Slashdot Mirror
Compensation for Bandwidth Costs is Extortion?
Tha_Big_Guy23 asks: "According to this article, a man who created a website for his local Sheriff's department is being charged with extortion. This was caused by taking down the website after repeated attempts to get compensation from the county to cover the bandwidth costs. As a result, all his personal computer property, and company computer property was seized and he was jailed."
"After being jailed he was charged with extortion, larceny by conversion, using a computer to commit a crime, and obstruction of justice. This website explains in more detail the circumstances surrounding the situation. Has anyone on Slashdot ever had an experience where a client was unwilling to compensate you for either your work, and/or the resources required to do your work?"
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
This guy gives website designers a bad name. I'd say he definitely belongs in prison. 3.5 million hits per month? Oh, yeah, right. I get the feeling that this guy was planning to pull this stunt all along, but I bet he wasn't counting on getting arrested. Another clue is the fact that he set the domain name up as his own property so the town would be unable to switch to another server. What a noble thing to do. And then there's his final bill... $300,000?! To offset the "huge expense" of running the website? WHAT huge expense? How much was he paying for hosting? DIdn't want to lose any more money? Why didn't he just set it up on a different server and let the town pay for it themselves? I think this guy wants to the town to pay for the loss he's taken running his business in the first place, and shutting the server down while handing over such a massive bill is, IMHO, extortion, and should be treated as such. I hope they throw the book at him, and throw it at him hard, to serve as a warning to anyone else thinking of pulling a stunt like this. Whew, I'm outta breath. Gotta go lay down for a minute.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I could see something getting out of hand with just verbal communications, misunderstandings, etc.
Anyone providing or buying services ought to insist on a written contract that both parties sign. Then, there's no question of consequences if someone doesn't pay within 30 days, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
...try small-claims court. Vigilante justice against the government will always leave you the loser.
That's a bit much,IMHO. Sounds like the Sheriff walked out as soon he heard that attempted fee. Don't blame him
This guy is way out there
My knee was jerking furiously until I read your excellent post. I can rest easy now knowing that there's two sides to this story and we have another sensationalized /. article.
everyone on his MSN contact list was placed under observation.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
What's the point in posting this story? No, really. All everyone is going to do is jump up and down and scream about the web designer getting shafter. The responses are totally predictable, and nothing more is going to come of the story. So what's the point? No, seriously, what's the fucking point? This story is a waste of pixels, frankly. Post something with some goddamn significance.
An article from today on this topic.
Perhaps this should be a lessong to all to work out your contracts a bit more clearly in advance.
He offered it as a free service, and he didn't get paid for it. It was an _oral_ agreement in regards to the hosting, most likely, and as such can't be held like a written one can.
I certainly think he could have claimed an escape hatch if the bandwidth usage was prohibitive, but seeing the logs would be nice.
However, I don't quite think that the sheriff's department didn't have the right to yank the equipment - but IANAL.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
$300,000 for three years is...
$100,000 for one year, which is...
$ 8,333 for one month of hosting.
(blatant_plug)
Well, don't host with that guy, come host with Tigerhost.com. We only charge $100/month for businesses! (And $16 for personal sites.)
(/blatant_plug)
Seriously, though, at those rates, he could retire on just that one site.
libertarianswag.com
Let's head back to the station and cornhole us a drunk.
Taking something away from someone else and threatening not to return it until they give you money. It doesn't matter if they OWE you money anyway, that's extortion.
If someone owes you money and they are not giving it to you, the correct thing to do is hire a lawyer. Vigilantism may make you feel better, but it's against the law.
Since the site shut down Jan. 1, the sheriff's office set up its own site, www.macomb-sheriff.com. The new site is bare bones compared to the original one, but Hackel said it provide the most important function -- public communication with his office in the form of e-mail.
I see why they needed somebody else to build their web site -- they think they need a web page in order to receive email!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
A message as this could only be vomited by The World's Most Dangerous Leader
Very truly yours,
Kilgore Trout
Now this is weird, I _just_ took a break to read slashdot from desiging the website for the police service in my city.
Thank god I'm not going to be hosting it.
... that you should NOT, in any circumstances, trust cops.
---
A Shelby Township Web site operator is accused of trying to extort $300,000 from the county's primary law enforcement agency the Macomb County Sheriff's Office.
Patrick Arthur Richard, 37, faces four felonies, including extortion, for allegedly holding the sheriff's office Web site hostage in exchange for money. Richard's Running Wolf Inc. operated the sheriff's office Internet site for nearly three years as a free service before shutting it down three months ago because the county wouldn't pay him.
"This is a case of someone trying to get rich quick," said Eric Kaiser, chief trial attorney for the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office. "He was given the privilege of carrying the banner of the Macomb County Sheriff's department and he tried to take advantage of it."
Richard's attorney, James Simmons, however, called the charges "absurd" and said his client merely attempted to negotiate with Hackel and his staff.
He argued the conflict should be resolved in civil court.
"Everyone should sit down and come up with a negotiated price," Simmons said. "This is no more a case of extortion than someone going to a car dealer and offering the dealer less than the listed price, then leaving because he didn't get it. This is really extortion by the sheriff's department."
Richard, who is free on a $5,000 personal bond, faces a preliminary examination today in 41B District Court in Mount Clemens on charges of extortion, using a computer to commit a crime, larceny by conversion and obstruction of justice. The most serious charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company.
The Web site, www.macombsheriff.com, debuted in March 2001 to praise by officials. Richard said it attracted 3.5 million hits per month from throughout the world.
The site provided comprehensive information about the department, a way for the public to communicate with police and archives of newspaper articles.
A year or so ago, Richard started talking with Hackel's staff about earning income from the site. An attempt was made to secure advertisements for the site with profits going to Richard, but Hackel said that generated only a small response.
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
"That was by no means the end of negotiations," said Simmons, Richard's attorney. "He shut it down because he didn't want to lose any more money."
But Hackel said that exorbitant demand amounts to extortion.
"He built up the site so that we would rely on it so much and would pay him," Hackel said. "(But) that content belongs to all of us."
Kaiser said the actual expense to run the site was miniscule compared to the demand.
Simmons said the Web site included a disclaimer that said it was owned by Running Wolf Inc.
"The sheriff's department never disputed that fact when the site was up," Simmons said.
Kaiser responded to Simmon's claim that the case is a civil matter.
"The O.J. (O.J. Simpson) case showed us that a criminal case can be a civil case," he said.
Hackel said Richard also impeded the investigation by the Macomb Area Computer Enforcement team, which seized Richard's computer and related records. Richard lied to investigators by claiming he sold the domain name to a Virginia company, Hackel said.
Hackel said his mistake was placing too much trust in Richard and agreeing to have Richard pay the nominal domain fee. Richard retains authority of the domain name.
Since the
He's going to be pissed once he realises he's been slashdotted.
Was it featured on Slashdot? Could also raise the hits if there was some combination of names/words which match the top searches on Google or any other search engine.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If it didn't have the bandwidth problems before, it sure will now!
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
The only hits this guy's getting now are if he runs a webcam in jail! 300 grand for a website... did he neglect to mention hosting the site on a SunFire 5k with 25 CPU's in it or something?
stuff |
I own a webhosting company and I give away hosting to a couple of sites (for karmic purposes). </PLUG>
All I do is set hard limits on the bandwidth. Problem solved.
First off, there was no contract.
Second, he told them that he'd discuss pay at a later date since they were to busy to handle it to begin with. If I donated 2 years of my time, I'd sure as hell want compensation.
He did what any normal person would do: shut off their service since they didn't pay. In fact, he did one up on what most would do. They didn't pay for TWO YEARS and he let them go on that long. Try not paying YOUR hosting bill and see what it gets you. A shutdown site, that's what.
How the hell is this extortion? Not even REMOTELY. People are stupid. They don't realize it takes time and money, not to mention VALUE of what he had turned the site into.
Granted he didn't have a contract, but both parties are at fault. You can't NOT have a contract then call "extortion" and throw him in jail. Sorry, that's not how it works.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
and the law won...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
First of all, $300,000 is extravagant by any standards. He should have charged his actual costs, after all, he did agree to do the site in exchange for publicity. Thus, the designer should have asked to have the county pay the real cost. I simply cannot imagine the ISP involved was charging that much.
Secondly, the designer should have never shut the site down without sending the county properly served due notice. In other words, registered or certified mails, preferably coming from an attorney.
Finally, the designer should have sued the county, and then through the litigation a settlement would have been obtained -- most likely through binding arbitration.
But, at the same time, to settle a civil disagreement through criminal prosecution seems to be abuse of power at most naked.
Both of the parties should be spanked by their Mamas.
...for hosting and their rates have really skyrocketed since their purchase of SCO licenses.
"Well yah see sherif, I put my Pam & Tommy Lee movies and my Paris Hilton movie on your server, just for storage. I didn't know they were accessible for download... Anyway you owe me $300,000.00 for bandwidth."
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
It does appear the webmaster is a scumbag, and probably had evil intentions from the getgo. However, the sheriff's office made an oral agreement, no written contract, with this person.
The evil webmaster then said, after 3 years and however many hits later, I need some cash. Pay me a lot of money or I'll shut it off to cut my costs.
Sheriff replies "Screw You!" and throws him in jail.
This is a Civil Issue, not a bullshit criminal case.
Don't be a zoa (zealous overbearing ass), be happy!
The proper charge should be fraud for improperly charging, not extortion, for pulling something due to non-payment..
Both parties are stupid for not having a contract.. With out that, who is to say who is right or wrong?...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
but, fuck, who wants that smelly old bitch?
everyone help out with his bandwidth costs!
let's all check out his website
anyway, he should of been smart enough to have the bills sent to the county clerk's office in the first place, never be a liason for bills to go through, lesson learned, and learned the hard way.
common sense isn't so common.
Runnin' On Empty
From the article
Kaiser responded to Simmon's claim that the case is a civil matter.
"The O.J. (O.J. Simpson) case showed us that a criminal case can be a civil case," he said.
Using that reasoning, there's no need for civil cases, becuase OJ's case was a civil case! This strikes me as plain vendictive from the Sherrif's dept. Surely they could have transfered the site to another provider if they didn't like the fee.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The article lists www.macombsheriff.com as the offending web site.
.com TLD? Was it a commercial web site? I'm sick of .gov and .mil sites using .com because it's k00l3r. These sites should use the proper TLD, and of course it should be impossible for a _person_ to own these domains.
.org because he felt like supporting Verisign, what with all of their sitefinder-related legal fees.
Which begs the question: Why does it have a
Of course, when I rule the world there will be different TLDs for individuals, companies, military, government, and nonprofits - and a commercial site would never be able to even claim an individual's web site is infringing (or whatever) since they will live in different namespaces.
Ironically, the alleged extortionist's domain is justice4pat.com, seeming to suggest that this is a business venture for him.
Or maybe he just decided not to use
The response of the Sheriff's Dept. is clearly overblown, but this guy was clearly not operating on the level.
To be honest, I wouldn't want to do business with either party.
This site is ranked 4,978,900 in traffic.
l s? q=&url=macombsheriff.com
It never broke the top 100,000, so there is no way it had 3 million hits, unless each page contained 1 million invisible gif images.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detai
If an Indian firm had built the site, some podunk sheriff couldn't abuse his authority over a contract dispute. Offshoring: good for civil liberties.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Whether he was justified or not (I haven't RTFA), playing hardball with the local sheriff just isn't a wise move.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Have you seen their website? http://www.macomb-sheriff.com/
Their new web designer should probably go to jail too.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Well, that does sound a bit absurd, but I sure betcha the copy of the site in the Wayback machine will probably surpass that in this one single day thanks to ericspinder's helpful little url link in the parent :-)
"Welcome to the Springfield Police department web site."
