 for each bad review posted online. The policy has been removed from their webpage but the wayback machine has archived the policy. "If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any internet site you agree to a $500. fine for each negative review."

Readers Mike Van Pelt and EricThegreen point out a story in the East Bay Express alleging that online restaurant review site Yelp is doing more than providing a nice interface for foodies to share their impressions of restaurants. Instead, says the article, representatives from the site have called restaurants in the Bay area to solicit advertising, but with an interesting twist: the ad sales reps let restaurant owners know that, if they buy advertising at around $300 a month, Yelp can "do something" about prominently displayed negative reviews of their restaurants. If the claims are true, it sure lowers my opinion of Yelp, which I'd thought of as one of the good guys (and a useful site). I wonder how many other online review sites might be doing something similar.

cjjjer writes "The Register has a article on Yelp, the newest local search engine based on your local friends and businesses. Robert X. Cringely over at I, Cringely has another take on this new type of service as well. Seems to me a service like this will only generate a lot of useless emails that will go un-answered. Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like spam."