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eFront From Inside
Gridle writes: "In short, eFront was a company which bought out successful websites and turned them into cash cows by maximizing profit through different ways of banner and other advertising. Not a bad idea, except that their methods aren't exactly pretty ones. A disgruntled employee obtained some crucial ICQ logs (mirror), which show the true spirit behind eFront. It includes cheating on banner companies, cheating on top100 sites, talking about raping a female webmaster because she doesn't agree on some points, tax evasion, delaying payment to webmasters, literally harrassing sites out of existance and all kinds of other nasty stuff. Somebody put together a summary about how it concerns the emulation scene. Also notice OverClocked's comic about it and Tim Eckel's previous ventures against the emulation community, and Penny Arcade. And it's all over the place already. FuckedCompany, SomethingAwful, Lum the Mad (and their forums), Get High Forums, mame.dk support pages and Retrogames' General and Current Affairs boards. Somebody even found that their CEO has earlier been convicted."
A few months ago, eFront contacted me about buying my website, in exchange for some crazy stock option plan. I'm not a lawyer, but even I could see how out of whack their contract was. I mean, give them ALL rights and ownership to the site in exchange for stock that has no value, and has no real prospect of ever having any value?
But, I suppose enough people are just interested in the prospect of making phat cash that they'll sign anything stuck in front of their face. These people getting screwed over by eFront are getting screwed over because they leapt into it with a lot of unfounded faith. Someone once said (I think it was George Carlin), "Businessmen go into meetings thinking the other guy is going to fuck them over, so they race to fuck the other guy over first."
This type of thing happens in boardrooms all across the country, every day. It really isn't surprising that eFront is conspiring to screw their webmasters over, what is surprising is that they were stupid enough to do it over ICQ.
NO CARRIER
How on earth can you do business (and the ICQ log makes the excellent point that, once you bring money into the equation, it's no longer a hobby) - do business with another company and not know that their CEO has been convicted of fraud? Where's the due dilligence? ``What other companies are you working with? Can I talk to someone at some of your other affiliate sites?''
How can someone host a site like mame.dk or somethingawful.com as anything but a hobby in their spare time? Pud seems to do just fine running FC that way (and appropriately makes fun of big companies that require 50 people to do the same thing). This isn't a troll - at least 50% of those reading this should know how easy it is to run a dynamic web site, and even to host it cheaply. But $24,000 a month!?
If you're going to accept ad revenue as the way you pay rent, it seems like you need to be up on the ad industry and know what the CPM trends are. It also seems like you'd want a pretty good contract with your ad provider, so they can't just drop you if it's not working out. Especially after April, 2000.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but I really can't see anything but greed as a motivation for the sites that have been hit by this; that and a sense of entitlement thwarted. I mean, I love PA, I really do, but I could host it on my (pretty modest) salary, in my spare time. What entitles someone to it as their job?
-1, Flamebait I guess... though I really think these are important issues.
For a change, would you please read the links too? Who the hell would invest two months of constant typing to create 12 MB of forged logs with authentic information, passwords, people, phone numbers et cetera, and what for?
I have no reason to suspect the logs aren't real. Draw your own conclusions though.
Also, ICQ's license agreement pretty much states that since they can't guarantee privacy, it's essentially a public forum. I guess eFront just fucked themselves.
About the rape quote, grep rape from iBLAMEj00.txt. You'll find it easily. Perhaps it wasn't said with any intention to do it, but it still sticks at people's eyes and would be pretty much an open and shot case for this female webmaster's lawyers.
Just as I think any kind of community spirit on the Net is gone, some little slimeball pops up and proves me wrong with the reaction he provokes.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I'm afraid you don't know what you're talking about. In a civil action, people don't "file charges." Only a government prosecutor can "file charges"--or more accurately seek an indictment by grand jury or by information with a preliminary hearing in front of a magistrate. Your points might apply if you were talking about ethical violations relating to prejudicial pretrial pubilicity by the government (state prosecutors or Fed. Assistant U.S. Attorneys). Similarly, innocent until proven guilty is a criminal concept; civil plaintiffs have the burden of proof/pursuasion (with a "more likely than not" standard).
Re. defamation, remember that truth is a defense. Stated another way, you can only defame someone with false statements. Second, some matters of public interest are covered by a qualified, constitutional privilige established by the Spreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan. With a public figure or matter of public controversy, a plaintiff must often prove "actual malice," meaning not "spite or ill will" but that the defendant had "knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for truth," but nevertheless published the statement(s). However, if the plaintiff is a private person and has not injected him/herself into a public controversy, then the plaintiff only needs to prove that the defendant was negligent in publishing the defamatory material.
With a private person & private controversy, usually negligence means falling below what a reasonable person or reasonable publisher would have done under the same circumstances.
There are other torts that might apply, however, like invasion of privacy.
One interesting question is whether obtaining the logs violated the Electronic Communications Protection Act (ECPA), 18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq.
Re. admissibility, pre-publication or not keeping something a secret has no bearing. All relevant evidence not otherwise inadmissible comes in. "Relevant" usually means "having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable". An easy standard. Some possible grounds for inadmissibility:
In all, electronic records are viewed by the majority of courts to be no better and no worse than any other kind of evidence.
---
In a hundred-mile march,
The "in short" version seems a little too short, for those of us who have never heard of eFront. And the log files are many, many times the length of War and Peace. So I apologize for not having read the entire "article" before commenting. But the charges seem a little stupid to me...buying web sites to make more money back is not a crime! Do the log files actually state doing something illegal, or is this just whimpering from eFront's competitors?
The "summary" link above is vaguely written, with nothing clearly stated to be illegal. It's more like it's written to *sound* illegal. "Screw the affiliates by lowering the CPM from $3 to $.75"...does that mean in actual breach of contract, or does it mean renegotiate the monthly pay rate? There's a big difference! Ad rates change all the time.
Bragging about "tricking" people into clicking ads (in the summary link), sorry, that sucks, but within certain bounds, that's part of web advertising today. You see tricky banners on CNN and most other major web sites too, like "click the monkey to win" and so on.
Bragging about "pop-ups and how he can do whatever he wants to his visitors," again, if this is just a gripe about unsolicited pop-up ads, they suck, but have become mainstream practice these days. I'd say most of the major media web sites I visit pop up ad consoles at different times.
"He frequently berates his visitors, at one point calling them 'sheep', He brags about his own 'leetness.'" Yadda yadda yadda. I'm sorry, if the whole issue is that this guy is a ruthless profit-seeker you wouldn't want to be friends with, it just seems like a lot of personal griping. Okay, maybe he's an asshole, but so what?
Again, I haven't read the 15 megabytes of log files, so I'm not saying for sure this is just a lot of name-calling, but if there are specific allegations of fraud, it would be interesting to have them summarized with more details and credibility than the "summary" link in the initial posting.
Tim's flame on Penny Arcade's forums (long long thread)
r. ghaffari
(25/M/Baltimore, MD)
Wow, seriously dangerous waters you guys at /. are venturing into.
/. get embroiled in the very things it purports to be rallying the community against ...
It could be argued, pretty easily, that this article is a competitive swipe against EFront, who seem to have a relatively similar business strategy to another "Buy-And-Milk" company, your very own Andover Networks.
I hope this doesn't cause more fuss than it should. Be stupid to see
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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