"Press YES if you have committed a crime, and wish to confess. Otherwise, press NO."
[Click]
"You have selected NO, which means you have committed a crime, but do not wish to confess."
"A padywagon is now speeding to your location."
"In the meantime, please look at our online store. You have the right to remain...Fabulous!"
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'm not sure what the old site looked like, but the new site is much more dashing than the old site!
I say yeah, charge him with extortion. That's just utterly bogus.
This sig no verb.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out -- because I hate those nation wrecking kikes.
Then they came for the communists
and I did not speak out -- because they killed millions of innocents.
What I don't understand is where the $300,000 comes from! 3.5 million hits a month equals something like 16kb/s constant upload, which is nothing, really. Even if he had a bandwith cap (which is unlikely), he couldn't have run up $300,000 in expenses. That means he now trying to charge for the work he initially volunteered, and carried through by shutting down the web page. Have fun in jail, Pat!
The fact is that he did, based on my reading of the statue commit extoration.
The lesson to be learned:
1. Have a contract in place, don't do things on a handshake and a nod.
A contract - and the exercise of building one - isn't just a legal play. A good contract is an agreement on what X will do for Y, and what Y will do in return for X. It is like an API definition.
2. If you have a dispute, don't take it into your hands.
He should have sat down with an attorney and have had them put together a letter of the following form:
"Dear Sir,
The service I have been providing to you per our oral agreement of December XX, XXXX and subsequentally afirmed in various conversations and by you use of the service, is currently costing me $XXX.XX a month to provide due to the traffic level of XXX,XXX visits per month.
To date I have not received payment for this service. Given the current situation, I can no longer continue to provide this service beyond (today+30 days).
If you aren't willing to pay for the service I am providing, will work with to transition to another service provider within these 30 days.
Please note, any assistance in such a transition, doesn't indicate a release of my claims for services provided for XX months at a cost of $x,xxx a month.
Yours,
Joe WebMaster
3. Didn't anyone every teach him "you don't spit into the wind, you don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't anger the local Sheriff!"?
at it's best. It could only happen in the god blessed america...
I thought it was called a lien.
New and improved site. Wow, they think this is an improvement? The old site was not great, but it appeared to be a little better. This "new and improved site" is one of the most horrid sites I have ever seen. Was it done by a third grader? Viewing the source, I see it was made with Microsoft FrontPage 5.0. Probably one of the cops did it at home in his/her spare time. They should have spent a few bucks and hired someone with a little graphical abilites.
This story is weird. I think the guy had some hopes on getting rich quick off the tax payers. However, I do not think it was a severe as the sheriff's office is making it out to be. I don't know the costs of hosting a site. So what would 3.5 million hits per month for three years run for your average hosting site? $300,000? That sounds a little steep to me. Maybe it was a dedicated host, which would add to the cost.
These charges seem like overkill. If your not happy with the deal, then drop the charges in exchange for the hostname and old site content. I am sure the guy would rather go for that then possible jail time on bogus charges. What a litigious society we live in now adays.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Now the article claims he spent $300,000 of his funds which implies there are probably reciepts.
One of two things happened here.
Web Designer is trying to milk the sherrif
or
Sherrif is trying to get the advantages of a very busy web site for nothing
Ok, granted, this guy is dumb, Really dumb, but not neccesarily trying to extrot money: If he's having to front costs for the City/Sheriff's Website then he should have every right to take down the website ifhe can't afford it. There was obviously no agreement regarding transfer of property or owenership of the website. The sheriff's claim that the site was public property should have been backed up with the idea that it was also a public responsibility (i.e. payment for services rendered) It they want the site put back up they should buy the content and pay for hosting themselves, or pay for devopment costs at least, but jailing the developer is the _dumbest_ idea is indeed they wish to keep "their" content
Can I be a Luddite too?
I haven't read a single comment that is at the heart of this issue. The reason the Sheriffs department considers it extortion, is because they claim they own the content.
Demanding money to give a person something that he/she owns IS extortion. But does the Sheriffs department own the content, or does the hoster (since he was hosting it for free).
It should probably have been a civil case first to resolve the IP. The owner of the IP would then have had firm legal ground for whatever action they wanted.
But I don't agree with slapping him with a criminal suit right off the bat.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
The guy couldn't jail county officials or seize their property. This is a perfect example of why we need lawyers and huge damage awards, contrary to businesses and Republicans would have you believe.
Someone disagrees with you? Good thing you're a cop! Wrestle them to the ground, kneel on their neck and handcuff 'em. Then fling 'em in a cell until they can raise bail. Turn a civil dispute into a criminal case. That's not abuse of power, that's proving your manhood. woot.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
I make over 100k/year as a software developer (web-based) so what's 3 X 100K? 300K that leaves out actual physical costs.
No contract, they are both stupid. However, it is an extraordinary abuse of power to have the guy arrested on extortion for taking away the service they haven't paid for.
3.5 million hits per month, not year, is what he's reporting. Not that it justifies the $300,000 but the number you've got is off by more than an order of magnitude.
NERDS!!!!
But one of the key parts of any contract is compensation. If one side isn't getting anything, then in most legal worlds, there is no contract.
The guy's demands for continued service may have been... excessive... but as far as I can see, he wasn't getting paid anything and there seems to have been no useful contract. Hence he should have been free to walk away, and the police should have been equally free to turn his offer down and do something else instead. I don't quite see how asking for money to do something in future is extortion just because you've been doing voluntarily in the past.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The quotes you state are from the Justice 4 Pat campaign, an apparently biased source drumming up support for Pat.
Personally, I'd trust a newspaper over blatant assertions by an activist site any day.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
At first I thought, oh great, the stormtroopers have overreacted, but I have to agree, this guy is a opportunistic scumbag.
While I doubt this actually fits the legal definition of extortion, the cops have to accept the fact that, in accepting a 'free' site (without an enforceable written or indisputable oral contract), they probably have no legitimate rights to the content or the domain. So much for free.
The webmaster screwed up in that he was probably trying to cash in on 'development time' (if he did in fact spend much time on it), and as such, HE is SOL because he also has no contract. In fact, since there's a snowball's chance in hell that he paid $300k in bandwidth overage fees, he's an idiot because he can't even prove that's a fair price.
I doubt they will make extortion stick, but they succeeded is seriously fscking this guy's life up.
Maybe I should try the wayback machine or google cache...and sell them the reconstructed site, for say $50k? Hm. I've got work to do.
- If you do decide your work is worth something then don't jump from free to $300,000
You shouldn't offer things for free if you really want to profit. All you'll do is make yourself miserable at best. If you're really stupid you might even lose touch with reality and demand $300,000. Did he really expect them to pay? Unbelievable...
"Never tell me the odds"
You can't win in a dispute with a cracker sheriff. Can't wait until he gets tried in front of a cracker judge and cracker jury.
Did I get the primary post? I refreshed twice and nothing came up.
This is an outrage! he should have used open source bandwidth because it's free!
JON
Just the man tryin' to keep a brother down.
On his website, it appears he has only three clients, and one design style.
Web Archive version of the old sherrif's site, and the new one.
-- Mark Lyon http://www.marklyon.org
This story just goes to show two things --
1. if you're going to do something like this, don't work without a rigidly defined contract.
2. if you're going to sink thousands upon thousands of your own money into doing a favor for the local PD, reread #1. Twice.
3. don't get involved with people who can claim eminent domain on you. Those people will turn on you in a split second, because they can.
My sig is too lon
I'm a programmer. My friend works in IT at a local USDA lab. One of the scientists there told my friend they needed to automate some of their "blasting". They needed to take DNA they found in plants and compare it to a bunch of national databases and depending on the results take it to other national databases, etc. etc (these national databases were all websites so it was A LOT of text processing). The final results needed to be put into an excel spreadsheet. I worked for a couple of months and had about 4 complete rewrites. It worked fine at my house, but it did not work at their labs.
What happened was, they had many many computers being natted with one ip address. These websites would see one ip address flooding their servers and cut them off or give one of MANY random errors. It was almost impossible to reproduce anywhere else. I got almost no co-operation on their part to get more ip addresses for the boxes doing the dna blasting. All they would say is "It doesn't work right". That was the extent of my bug reporting. "It doesn't work right".
It was basically impossible to get meetings with them and the project lasted about 5 months with only 5 meetings (each lasting less than a half hour). After not seeing one penny of payment and MANY thousands of lines of code later, I told them I'm not going to work on it anymore until I get some payment. That's about when I couldn't get a hold of them anymore.
That was my first and last time working on code without a contract before hand. I did not recieve a single penny for my months of work. They acted like they were in it to help out a young programmer. The USDA was in it to help the USDA. About the end of it all they hired a "programmer". One of these people who had many degrees and could "program" in many languages, but couldn't write a simple program on the spot. From what I understand they tried to get him to write it because he was supposed to be this experienced programmer with many degrees. It made me feel good that after 6 months they still don't have anything from him.
They were greedy. They taught me a lesson. Don't work for ANYONE, without a contract before hand. No matter how much they pretend they are looking out for your interests, THEY'RE NOT.
The Site Goes Down
Pat did not ask for payment of any of that investment, but simply explained to the county he could no longer afford to host and maintain the site for free. For 2 years the sheriff refused to negotiate a way to continue paying for the site.
In January 2004 Pat could no longer afford to host this site out of his own pocket and shut it down.
So, rather than simply transferring it over to the county and telling them to deal with it, he SHUTS IT DOWN and effectively HOLDS IT HOSTAGE? If Pat is *really* not looking for his investment back, he'd simply hand it over to anyone else and be done with it.
Those 'testimonials'. Sheesh! From that page...
To pay for hosting from your own pocket for over 3 years as Mr. Richard has done is an incredibly gracious act.
HOW MUCH does this guy pay for bandwidth? Even at $2.50/gig, he'd have to be pushing terabytes per month. Turn on mod_gzip, for goodness' sake! I certainly don't pretend to know how much traffic they were pushing, but he's either got really bad rates from someone upstream, or he's adding lots of markup to whatever he's claiming in usage.
But even so - if his defenders are saying he's not out for compensation, I say turn the site over to someone else and wash your hands of it, lesson learned. He *is* looking for money back out of this, I bet.
His supporters can't write either...
"You can also view any of our passed updates by clicking the links below."
creation science book
Boy, I dunno about you guys, but I sure like ovekill.
Hope he wasn't running a linux server...
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Looks like a case of mass miscommunication or mass misrepresentation. $300,000? Probably more like $25-30K at the most. 3.5 Million hits per month? Well, "hits" from bots and worms don't count. I'd like to see the log files. That ain't right. Perhaps there were some other sites on the server that Pat was trying to cover the costs for as well. I find it hard to believe that 3.5 million people a MONTH would want to see some random Sherriff's website. I find it hard to believe that 3.5 mil. hits a year would hit that site.
I'll suspend disbelief and go with it--so why would it $300,000? Did he buy a Sun E series? Did he have an OC12 dropped to his living room? How could a part-time Sherrif cum web hacker even have $300K to spend unless he was billing seriously hourlies on imaginary invoices.
Dude: big league bucks require big league paperwork. Pat shoulda got a contract or transferred the domain to the county when he "ran outta cash." He should have negotiated a transfer of rights when he ran out of money. Shutting it down was stupid--cops don't like it when you play the power trip. Ask Rodney King.
Well, now Pat's in jail. A jury will decide--based on evidence from both sides who is wrong and who is right. We, the slashdot readers cum legal experts can comment 'til carpal tunnel takes us out, but this belongs to a jury to make the call. We don't have enough evidence or information, but it sounds like some stupid sh*t went down on both sides.
>>Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county Let this be a lesson to all of us - when working with or for the government, always demand the money from the secret slush fund, not from taxpayer's dollars.
We need more details to know what went wrong in the negotiations. It's quite possible that the sheriff said "we're never paying you a cent, go jump", and it's equally possible that Richard said "I'm not giving you ftp access to the site, you must pay my fee"
If either of these were true then this situation would develop naturally
Oh... Richard may have owned the domain name, but that wouldn't have stopped the Sheriff's dept from transferring the site to a new domain name, providing they had ftp access. They could sue Richard for the original domain name later - in a civil court. Yes it's an inconvenience, but not one worth 4 criminal charges!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Ex-Macomb sheriff Hackel is free today
April 24, 2003
BY ALEXA CAPELOTO
Today marks the end of William Hackel's three years as a prisoner, and the
beginning of his return to freedom following his rape conviction in 2000.
The former Macomb County sheriff is expected to leave the Charles Egeler
Reception and Guidance Center in Jackson at 8 a.m. after being granted his
first possible parole date last month.
He was transferred to the center in late March from a Kentucky federal
prison in preparation for his release.
His wife and mother will be in Jackson to greet him and drive him home to
Macomb County, said son and current Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel. He
said his father's immediate focus is on reconnecting with family.
"He just wants to be with his wife and my grandmother," Mark Hackel said
Wednesday. "I'll try to see him as soon as possible. He's my father and I
definitely want to spend time with him."
Even as the ex-sheriff, 61, readjusts to life outside of prison, he plans to
continue efforts to clear his name. Birmingham attorney and longtime friend
Terence Page said he has asked the Michigan Supreme Court to review an
appellate court's refusal to reverse Hackel's conviction.
The court has not issued a decision.
Meanwhile, Hackel can expect to return to countless friends and supporters
who say they still believe he did not rape a 25-year-old female acquaintance
at the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort in Mt. Pleasant in October 1999.
Several of them are collaborating on a Friends of Bill Hackel fund-raiser,
scheduled for June 9 at CJ Barrymore's in Clinton Township. Jerry Medley, a
friend of Hackel's for almost 50 years, said he expects 700 to 1,000 people,
as well as the guest of honor, to attend.
"We had an event two years ago and there were police chiefs, police
officers, judges -- all friends of Bill Hackel," he said. Tickets for the
June event cost $25.
Hackel is no longer in the custody of the Michigan Department of
Corrections, but he is still under the eye of the law. His two-year parole
period requires him to register as a sex offender and to check in regularly
with a parole agent.
In addition, he is required to complete sex offender treatment and is
prohibited from contacting the victim or possessing any items related to a
law enforcement agency.
Hackel served as county sheriff for 24 years until he was convicted in April
2000 of two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and sentenced to
3 to 15 years in prison. The crime shocked community members who said they
considered him a trusted leader who cared more about justice than power.
"I'm sure it's not going to be easy" readjusting to life after
incarceration, Medley said. "But knowing the person that he is, he'll get
through it."
To all of you posters claiming he should have had a contract, I say why... he offered to run the site for free, a site the HE OWNS and worked on. Was he supposed to contract with himself ? Or maybe a contract that states that he would work for free until such time as he didn't want to any longer ?
I don't get it ? Is there really any legal reason he can't pull down HIS OWN website ? If he approaches the Sheriff and suggests that he need money for bandwidth or he's turning HIS WEBSITE off, how is that extorting ?
All you William Hung fansites take note... don't take them down or else !
An arrest, possible prison sentence, confiscation of equipment... if anyone doesn't see this as a small-town Sheriff abusing their position they are missing the point.
It's not illegal to ask for money to support YOUR website...
Wouldn't that make Slashdot guilty of extorting money by withholding stories from non-subscribers ?
Nuts...
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
How many before being slashdotted? 10?
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
"We only charge $100/month for businesses! "
What a great deal.
Have you seen the designs for these sites? A retarded three-legged, one-eyed dog named Lucky could have made a better design. It looks like every Angelfire website, circa 1996. Has this guy not heard of Adobe CS? There are enough wizards in those programs to make even a pile of crap into something halfway decent looking. That $300,000 is like 3,000 copies of Adobe CS Premium. Looks like he bought a "Teach Yourself Frontpage in 24 hours" books and went to town.
I hate sigs.
My brother-in-law is an experienced contract lawyer. He has made the point to me that the key issue when working with somebody is that good faith must be present on both sides. Irrespective of what any contract says, if it gets nasty and either party starts "enforcing" that contract, the only people that win are the lawyers. I thought that was extremely interesting.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Wow, for such a busy site those are some amazingly affordable advertisement fees.
>Has anyone on Slashdot ever had an experience >where a client was unwilling to compensate you >for either your work, and/or the resources >required to do your work?"
Two letters: GE
Their idea of compensation is 90 days and if they are early they knock down the price 1%-2%.
putting aside the blatant extortion, since when was "using a computer to commit a crime" a crime? Commiting a crime is bad in itself, but when you use a computer to do it, it's even worse? Does that make sense?
Somehow you are assuming that the Sheriff owned the site. Mr. Richard created the site, and there is no indication in the article that he gave it to the Sheriff. He agreed to operate the site in return for publicity. Your explanation is ridiculous. At best he could be accused of breach of contract, but there is not even a strong case for that. It isn't clear whether publicity really counts as consideration. A better analogy would be one where I offer a service at a certain price and you refuse to buy it at that price. As far as I know, that is still legal. If the Sheriff didn't want to pay, he should build and host his own site.
Some lie...
IT BURNS IT BURNS!
I was going to say it looks like a 10 year old designed it. But my 10 year old came in and said "Gee dad, that sure sucks.".
I hope they get this guy before he defaces any other web site.
One way or another, this is an interesting situation. Not because of what he was charging or the details of the setup to the action, but of the action itself.
Essentially, we have a non-contract situation, and the provider decides to terminate the arrangement, and the ownership of the content and name are in dispute (who would win such a dispute, no matter how obvious the answer, not the point).
For any private citizen, the only recourse would be litigation in civil courts.
Since the customer was a police department, the matter is taken up as a criminal case. His property is seized (the customer took posession of the files in question), and he's jailed, finger-printed, and now has a criminal record of arrest.
Does a senator get to fix his daughter's traffic tickets?
Does a judge get to let his friends off?
Does the dog catcher get to kill his enemy's uncollared dog as a stray, when he knows full well whose dog it is?
The police engaged in kidnapping, battery (by placing cuffs on him), theft and libel.
Not because it was the normal action, but because they COULD. He may be a scumbag, but he's not put in a position of trust by those he's elected (or hired) to protect. He doesn't take an oath of office as certainly the judge who authorized the warrant did, and I suspect the officers did, too.
The wrong fellow's out on bail, here.
I know a bit myself, but have no interest in really sharing anything as my memory might not be perfect on all matters detailing some of the things this 'sheriff' has been involved in.
Needless to say, I am certain that one could find something searching goole, The Detroit News or Detroit Free Press and other Michigan, Detroit Area publications.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Wait, please RTFA. He OFFERED to run the site for free initially, I quote:
Doesn't sound like he was getting screwed to me. Sounds like he pulled a turnaround when he asked the county for $300,000 all of a sudden.
I've actually been in a situation when we've had to shut someone's site down because they wouldn't pay. It took us more than 6 months to do it though, because we were professional and considerate, and it wasn't even a big site, just one of our small clients. But we had to do it after a while because he was just totally ignoring our bills and communications. He did eventually pay a reduced sum that we agreed to through negotiations. We then surrendered his domain gladly. But my point is, we gave him a long time and we tried really hard to communicate with him before shutting him down. It was the most drastic thing I've EVER done to a client, and I still feel a little weird about it.
This sounds different. Sounds like ye old bait and switch to me. And it doesn't really sound like they were out of communication--something I'm sure should have been worked out before the drastic step of shutting down their site happened. ESPECIALLY considering this guy offered to do it for free initially. You don't just shut down someone's site, especially not a high profile client like this. You just don't. There are other avenues way before that happens.
I think then that the sheriff lost any real legal claim to anything on the site at that point.
So he did not "take something away from someone else and threaten not to return it", he refused to continue providing a service to someone for free that was costing him money ($300,000 or $300, the amount doesn't matter that much).
I'd say that the real lesson here is much simpler. If you do something nice for someone, be prepared to be screwed unless you've worked out a contract in advance (and if the someone is SCO, don't count on the contract). And I'll admit that I'm still idealist enough to be saddened by it (though I'm cynic enough to be unsurprised).
Of interesting note... The domain justice4pat.com (The 2nd link) has their DNS hosted by runningwolf.com servers... Runningwolf was the name of Pat's company. Hmmm....
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
The way the website offer should have started the process was by sending them a registered letter informing the sheriff that he no longer could afford to offer the county his services for free, and that as of a certain date he intends on terminating the service unless another agreement can be made.
He could then conclude the letter by informing them that he is willing to provide services to the county at less then his normal prices, and would be willing to consider a request for an extention of the deadline for a reasonable time if needed to ensure continuity.
Extortion charges are a bit extreme, but if he's trying to show his power over the site to the sheriff, he shouldn't overreach. He managed to get the sheriff to overreach as well, and while the charges will likely be overruled by a court, that isn't a fun thing to have to go through.
Never - I repeat NEVER - verbally promise a free service at a loss to local law enforcement, because if you do and run out of money, they will lock you up! The guy should have simply declared bankruptcy and let the lawyers wrangle the mess out, but because he requested to renegotiate for one of those strange and unheard of contracts where services were exchanged for money he wound up in the clink. Wouldn't every business enjoy having such power over their employees and contractors... Un-fucking-believeable. I really hope the judge throws out those criminal charges ASAP and the guy's lawyer files a wrongful arrest suit immediately afterward. I used to donate to the FOP - but after seeing the horrible way some cops treat perfectly lawful citizens, and how the department backs them up without regard to their behavior, I'll never give the FOP a dime again. This is just plain disgusting. --M
This case is a perfect illustration of the biggest problem with donating ones time or money; even when it appears to be a good cause. All too often, the recipient comes to rely on the gift and view it as an entitlement.
- scsg
They guy was frikkin arrested, his equipment impounded, and he's being threatened with 20 years in jail. For a dispute that should be settled in civil court. Is the guy snow white innocent in the whole affair? Probably not. Is the police department committing a huge abuse of authority? Hell yes!
- Extortion. Threats of harm or injury to another person or his property? Just what is it he has supposedly threatend to harm?
- Larceny by conversion. This assumes that you took something of value and used it for yourself rather than its original purposes. Just what is it that this guy supposedly took? And how is he using it for his own purposes?
- Using a computer to commit a crime. This assumes a crime is committed. It's also a stupid law. Might as well make it illegal to use a stick to commit a crime. Committing the crime is a crime, no matter what you use to do it.
- Obstruction of justice (bad link). This is based on the guy lying to the police about who owns the web site. Dumb thing to do, but "justice" doesn't figure prominently in this story in any case.
If all they want is the site name, they don't even need the courts. You can't keep someone else's name without a valid reason. That's what all the cybersquatting cases were about. The Macomb Sherriff could simply argue to ICANN that Pat Richard doesn't have a valid claim to the name "macombsherriff.com" and they could get it back. (Technically, it should be "macombsherriff.gov" anyway.)===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Ugh. And in response to the old 'designer', the only way you'd be getting 3 million hits on some small town sherrif page is if you're posting 'The Strip Search of the Day" gallery. It just doesn't happen.
This is just another in a long line of public battles of idiots, rife with overreaction and failures to communicate.
Just like the internet and small town politics.
NAAAWWWWWWWWWW!
So the basic logic behind this is if you ever do something as a favor for the sheriff's department, you are obligated to do it forever, or be charged with four felonies if you stop doing it?
The statement about him being "privileged" to provide the website gives me the chills. So working for the state for free is a privilege now? That's just plain scary.
Many of your are stating that he's rediculous for trying to get $300K dollars from the sherrif, and that should amount to extortion. ...For two years Pat spent $300,000 of his own money to host and maintain the site, never asking for nor receiving a profit.
Pat is in fact (according to his web site) not attempting to recoup any of that money. To quote from his site that you didn't bother to read:
The Site Goes Down
Pat did not ask for payment of any of that investment, but simply explained to the county he could no longer afford to host and maintain the site for free....
Isn't that clear enough? He just wanted compensation for the hosting costs that he was incurring. Nowhere in that page does he claim to want back pay, or IP rights to the content.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Don't try to rip off cops, MORON!
*laughs*
What was this fool thinking. And then the save pat website tries to make it appear as though all he asked for was them to pay for the bandwith.
There are definetally two extremely different sides to this story. Somehow, I sincerely doubt that the police are going to lie on a case they intentionally drew public attention to.
Regardless, I'm most certainly not going to donate money to help this persons legal fund - I find the statements made there to be very misleading and untrue.
The Sheriff's side seems to have quite a bit of supporting evidence. Most of which you can read on quotes in previous comments.
When the police came for him it must have been like looking at the logo for his own company. LOL.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
Holy fsking sh!ts. This new web site sukz hugely!!! I'll offer my fscked-up web design for a few brews now and only $150k later. Jeez, what next, let's sue the buffets for making us fat? Their as both wrong as man and sheep relationships.
So this guy volunteered to build and host this website. After 3 years he can no longer afford to do so, so he stops. Then, the police say that since he ceased volunteering his service and required compensation for his services that he is guilty of extortion? One thing i didn't get in reading the article the first time (and i seems slashdotted now) was, is his fee he asked for a charge for services in the past, or for future/continuing service? If it's for past fees, then i would say that is questionable behavior. if it is for future service, what is wrong with that? He had volunteered, but can no longer afford to volunteer, so he's asking for money. If they can't pay him, he takes away the service he provided.
anyway, this guy should have had a contract in place even if it's to say who owns what once it's created. the police seem to be forcing the issue by using their position of power.
To suggest that a newspaper, or for that matter any "press" source should be considered unbiased is is patently... foolish.
I challenge you, or any other reader to name a truly unbiased source for this or for news in general! At best you'll find sources that listen to "both sides"... But remember, these media "balanced" news outlets choose who they will interview/cite to represent these sides. And that is BIAS my friends.
CNN - Biased
FOX - Biased
ABC - Biased
CBS - Biased
NBC - Biased
BBC - Biased
Times (london) - biased
NYTimes - Biased
WSJ - Biased
WashPost - Biased
WashTimes - Biased
SticksvilleDaily - Guess
You may prefer a particular bias. But there IS bias.
Shoo, troll.
For those curious, the sheriff's department has put up a new website to replace the old one.
/.ing extortion? If you don't think it is, vote by clicking that second link a few times :)
The new one sucks.
Here's a bad snapshot of the Old one
Here's the New one
So is a
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Couldn't the above story be considered entrapment on the part of the police since they seem to have never intended to pay but still require the results that incurred costs on his part? Obviously he'd eventually cut off the service since they weren't paying him.
Not supplying a free website isn't extortion. I
Hosting something for 3 years, under an agreement that you would do so for free, then trying to charge for it retroactively is definately improper, and a violation of the existing contract.
If he would have merely tried to charge from a set point in time, and perhaps for the content he had created it, he would be safe.
Back charging in violation of the existing contract, this really isn't defensible, and he isn't entitled to that money.
Removing a valuable public service, and withholding all information from that service, unless you receive money you aren't entitled to is just not a fair way to play.
For those of you that might no know..Macomb County is the count just to the north of Detroit.
0 13 82.htm
Now if you read the following link..you will find out why there was so much traffic to that website.
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0303/07/d01-1
Sherrif Hackle is the son of the former sherrif of 23 years who is doing 5-16 years in the federal pen, for laws he violated while in office.....
The man did it out of his own pocket and asked to be paid back. The Sherrif's weren't FORCED to become dependent on the web site; they CHOSE to use it and they CHOSE to allow Pat Richard to continue to pay out of his own pocket, despite repeated attempts to negotiate payment.
It's Pat Richard's property, and if the Sherrif's office wants control of it, they need to compensate the man for the time and money he spent on it. The "priviledge" of developing a web site for a Sherrif's office such as one that would arrest a man after abusing his resources for so long must be quite an honor!
Macomb County Sheriff's Office: FUCK YOU. Freeloading losers.
For 3 years. That's $8.300 a month. What kind of provider charges THIS much for webhosting? $270 daily, don't you think, the guy was asking for it?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Fountainhead Media (MACOMBSHERIFF-DOM)
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
Domain Name: MACOMBSHERIFF.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Stanley, Michael (36687838P)
fountainhead_463@hotmail.com
Fountainhead Media
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
999-999-9999
You are absolutely right, $300K for bandwidth costs for a small-to-medium size site is crazy. But its not just for bandwidth, its also for labor! Bandwidth costs + hardware costs + 3 years salary for a professional web dever to design, update and maintain a site could easily be $300,000.
Maybe your time is worthless and you work for nothing, but most of the rest of us like to be compensated for our work. Did the guy origionaly agree to so this for free! Sure he did. Was he working without a contract? Sure he was. But the site was his, and as there was no contract he had the right to take it down at a whim, and ask whatever price he wanted for to maintain it. If the county didn't want to pony up the money, the most they should have done was tell him to go to hell. NOT arrest him, impound his equipment, press bogus criminal charges against him, and threaten to send him to jail for 20 years.
This was nothing more than a huge abuse of authority by the county and the sheriffs office.
Yes - I especially like how they post pictures of SUSPECTS on their website that have not even been convicted of a crime.
e st s/PeterKelley.jpg
That's fair game. They are public records. Besides, are you going to tell me that a guy who looks like this isn't guilty?
http://www.macomb-sheriff.com/images/Mace%20Arr
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
The actual number of visitors is something like 10,016,000, it's just that their counter doesn't support that many digits so it's rolled over a few times.
There is no question this is a poor attempt at extortion. There's only a few possible explanation scenarios and they're all BS:
Perhaps the site really did cost 8k/mo to host. From the beginning? If so, projections would have easily revealed he would be broke soon. But, he offered to do it for free - did he pay this amount out of his pocket? Unlikely. It's unlikely there was ever this much traffic.
If there was that much traffic after the first few months, did he send logs to the Sheriff's dept with an explanation that these logs represent doom for the site without a major cash infusion? Do such logs exist - not likely. If so, why did he sit on three years worth of logs?
Perhaps he felt he deserved compensation for time spent operating the site, and that came to 8k/mo. Why did he wait three years to ask for it?
Perhaps he didn't wait three years at all. Perhaps after the first two months of pro-bono hosting, he decided he needed compensation. Perhaps he asked the Sheriff's Dept and got stonewalled. Perhaps he continued asking for three years. If he knew he was getting burned the whole time, did he ever keep records of his requests from the Sheriff's dept for compensation? With itemized bills and proof of hits so that he could sue them later in civil court? Who would do that?
There are so many holes in this story, it's not even funny. Clearly this is some guy hosting a site in his basement for nothing on his cable modem. (anyone have old DNS data for this domain?) Later, he tries to extort money from the worst possible source. This isn't much different than people calling the cops to report their crack pipes stolen.
Of course, he had a "company", Running Wolf Inc - meh - he probably had a $100/mo managed server with l33ts3rv3rs.net which he hosts 50 other sites on. Google for "running wolf inc hosting" returns nothing.
# Erik
Welp, I have read over the parent story, the 2 linked stories, and the replies on this site. While there is not enough to make a final judgement. With that said...
Conclusion:
1. Pat ran the risk of any business, investing time and money.
2. He registered the name in his own name, as customers do not understand domains, UDAI, and why am I getting this bill from this odd company.
3. Pat tried to get recompense for 2 years of work
4. Pat is a poor business man who doesn't know contracts, TOS's etc.
5. Pat is inexperianced.
Also from this page, presumably, the average Slashdoter:
1. Is a talented web designer. Not to mention developer.
2. Is brilliant at business, draws up brilliant, watertight contracts for every job.
3. Is paid $1.50 per hour. And wouldn't have it any other way.
4. Believes crimes against soft entities(murdered, raped humans) is a darwinian consequence, whereas being a bad web designer, and business man deserves death( with preliminary torture session for resistering domain name in his name).
5. Is relieved to see IT worker pay structure is somewhere around street sweeper, and lawyers, copyrighters, graphic designers, govt employees are sooo deserving of the high pay they get.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The important thing here is the county never paid him one dime he provided this service for free hoping they would see the value and compensate him later. The important meaning of this is that HE OWNS EVERY LINE OF CODE IN THAT SITE and has every right to stop providing the service and to not give the county what he created.
In a related note I am suing my ISP for extortion ...they gave me free DSL for the first three months and now they are demanding I pay for it or they will shut me off.
the difference between being insightful, and being modded insightful.
I don't even think "Tha_Big_Guy23" read the article....
Pay for bandwidth costs at $300,000 you could start your own damn datacenter!!
a few simple facts: The Sherrif did not have any financial burden associated with the website. The web designer registered the name, hosted the site, and presumably maintained it. The site belonged, in it's entirety, to the designer. The web designer did incur some real costs associated with hosting the site (almost certainly not to the tune of $300k though). There was no contract, therefore there was no gaurantee for any type of "level of service" The designer/service provider can lawfully terminate his service at any time. The County always had the option of saying "gee thanks, that was fun, now take your toys and go home, we are going to play in our own backyard now" The website designer make an OFFER to continue service for $300. The County got upset. The Sherrif abused his authority by seizing the hardware and the IP of the poor website designer. Tar and feather the web designer and put him in stocks in front of the courthouse for a day or two. Fire the Sherrif who abused the authority of his office just because the web-designer got tired of playing nicey-nicey. Done
check out there temp website. it's HORRIBlE!!! The "new and improved" site.
Having lived in Macomb County for years, it might interest you to know about the history of this sheriff.
Mark Hackel, the current sheriff in this case, is the son of William Hackel, the prior sheriff. Daddy was sentenced to jail for rape a couple years back.
See: http://www.detnews.com/2000/macomb/0005/17/
Now while you might argue that his father's actions have no relation to his, please consider that crooked deals have followed this family around for years. I'm not even going to get started on how black's from Detroit, Mt. Clemens and other subs are treated driving in their jurisdiction.
While I think the fee's demanded by this hoster are without question out of line, the methods used by the sheriff's office are a distinct abuse of power which reflects the county's past.
Was this guy really trying to get money from the county or from the shreriff himself.
It seems to me that www.macombshreriff.com is not exactly the proper domain for a government website.
How is withholding this domain possibly extorting the county? It's not like it can be that valuable to the county government, only to one mans re-election bid.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
A slew of Slashdotter's ranting on and on about the $300,000 dollars as if it's dead set in stone that he absoulutely without a doubt asked "for $300,000 dollars or else!".
You want to know what happened? He probably asked them for a $15k up-front payment for the next year, maybe less... whatever. Just enough to keep him from LOSING money on the site. When the Sheriff got all pissy he probably VERBALLY informed them that it's actually cost him near $300,000 in time and real money over the years... which is probably inflated but given that he was pissed at the time he's likely to over-estimate when shooting from the hip.
Show me, in writing, an invoice from this guy with the figure $300,000 on it (or something anywhere NEAR that) and I'll beleive it.
Anything less than that and I'm going to chalk it up to an overzealous sheriff going way overboard.
Hell, he's probably lucky he's alive.
Sure, we all agree that the claimed expense of $300,000 to run the website is very high. However, we really cannot commit on this guy's actions, as the two articles presented are extremely contradictory. The first one does lead to the impression of extortion, that he wanted a large amount of money to keep the site up. The second one says that he simple wanted money to cover his future expenses, not past.
I was on a grand jury at one time, and got to hear cases like this. This seems to be a situation where Pat Richard may or may not be in trouble. It all depends on state law, how it is written, and how the grand jury interprets the law.
In my opinion, the charges are ludicrous. The extortion charge won't stick, based on "750.213 Malicious threats to extort money." According to that law, a malicious threat of injury, accusation of a crime or a threat that causes a modification of a person's behavior has to be demonstrated. In neither of the links does anything remotely resemble that. Additionally, the obstruction of justice charge listed is really "750.505 Punishment for indictable common law offenses," which is a Michigan catchall for throwing the book at someone.
Since the prosecutor seems squarely behind this one, I certainly wouldn't take anything lightly. However, I don't think this will be as bad as it sounds. Most likely, this will simply be remanded to a lower court and be reduced to a civil suit filed against the state, not Pat Richard. Hopefully, Pat Richard will learn from this and study a little contract law, in order to make better decisions in the future.
He offered to do it for free. Then after a while he decides he cannot afford to do it free anymore, imo, he should have just turned it over to the sheriff department and let them run it and pay the bills.
This is a good case as to why contracts are always needed - free or not.
The heathens of course! Gooooooooo heathens!
It's perfectly OK to charge ginormous emounts for your time -- but only if all parties know in advance how much you're charging. That's why I say I wouldn't want to do business with either party -- regardless of whether the guy is being shady, the sheriff's dept. seems to have overreacted and generally abused their position ("Extortion" is generally reserved for threat of physical violence); but Richards didn't exactly play nice, either.
...hits since the birth of the universe!? /. RIP
Way Back Machine
Gosh, everyone here seems to read the articles differently. I read it as he valued his services at $300k, and that included everything from hosting to site design, maintenance, info gathering, etc. That could very well be.
Now, when you go into negotiations you frequently state your side as strongly as possible, and I wouldn't be surprised if he came in saying, "Look, I put $300k into this, let's talk about paying me *something* to keep running this. Make me an offer."
But of course when you deal with the law enforcement authorities, things like this go with the territory. Ever try disagreeing with a cop?
Never piss off people who can legally carry guns.
Seriously though, let's look at the charges:
Extortion: How could Pat Richard extort anyone by shutting off his own server? Imagine loaning your car to someone, then deciding you cannot afford paying the gas, the insurance, and the up-keep. You give him an ultimatum, either buy the car or I'll take it back. Under what system of justice could you be charged with extortion under that scenario?!
Larceny by conversion: How could he convert his own property? Via this charge the Sheriff's Office is essentially admitting that the website was theirs, but on the other hand, they refuse to pay for it. They should not be able to have it both ways.
Using a computer to commit a crime: Turning off your own server is a crime?!
Obstruction of justice: See above.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Check out this silly quote from the guy's lawyer:
"Everyone should sit down and come up with a negotiated price," Simmons said. "This is no more a case of extortion than someone going to a car dealer and offering the dealer less than the listed price, then leaving because he didn't get it. This is really extortion by the sheriff's department."
That's a bogus analogy. When I leave the car dealership after they didn't like my price, I don't get to take the car with me.
If this guy's only claim is the site was costing him too much money to maintain, he should have put the whole site on a Zip disk, transfered the domain name, and handed it all over to them. To just shut it down and say "all your webpage are belong to us" isn't cool.
If his claim is they promised him all along to pay him, he'll have to provide some proof of that in court.
The really interesting question is who does the site belong to? If it is his, then doesn't he have every right to shut it down?
Interesting? ummm.... I think he was going for Funny.
The article about the ex-sheriff rapist mentions a William Hackel.
h tm, which states that Mark Hackel ran to be sheriff four years ago after his dad was removed from office and arrested for rape.
The webpage for the current sheriff at http://www.macomb-sheriff.com states that the sheriff is Mark A. Hackel.
Doing a search for William Hackel brings up an article at http://www.freep.com/news/locmac/sher27_20000727.
Is it just me or has the volume of posters who admit to not RTFA gone down lately? Perhaps the outrageous slant used to announce stories is having a salubrious effect...
Welcome to Slantdot!
Did the sheriff get complaints from anyone else? Does she routinely persue other complaints as vigorously?
Irrespective of the merits of the webhostaging, it would appear the arrestee has grounds to sue for false arrest and/or offical oppression.
Everyone here seems to be either ranting or siding with the guy. Before I take my position, let us look at the facts:
Richard talks to the county sheriff and tells them that he can host the sheriffs department website for free! the sheriff is happy and agrees. Three years down the line richard comes and says, "we can earn money!". Proposes advertising. Sheriff is happy. After some time, its clear there isnt so much money coming in from the ads, so he says to sheriff, pay me for the service or else... sheriff gets mad and refuses! Richard goes home and shuts down the webpage and demands $300K! The sheriff wants to set up the website and finds out that Richard owns the domain name! What to do? Being a cop, he arrests Richard and charges him for extortion, using a computer to commit a crime, larceny by conversion and obstruction of justice... his argument being, "the exorbitant demand amounts to extortion."!
Now the tables are suddenly turned on Richard, as he now has to justify himself although he was giving the service freely which means that he could walk away whenever he wanted and that he owned the sites name! I think Richard is right here and no matter what the sheriff calls it, its not extortion / kidnapping / ransom.
But this is the US and the justice system has its owncrazy way of working!
Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking it differently than the normal way.[Steve Wozniak]
From the article:
Richard said it attracted 3.5 million hits per month from throughout the world.
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
3.5 million hits/month for a county sherrif's site? Was there really THAT much traffic going there? Even if there was, $300,000 for 33 months seems kind of steep...That's more than $9000/month.
Even if by some strech of the imagination this number is close to accurate, this guy's trying to retroactively bill them when the original agreement was to host the site for free. Given that, I can see why they wanted to hit him with extortion.
-R
This suprised me, it's in my own county. Sheriff's dad is and ex-sheriff in prison for rape. Which is not at all relevant. :-)
Was the oral contract in perpetuity? I can't believe that this guy's own property can result in an extortion charge. The sheriff's department is at fault for NOT covering their bases from the beginning.
If I do something nice for free, and decide to take it away, I'd hate to get friggin' arrested for it. Jeesh.
--Jim (me)
Signal processing engineers know that nature abhors the unit impulse.
A gradual reduction in services over a few months might have kept the fellow out of gaol.
How is withholding this domain possibly extorting the county?
Since I live here, in Macomb County, I was kinda thinking the same thing. Then I read the part about the county needing to change the ip-address text on the police cars, business cards, and letterhead.
I'm not sure what exactly transpired. The guy might have simply said he was going to call it quits unless he was better compensated. He was originally doing it as 'a favor' but probably got in over his head as the site got popular and wasn't generating into other business. Spouting off at the Sheriff is probably not a good idea. Our local Sheriff's office is well-known for being tough on crime, any crime. When they couldn't get the domain transferred they apparently saw this as "extortion". Grabbing all his stuff was probably overkill. The real story is probably somewhere in the middle.
The most disturbing fact to me is how our county was so eagerly pointing at this domain (on the police cars, even!) without owning it nor with a valid contract of any kind.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Our dear friend S.D. died today.
He was invited to party at http://www.macomb-sheriff.com but never showed up.
S.D. had no wife, girl friend, or any relationship
with opposite sex whatsoever.
Well, that is true - but can you say that it gives Slashdot credibility? I guess it depends on what you define as Slashdot. I have noticed the phenomenon of which you speak more and more over the past year. It *almost* seems intentional at times. That would qualify as questionable journalism in my book, posting a misleading story just so your readers will hash out the details for you.
Think of it this way - *without* the faithful Slashdot readers, how good would Slashdot's journalism be?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Here's the latest on this case. Whatever the law says, he didn't do anything WRONG.
--Jim (me)
Does the Macomb Sherriff look like that sherriff from the Dead Zone?
Regardless, with the domain name it's IP, a civil issue. It's parked, so the sheriff's office can do the WIPO cybersquatting claim, but, AFAIK and IANAL, it's not criminal.
Who owns the content? If the sheriff's department does, holding the content hostage may be illegal. But then again, there was a private towing company that illegally towed my car from a private lot where I had a legal right to park, and would not return it. They violated two sections of the vehicle code in the illegal tow, then had additional violations (actually flaunting some of them) in the operation of their impound lot. What did the cops say? "This is a civil matter. Pay the impound fees and then sue them."
The cops probably threw him in jail to try to intimidate him, which forced the DA's hand to prosecute, or perhaps it's collusion between the DA and the cops.
The facts will come out at trial. Both sides will tell their stories, a judge and 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty will decide who is telling the truth, and regardless of the outcome, a civil suit will follow.
Welcome to America, where our courts, fine instruments of law, capable of incredible intricacy and precision in legal thought, are used to bludgeon people like a sledgehammer.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Actually idiot, if you read RTFA, it clearly says who the rapist was, and that the SON is the current sherrif. Jackass.
I would host a site for free, too if I could charge $1,000 US for a banner ad. Check out his "rate card":
rates
There is an ad from the "ad council" or some such on the archived site, so I don't know how much he was making, but if he was selling even a few ads he was probably doing better than many in the hosting/designing business these days.
He's an idiot for claiming that the website cost him $300k. That I will agree on.
But... there were two links. One said he did NOT demand back-payment and just wanted forward-payment for his site. That is perfectly legal and if they refuse that, then he has the right to close it. It sux and is shitty business practice, but it's legal.
If he DID demand back-payment for that rediculous amount of money, he deserves trouble. 50 years is excessive. Give him 3 months and keep his computers...
Ever been in jail? Two nights feels like a month... trust me, he'll have plenty of time to think about it in a few months.
I think everyone should spend a weekend wrongly imprisoned in jail... just for the perspective. I did it (not by choice) and many of my opinions about the justice system changed drastically.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
was to try to do anything to help the police. The police are a bunch of thugs and they've proven it again in this case. Never help the police - you will get screwed. Don't have anything to do with the police. If you ever get arrested, shut up and only speak through your lawyer.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Don't feed the sharks.
When I was still in college I was doing contracting work for a small company that sold things over the web. I'm not going to name names even though they don't exist any more.
I did all the coding work and a friend of mine did the design. They would pay us willy-nilly, $200 here, $200 there, on no set plan. This was all done on a handshake agreement with the understanding that the payments would eventually add up to a fee we had settled on in the beginning. Not a smart move but hey, I was young.
So eight or nine months after the work had been completed I still hadn't seen the last bit of money they owed me. Repeated attempts to call and try to settle the matter got me nowhere. So seeing how I they didn't have a backup of the source and I still had the password to the site I nuked it; didn't leave a trace.
They got a hold of me really quick after that. I didn't tell them I did it but that I'd restore the site if I get the cash. After I had the check in my hand I told them it was me. The guy I originally contracted with actually threatened to break my legs although I didn't let that scare me. If they beat me up they'd have some nice jail time on their hands and they still wouldn't have a site. The way I saw it, no money, no site.
In retrospect I probably shouldn't have let it get that far. Web development should never lead to threats of bodily harm. I should have warned them that I would do it if I didn't get the rest of my money. I remember I was afraid at the time that they'd just change the password, I'd have no control over the situation any more, and I'd never see another cent. There was a lot of things I could have done to get the rest of my money without resorting to extortion.
The lesson learned is to always have a solid contract before any work gets completed.
I wear pants.
Surely this is flamebait. He even admits to running counter to our 'view'.
Burn him!
You're comparing demanding compensation for a site that you completely own and maintain, to throwing someone in jail, seizing his equipment, and threatening him with a 20 year jail sentance? Get a sense of proportion, man. The most the sheriffs office should have done was tell him to go to hell, or take him to civil court.
Nice of them to point out that two men with almost the same names aren't in any way related...?
Oh... come on you have to admit it's kind of funny! "Really, Pat Richard and Pat Richard aren't related!"
In true /. fashion, I haven't read the original article -- just all the +5 point-counterpoint responses.
The basic problem is that 3 yrs ago, the county made a bad decision -- letting this guy create/manage their website, seemingly without oversight. As time went on, they naturally became more locked in. Now, they're completely locked in to this guy. Anything the guy asks for could be seen as extortion (in the county's eyes).
The basic problem, it seems to me, is that the county should have applied greater oversight, and ensured at all times that the website designer guy wasn't required for the continued operation of the site. They should never have become so dependant on this one guy.
Which brings me to Microsoft... (need I spell it out?)
I haven't read a single comment that is at the heart of this issue. The reason the Sheriffs department considers it extortion, is because they claim they own the content.
And the guy who did the website, on the other hand, has claimed that HE owns the content all along, because he WROTE it.
It's not "work for hire" because there's no contract provision to that effect.
And he put a copyright notice naming himself/his company on it from day one.
A LOT of companies have been burned by this - hiring a company or developer to put together a website, then discovering (when they want to move elsewhere for better service or lower costs) that, like a photographer owning the negatives to your wedding pictures and the right to make copies, the website developer owns the copyright on the website - and thus only he can make changes without an additional contract.
They might have provided the information. But HE wrote the HTML, scripts, etc.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in court.
And whether any authorship or "content-provider" trade organizations will come to his aid, to prevent the establishment of a precedent that will weaken their hold on their own output. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Unless the sherrifs department had a contract that said otherwise, he can change his mind at any time. His demands are unreasonable, but it was a server *he* was paying for, site maintenance *he* was doing.
These charges are utter bullshit. So I do something for free for someone, I can't change my mind about continuing to do it for free?
What the fuck makes you think a contract has to be written? Go read a book.
Well, being .com is a COMmercial operation they are entitled to offer domains to anyone who will pay.
.com official website, and it was to the point where they were going to brand the whole city public works after some silly .com address (any other people in Calgary remember the whole stupid "CalgaryCity.com" rebranding fiasco?).
.ca address when it's clearly a corporate website?
.ca name. And the reason the domain you want seems non-sensical in relation to the content perhaps it is because the original business was re-named or bought out and for transitional purposes they retained the domain. It's not that uncommon.
.UK example and offer .co.ca, but banning corporate sites from .ca would be absurd. That or maybe I would find such regulation-from-on-high very distasteful.
Not that I think that's appropriate behaviour on the part of governments and such. The city gov't where I live wasted THOUSANDS because they wanted a
This kind of thing is stupid, irresponsible use of tax dollars by the govenrnment. The domain resellers aren't at fault--to them governments are just another paying customer. I'd say that having some governing body ENFORCE TLDs would be like having the lunatics running the asylum.
On another note...
No... even worse, why are they using a
So long as the corporation is Canadian owned or is registered and has permanent physical operations in Canada then IT IS FULLY ENTITLED to a
Perhaps CIRA should follow the
First off, let's dispense with the "he said, she said" content here. My divorce lawyer once said to me: "There are three sides to every divorce: your side, her side and the truth!"
So, let's try to stick to the facts:
Fact #1. This guy built and hosted the web site and paid for the domain name. Last time I looked, it cost money for bandwith, so some one was paying something. The Sheriff's Dept. admits it wasn't them paying, so it must have been him. Bandwith for 3.5 million hits costs what? $1000.00/month? $5000.00/month? I don't know the exact amount, but this still is a tidy sum of money.
Next, someone paid for the computers to host this site, the rent for the place to house them, the electricity to run them, upgrading, maintenance, etc. Another fairly substantial cost.
Next, someone had to build the web site. It's likely quite slick to win all these awards, and took someone quite a bit of time, not to mention the cost of the computer programs used to create it.
Okay, no one disputes that the guy did all these things. Maybe in the beginning he DID offer to do them for free....
BUT.....(and this is a big but....)
A year ago, he went to the Sheriff's Dept. and told them he couldn't afford to do this for free any more. I'm sure that the bandwidth cost for millions of hits/month were getting pretty steep for him. I'm sure he had to provide mega large servers out of his pocket for hosting too. The Sheriff offered to help him by allowing him to sell ads on the site. It's fairly obvious that the Sheriff was getting MUCH MORE from this site then the guy was. I'm sure the site got much bigger then both of them ever expected it to... In any event, it's fairly obvious that the guy let the Sheriff know of his hardship at least a year before he actually pulled the plug. The Sheriff even admitted this when he allowed the guy the right to place ads on the site.
The way I see this is that it was unreasonable for the Sheriff to expect unlimited web hosting in perpetuity, especially where the costs of providing such hosting had obviously increased dramatically over when the offer was first made (of course, I'm assuming the web site didn't have 3 million + hits a month the first day it opened). There IS an implied contract here actually. That contract was to provide web hosting and email for a small county's Police Dept, NOT a mega site visited 3+ million times a month by people from over 60 countries. The fact that this guy offered his benevolence (and his money!)for as long as he did (in a major economic downturn no less!) should not be cause to put him in jail for extortion. The Sheriff should have known that the gravy train would eventually come to an end, and actually HAD a year's notice that it was fast approaching the station! This sheriff should be fired for several reasons. The first is stupidity. A high school student should have been able to see that this site was costing much more to run then one man can provide for free. Worse, the guy TOLD HIM it was a year BEFORE he pulled the plug! Second, is due to police brutality. There was NO criminal activity here! At best, this should have gone to a CIVIL court. Finally, for theft. The Sheriff had NO RIGHT to confiscate that computer equipment. By doing that (and jailing the guy), he likely put the guy out of business permanently. What a reward, huh? It's like giving the Sheriff a gun for his birthday and then having him shoot you with it!
With friends like that Sheriff, who needs enemies?
Please Note: Pat Ricahrd never attempted to get the sheriff's office to pay him. He informed the sheriff that he could no longer afford to pay for it himself, and that the sheriff would need to come up with a way to finance the hosting/bandwidth. The sheriff refused, beleive that he could continue to have a top-notch high-bandwidth site for free. Have any of you ever had a top notch high traffic site that did not cost you anything? Of course not. Servers, bandwidth, and labor costs money. Pat Richard provided all three of those things for free for several years. He gave the sheriff 2 years to come up with a way to offset the costs of such a service. He gave him an estimate of the cost he had incurred in an effort to make the sheriff understand how costly such things were. When the sheriff refused to finance his own website, Pat was forced to discontinue his services. Period.
agendum = singular
agenda = plural
agendas = way plural
set of agendas = wicked plural
After all that Slashdoters say and do about how bad people are getting railroaded over simple little technical mishaps.. we get so many believing that this guy should go to jail??
IANAL, but I try to read Groklaw and so.. I think that if you are giving something away you can stop at any time. I run a mud at (www.mageslair.net cheap ad.. ) and if I wanted to I could stop it at anytime and those who are addicted (yep.. quite a few) could whine and complain but its MY mud and I only agreed to host it while I want to do so (going on 6 years).
This guy was spending lots of money and his advertising was not making up the difference. Its obvious it was a high quality website. Reading the Article(s) I get the impression he came and asked for money to continue the operation and the Sheriffs departnment said NO. 300k may be the monetary cost, but he had the right to CHANGE the deal at any time he wanted since there was no written contract (at least none stated). No contract is forever in perpetuity, there is reasonable costs associated to it as well.
So.. here is a guy who wants money to host a site and he may even ask for 1 million but he didnt.. and he is now in jail.
The Sheriff office made the decision to put the website addy on the car and the horse and buggy and the office pig. Why should he be held liable or CRIMINAL for stopping a service he was providing for free. The Sheriff office would obviously just STOP providing advertising for his company.. which of course they pretty much did not do anyways... and let the matter drop.
Police power gone rampant.
Support your local Police Department, Teach them that "Computers are your friend"
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
We should let feel that gangster sheriff feel the slashdotting effect!
There you are, staring at me again.
On the one hand you have a Sherrif that locks up people if they look at him funny. On the other hand you have a scheming web-designer that tries to rip-off the Sherrif's department.
Sounds like a movie remake of the Dukes of Hazzard to me. Well, after the Avengers, Charlies Angels and Starsky and Hutch what would you expect? Have the Duke boys solve the dispute, add car chases to taste and you have a working script.
That would be my own post I would be ripping off. There were about 4 people saying the same thing, and I wanted to make the same basic reply, but the only way that most of them would read it is if the same post was made to each one. Lame? Yes, but thats why I was doing it anonomously. I just forgot to check the "post anonymously" flag for that particular post.
But if you have some mod points, by all means mod it as "redundant", I care not for the worries of mortals.
--
Scud
http://web.archive.org/web/20020826021356/www.maco mbsheriff.com/article.php?aid=60 seems fairly informative. The designer owned the domains, the design, etc.
Any man who works for free is a slave. He's within his rights to terminate access to a site he owns.
Have you seen their website? http://www.macomb-sheriff.com/
:) Still, I think that sheriff site has them beat. It's so bad you have to think it's intentional...
Their new web designer should probably go to jail too.
Check this one out. It's a website for a local theatre - gaudy as hell with poorly presented content. I actually emailed them and complained about their poor design... didn't hear anything back though
Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
...will you sue me for your coming up with the idea first?? LOL!
Richard lied to investigators by claiming he sold the domain name to a Virginia company Whois says it is owned by a Virginia company.
A few comments: What the hell would over 3 million people a month (worldwide?) care about the macomb sheriffs department? I suspect some heavy stats tampering here.. I can't see them getting more than 50-100 hits per day, if that. The current macomb county sheriff's site has recieved around 20k hits since January.
I don't care how much bandwith or server space you think you have, you are ill advised to offer site hosting for free to anyone. If folks are really that cheap and need cost effective hosting they can pay $9 a month (see sig...). You won't have any trouble from them later on, and you probably won't end up in jail as a result. $9 is not a lot.
TallGreen CMS hosting
....never voluntarily develop a relationship with the authorities.
I think some of you relied solely on the poorly written and sheriff-friendly article at the Macomb Daily.
Why don't you see what a real newspaper like the Detroit Free Press has to say about the situation?
Mr. Richard did not ask for $300k. He only cclaimed that to be his previous investment. The only thing he asked for was help in the future.
He gave 12 months formal notice, and more than two years of informal notice, that he needed help financing HIS site. The sheriff refused to help. The site went down. Simple.
for web hosting from pronethosting.net so there. /not a plug just a comment
In the end, there are really only two ways this can all go:
;-)
1) If this person can prove that they had been trying to negotiate a payment plan with the Sherrif, and that these subsequent charges against him are because he then stopped supplying the service when no settlement could be reached, then he will have a great case; and will probably win more than he says it all cost him.
2) He will go to jail, and has lost all of his computer equipment forever, and may even be restricted as to their use when all said and done.
Personally, I find this all to be an over-abuse of police power.. at this point. IF it turns out that there was no 'demand' for money, only a 'request', then the extortion charge seems pretty steep. Most of the other charges are just being used as 'add-ons' to that main charge - this was what was used in the committing of that crime etc.. However, they ARE serious enough to adequately destroy someones life and livelihood.
Was it reeally called for in this case? Why would they particularly need to seize his equipment and personal effects? Taking these things really do nothing to solve the 'case'.. if anything at all, maybe they would have wanted to server so they cold pull evidence of access logs etc from it, but beyond that, siezing all of his computer and electronic equipment associated with it, is just strong arm tactics.. I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning due process and reasonable search and siezure rules.
Still, the press is not a good place for finding out the 'truth' about such things.. after all, if you where to believe the press, then the Macomb Sherriff's office has enough problems as it is anyway, what with the Old Sherriff Hackell who was brought up on charges for rape (I think it was), and now his son taking over.. who is the currect Sherriff probably involved in this.
Basically, there's more to this than meets the eye, but I still feel there is something wrong when peoples property gets taken without there even being 'good reason'.
But that's just me I guess.. and I'm a bit of a SykeOpath
Absence of evidence, is never evidence of absence..
At least this article get it right in that it states he was not asking for the $300,000 in payment, but just said that is how much it would have cost the county to have the site for those three years. He are the $300,000, but wanted the county to take over the future costs. Detroit Free Press Article Of course, the Sherrif says the money was a DEMAND. Well after a year or more of trying to come up with some sort of agrement and getting no response, he had to shut the site down. The article even points out what both sides agree on certain points: "Both sides agreed on a few points: that Richard started running the site for free a few years ago; that his site became so popular, the Sheriff's Department -- and the public -- came to rely on it. And that Richard decided the site was too costly to run for free any longer. " He got screwed. Period. No due process, no court orders, just a straight up jacking.
Their new web designer should probably go to jail too.
I'm afraid you cant put FRONTPAGE 5.0 into jail.
I left a company, my former boss contacts me via email and asks for a login and pword for a server, and I gave it to him.
Later that week he emails me again asking for another server, which I did not know the pword to. I suggested that if they wanted me to keep working with them, it would have to be on 1099-MISC forms.
Later the CEO started threatening with extortion charges and threatening to sue me.
Did the company have any legal grounds? Was it right for me to keep working for free?
Where else do you need to go? A quick perusal of the archived version of the Sheriff's site shows such topics:
Hallucinogens Marijuana Stimulants
Blood Alcohol Calculator
Concealed Weapons Permits
Employee Fingerprinting
Request RADAR trailer
Encounters with Police
Frankly, even though I'm certain that the construction of this site was some sort of keyword spamming and click-through ploy, the range of material linked to just boggles the mind.
Oh, I'd like to request that a radar trailer be dropped off at my home this afternoon, at which point I will connect it to the trailer hitch of my truck with a length of chain, pull it over, and go for a nice 'drag' around town.
Maybe I should check out the 'Encounters with Police' section before I head out of the driveway though, may come in handy.
According to Dictionary.com extortion is:
1. The act or an instance of extorting.
2. Illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage.
3. An excessive or exorbitant charge.
4. Something extorted.
$300,000 is definately an excessive charge for the bandwidth and even his work. My website gets around three million hits too but it only costs a whopping $6/month for hosting. That pretty much means he wanted $10,000/month for his work. Only the courts will be able to decide whether it was an illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage or if it's just plain capitalism.
"It's like giving the Sheriff a gun for his birthday and then having him shoot you with it!"
No, it's more like giving the Sheriff a gun, then trying to wrestle it away, and getting shot in the process.
He was holding the website and the domain hostage. If he merely walked away, why did he lie about ownership of the domain?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
An objectivist would certainly volunteer for that if it meant more business down the line. I've done several sites for charities, because they provide excellent business contacts.
You miss the point. It's not about 'not helping other people' -- it's about helping yourself.. which oftentimes involved helping other people. Hell, you can even volunteer or donate money to charity if you want... if that makes you feel good. You just shouldn't do it out of some externally inflicted sense of moral obligation.
Yes, that is definately extortion. 300K, give me a freakin' break. GIVE HIM THE CHAIR!!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
...who has any dealings with the police whatsoever can expect, at some point, to spend time in handcuffs.
Remember... Deputy Dan has no friends.
"he hooked the department on a free service
gained the desired publicity over it
*then* decided it was never free and is now worth $300,000
then pulled the plug during negotiations"
Sounds somewhat similar to the SCO situation.
What did he spend $300,000 on? Over 3 years that's $100,000 a year...over $8000 a month. Does he need a couple of T3 lines for one fairly low traffic website?
Hello out there? Any lawyers want to comment on the legalities of this case? You would think that out of such a huge /. reader base you would find one stinking lawyer when you need one. :/
Come on, shed some light on this please!
Need I say more ;-)
Kod*k hired me to do some work (support dual ported disks across two independant computers and maintain filesyatem consistency). Payment was set contractually, net 10 days. After they were 10 weeks in arrears (and owed the last billing in a few days for a total of 12 shortly), with almost 14 weeks unpaid I did what any sensible contractor would do after nearly daily getting nowhere with the management and accounting to get the funds authorized to be released and a check cut. I told them the end of the week would be my last day of work until paid, then when not paid I called in to work and said when a check was ready I'd show up. I asked that in light of the nature of the arrears I'd resume work when all of the unpaid work was paid in full. My boss tried a power game where all the appropriate checks where cut but he held back the last one having his secretary tell me I'd have to resume work to collect that last check. I said I'd resume work when all the outstanding work was paid for. Kod*k still owes me $3500 plus around 20 years interest. Rather than burn the bridges with all of Kodak since I did work for other divisions, I just refused contracts with that division or any other division that that manager worked for. In an interesting and twisted justification for keeping the funds when I delclined to return to work until they'd pay me, they sent me a letter saying that they were deducting the cost of training my replacement to rewrite a driver I had done for them (which is really funny since I took a stock Digital RSX-11M Plus driver and changed the drive designation letters to RO: so that the batch scripts could easily be read and have one know that was the Read Only port for the drive by convention). The really fun part was they said it was poorly written and lacked documentation! This after a full functional specification as well as a design document for all the parts of the system. Somewhat of a rarity back then.
So even contracts don't always keep things straight. Sometimes you can't afford to get too many folks at a longterm customer riled too much.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
$300k in three years.. that amounts to $8300/month.
With 170 working hours a month that would lead to $48/hour. Not astronomically.
And that does not even include bandwidth. If you actually *do* get 3.5m visitors a month, you need three, four computers, an OC-3 or higher and round the clock maintenance.
But, somehow I just don't believe the guy.
Have /. crowd heard about art of negotiation?
Just look at lawyers - sue someone for a 100 million and then settle for 100 thousand.
Him asking 300,000 is nothing more than starting point. What sucks big time is the sheriff refusing to come up with a reasonable agreement at all.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I am personally offended by that remark. I believe that jury duty is a responsibility of almost every citizen. We Americans get a bargain simply by being born here; there are a lot of worse places in the world. Service of some kind (whether through Open Source contributions, charity work, or service in the armed forces) is generally a way to keep America a bargain. Furthermore, there can't be speedy trials (a right, not a privilege, in the US) with a shortage of jurors. Finally, the defendants and plaintiffs in a court deserve an impartial jury of their peers. If you jerk out of your duty simply because you don't want to be bothered, then you're not being very considerate. }:-{
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
...you didn't even bother reading the post to which you are responding.
If you had read BOTH articles as argmanah suggested, you would see how they contradict each other. One says he demanded $300,000. The other says that he did not ask for the money he spent previously, but said he could not continue to provide the service for free and pulled the plug when the sheriff's office wouldn't agree to help cover the costs. Basically, one article paints the guy like an asshole and the other makes him look like a saint.
Put aside the amount for a minute and ask yourself a question that argmanah posed. Which is more likely to happen? The guy operates the site for three years and then demands backpayment or the guys says that he can't continue eating the cost. I can't be certain, but I would guess that a guy that had poured that much effort and time into the web site for 3 years would probably be more reasonable than to demand the money or shut down the site.
The guy probably started it hoping to draw attention and generate more business. I don't see anything wrong with that. It apparently didn't bring in enough business to justify the expense of maintaining the site. So, the guy tells the sheriff that he can't pay for it anymore. I don't see anything wrong with that.
The problem is that we will probably never know for certain which article is closer to the truth. I would guess that he didn't demand the money simply because three years is a long time to wait until you start extorting money out of them.
Now just you wait a minute. I've done this very thing and I can certainly tell you I wasn't extorting anybody. I worked for my local provider when I was younger. When I went off to college I was no longer an employee, however I did keep their systems running for free. When I took another job I continued keeping their systems running for free. Why did I do all this free work? I had a previous working relationship with them. I knew many of their customers personally. Hell my mother was one of their customers. If their systems went done it would be me she'd call. If I didn't keep their systems running they'd try to fix a problem themselves and create many times more work for me in the end. I eventually negotiated a contract with them. Before that I had to stop doing any work for them for free because I simply didn't have the time to do two jobs at once, at least not the way they wanted it done when they wanted it done. They eventually signed me on for a regular monthly contract which last for a year. At the end of that year the decided not to renew the contract. I stopped doing all work for them at that point. Every so often they'd ask me to do something for them. I'd tell them about what it would take and tell them to get back to me when they had the approval of the person who could authorize my payment. I'd never hear back from them. This went from the January before last to this past Fall. In the Fall they finally started hiring me to do things for them. I'm doing an awful lot of work for them right now. The point is I stopped doing work I'd previously done for free unless they could afford to higher me. I wasn't extorting them. I just couldn't afford to perform my services for them for free any longer. Simple as that.
The Sheriff's version...
Sic!
Mundus Vult Decipi
There aren't any fair witnesses. The guys own site is obviously biased. The papers are being told the story they report, presumably by the sheriffs department; in any case they don't have the web developers side of the story. Personally I think it is plausible to tell someone, "sure I'll do this thing, and we can work out the rates later" particularly when said person is in the process of an election and may not yet have the power to pay you. Having written off more than one client debt as uncollectable I am biased too. From a pure business point of view, he paid all the expenses for the website and should be free to turn it off. Asking for money to turn it back on is not unreasonable. Clearly to me at least this is a civil matter. I hardly see it to be extortion to ask for money to continue providing a service that was never fully negotiated (and apparently difficult to negotiate). It seems like he may have a case for malicious prosecution and several civil rights violations. No matter how you look at it the department in question should not have been the one to seize anything related to the case. Big conflict of interest there. All of the evidence that might have been there is IMHO very tainted at this point. I expect this guy should go free and maybe he'll get more after his lawsuits settle than he originally billed. The law enforcement went way over the top in what should have been a civil matter. Note that in order for the web designer to take the department to court to collect his debt he most likely had to bill for his services. And, there may have been pressure to lock the guy up as intimidation since most likely contracting for services (even if you don't set the rate) before you take office is probably illegal. A good bru ha ha, ha ha ... in any case.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
> Another clue is the fact that he set the domain
...
....
...
> name up as his own property so the town would be
> unable to switch to another server [...]
If so, he's not the first to have thought of it, nor the biggest offender. He could have modelled the scam on the activities engaged in by Knight-Ridder thru their subsidaries, RealCities, some years ago, since what he did would be (assuming for a moment that he did it as a scam) precisely the same as RealCities' "marketing" scheme.
They gave away free domain name registrations for area businesses through-out the SouthEast, but retained ownership of the domain names they registered. They also offered free hosting services for awhile, then after a year or so, pleading "financial hardship" as an excuse, started billing for both hosting (approx $35/mo) and web site maintenance ($85/hr). No option to xfer hosting or maintenance was made, and in fact, it was not possible, since the subsidaries retained the authentication access to the hosting accounts. I.e. in order to post changes to a site, material had to be submitted, and the maintainers fees assessed.
In my estimations, their scam was good for several millions per year minimum thru their subsidary corps Real*.com (RealRaleigh.com, RealValdosta.com, RealColumbus.com, RealMacon.com, RealTalahassee.com, etc, etc), and afaik it's still going on.
Found out about this when a client decided to start doing their own hosting and maintenance, but didn't understand why the couldn't move the DNS pointers to their new servers. It turned out Knight-Ridder had retained ownership of the domain, but continued to insist to the client "It's yours" when the client presented them with the DNS records.
Anyone know how to query whois for a list of all the domains owned by Knight-Ridder.com? It would probably be good for a class action
Fwiw, the client protested against Knight-Ridder continuing to do business under the client's corporate identity (the domain name), and Knight-Ridder finally caved with extremely bad grace (threats, demands for money, and question about "where are you getting this information [the DNS records]"). KR managed to seize the domain name again, about a year later, apparently by including it in a batch job of registrar changes run at register.com; register.com was not the registrar for this domain, though, and was very cooperative in restoring the correct ownership.
As far as I know, this is the only case of any of KR's victims recouping their domain
All this to say: If this guy is guilty of 4 felony counts for doing the same thing KR did, then perhaps someone should sub-peona the DNS records for KR. They are a helluva lot guiltier than he is, having done this thousands of times in several states, as opposed to once in a county jurisdiction.
It'll be intersting to see how it works out.
And for those who aren't aware of it: Knight-Ridder Corp of San Jose, CA owns the vast majority of all "secondary city" print media outlets (newspapers) in the United States, and several major city newspapers (ref: they were bidding to acquire a Minnapolis/St Paul paper, in early 2003).
"The Internet is made of cats."
I'm not very impressed by most of the responses. I got kind of a queasy feeling reading the articles and checked out the justice4pat.com site where I was surprised to find he linked to several articles that painted his side negatively. They were in fact the top links. Looking at the lower links I got different information. It sounds like when he offered to set up the site they said we'll work out payment for the maintenance of the site later. They never did work it out later because the sheriff refused to discuss it. More than a year ago he let the sheriff's dept. know he could not afford the ongoing costs and he'd have to take down the site if something wasn't arranged. The $300k figure was what he estimated he'd have charged a paying client for everything. That means his time for maintenance and upkeep, designing the site in the first place, and hosting costs, and whatever other costs may have been involved. (BTW http://web.archive.org/web/20020929171339/http://w ww.macombsheriff.com/ gives a much better idea of the site than the previously posted links.) My understanding is he wasn't asking for $300k, he was asking they take over the costs going forward.r ead/2452/ someone (Nevel) indicates he (Pugzly a.k.a. Richards) helped create that very site and hosted it as well. Then when the cost got too much, because the site grew, they worked it out and are still friends. They're even trying to help with his current situation. Having read all that I'm much more inclined to believe his side than the sheriff dept. press releases in the newspaper articles.
Apparently he's been in a similar situation before. In this discussion thread http://development.gurusnetwork.com/discussion/th
The difference between Slashdot and most other "news" outlets is that at least here there can be some dissent, rebuttal, and opinion. Most news sites publish sensationalist crap without any way for differing opinion to be published. Heck, so many stories get submitted to Slashdot where the folks here tear it to pieces, but the original publisher lets it stand as-is.
The funny thing is that when approached about adding article forums, most cite legal liability as a problem - they see themselves publishing submitter's letters rather than the submitter being the "publisher", eg they own the comments rather then you? I guess.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
(sorry for spelling im a bit drunk) Seems like pure vindictiveness to me. What are they looking for a text file that says: Plan to make millionzzz by me 1: offer to host police website for free 2: ? 3: profit! Just pure petty minded vindictivness. I do worry that over there it is slipping into a police state (though of course all I have to base this on is the media).
CCCLIIIIFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFY !!!
Who loves you? We loves you. Stay with us awhile, we've missed you oh so much.
Convenient voice: Thank you for calling the parking violations bureau. To plea `not guilty,' press `one' now. [Homer dials `one'] Thank you. Your plea has been...
Male rough voice: Rejected.
Convenient voice: You will be assessed the full fine plus a small...
Male rough voice: Large lateness fee.
Convenient voice: Please wait by your vehicle between 9 AM and 5 PM for parking officer Steve...
Male rough voice: Grabowski.
I give my vote to the extortion charge. Let's compare to another similar website, that I know something about--the Nevada Department of Corrections. This site gets about 35,000 visitors a month (500,000 "hits"). Granted, I don't know what was "special" about the sheriff's site, but this one is a state correctional department. It hosts an online inmate search, and is used heavily by government staff and the public. And even with more traffic, gee, what does an unlimited Internet T1 cost? Last time I checked, less than $1500/month in any major metropolitan area. $9000/month to run a simple website? I'm in the wrong business...
I'm afraid you cant put FRONTPAGE 5.0 into jail.
You're right. It should be executed instead.
That site almost gave me a seizure.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
If you're responsible for sites like these (nice mixup of "defense" tactics with extremist views), I would not mind for him spending a few years behind bars. I don't think that sherrif is in his right though, so unfortunately I am pro release of the guy. The criminal charges should be dropped. Unfortunately. Darn.
So who's lying? In the words of Abe Simpson I'm thinking "A little from column A, a little from column B." The web guy better have some serious bandwidth bills from his provider for the Sherriff's site and not a "total" bill for all his sites.
Sad to say because most police departments are almost totally corrupt when they do tell the truth (not saying are) no one believes them. People stopped seeing cops as honest and reasonable a long time ago. They see a cop giving Rodney King a beat down, a Haitian getting a plunger handle or the bruises on their cousin because the cop only saw "another backtalking n*gger" and not a person. Shit, have you ever seen a cop not speeding on the highway? If you can't trust them to follow a simple law like speed limits do you really trust them with anything more? Are there still good cops out there: of course. Too bad they're grouped in with the troglodytic parasites that nest in every station in which their "brothers" refuse to do the right thing and "clean house".
Moral of the story: Avoid all dealings with the cops at all costs. Remember, they only get rewarded for tickets and arrests, both good and bad.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I will preface this by saying that I manage a municipality's web presence, and have delegated management of the police department site to a dedicated and competent citizen volunteer, although I still retain control over and bear responsibility for his actions. Likewise, everything I do is subject to oversight and control by several layers of bureaucracy, ultimately ending with the voters. It's a good system.
Both parties in this dispute have grievances which could be legitimate; that will be up to a civil court to decide. I really doubt a criminal case will result from this dispute.
One only needs to glance at the new site and archived copies of the old site to realize both parties are quite clueless about what's involved in web publishing. Pox on them both for their stupidity, I say.
The original article says that the web guy was "a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division." That raises a red flag to me, and perhaps it should have with the sheriff's department. I'm always suspicious of the motives of these "wannabe cop" type people. I wonder if a background check was ever done on him before he was given these "reserve deputy" duties.
>> "3. Didn't anyone every teach him "you don't spit into the wind, you don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't anger the local Sheriff!"?"
>
> bullshit. piss him off all you like, just don't break the law. i'm not having any of this walking on eggshells around police bullshit.
You've been leading a charmed life, haven't you?
> quite a few of my friends are police officers and some of my family members are officers.
Ah, that explains it.
Unfortunately, regular Joes like me, who do not have friends and family members in the police force (that can bail them out if need arises), cannot afford to hold this viewpoint.
> police are 1) servants of the people and 2) bound to uphold the law.
In a perfect world, maybe.
In the one I live in, police have 1) lots of power and 2) very little accountability.
> if they fuck with you because they don't like you or you have made them angry without breaking the law, then THEY have broken the law and THEY get to go sit in a cell for a while and think things over.
Nope. When police officers do something that should have put them in a cell, they usually get sent to "sensitivity training".
> that's the whole godsdamn point of the legal system in our country. NOBODY is above the law...we ALL watch the watchers.
Except that the deck is stacked in their favour.
Who can better afford a prolonged legal battle, some poor schmuck saddled with a mortgage and trying to put a kid through university or an organization that is funded by said schmuck's taxes?
When it comes to the poor schmuck's word vs. a police officer's word, who is the judge more likely to believe?
The police can legally "detain" you (read: throw you in a cell for a couple of days) for any reson they can pull out of their anus. If you try to stand for your rights, they can slap you with several frivolous charges (e.g., insulting a police officer, resisting arrest).
And when police officers do get convicted of crimes that they commited by abusing the privileges of their status, that same status gets them reduced sentences ("your honour, you cannot send my client to prison because the other inmates will try to hurt him for being a police officer").
All in all, a sweet deal for bullies and crooks.
So until there is a law requiring the application of the maximum sentence for any crime that was performed by abusing a position of authority, I will treat the police as the most dangerous organized crime gang and every police officer as corrupt until proven otherwise.
> to do it any other way would undermine what this country is about.
A wake up call: What your country "is about" has been undermined so thouroughly for so long, it does not really stand for anything anymore.
A T1 would not be anywhere near enough to handle the load of a popular Web site. NDC's site must not be, well, popular. In today's world a T1's 1.544 Mbit/sec is peanuts, and for a heavily-visited graphic-intensive multinational site that would be wholly inadequate. Even more so if the site supports downloading of anything substantive. No, if the nunber of hits Richard claimed is anything near accurate I can see him paying more than $1500/month for connectivity. Significantly more, I might add. Hosting services charge as little as they do because they average the cost of their connectivity over thousands upon thousands of users, most of whom never go near their bandwidth allotments. My understanding of this situation is the Richard was paying for his own backbone connection, which is an expensive proposition.
... so what. That's insufficient reason to use police-state tactics on him. I'd like to know what kind of judge permitted that search & seizure in the first place (assuming a judge actually did allow it, and that it wasn't totally illegal right off the bat.) If a judge did sign the warrant, my bet is that it was issued under false pretenses. Time will tell.
And if he had claimed $3,000,000 instead
I had a business partner some years ago that was trying to make me realize that we needed some liability insurance and he handed me a fake invoice for $5,000. He didn't intend me to pay it, of course: he was just making a point that we needed some protection from fraud. I was very irritated with him at the time (mostly because he was right) but I certainly didn't have him arrested on extortion charges for trying to make a point. My point is that playing business hardball should not result in having one's property seized and one's life disrupted. That's absolutely ridiculous, and it doesn't really matter how big the bill he submitted is. The police should have obeyed the law, taken this matter to court, and lived with the outcome.
Besides, Richard gave the Sheriff a year to find an alternative and that didn't happen. If anyone was being unreasonable here I think the burden is on the Sheriff.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Given reporters are often not entirely accurate, is it not possible this guy simply stated that for the last 3 years he was providing $100,000 pa worth of service. Hosting, bandwidth, support and web design, billing his own time at $150 ph (guess), that's quickly $7500 just for 50 hours work per month plus $1500 for hosting and other costs, including software licenses... This all adds up to roughly $300,000 for 33 months.
It may simply be a case of "I've done this for free for the last 3 years, I want paying to continue!", he may not have actually asked for back pay. If, however, he can show he asked to be paid and that was agreed to in the past, then there is a claim to back pay.
If he actaully is after payement in full for what he agreed to do for free, then he deserves to be in trouble (degree of trouble dependant on specific circumstances, but I'm not sure I agree with heavy handed police tactics which others in the same boat can't use).
I think this all boils down to one simple piece of advice: Get all agreements in writing! (this applies to both sides here).
It's precisely the core issue here. Arresting the guy? Come on! If that's not rampant typical idiot macho cop behavior, I don't know what is.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
I always put it this way, when I hear a story about someone pissing around with the police:
Don't hassle men with sticks and guns.
Seems obvious.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I don't understand why there was no criminal act. If the towing company had no right to take your car and refused to return it, wouldn't it be considered grand theft auto?
Awesome that you were able to get some justice though.
By your logic, then the phone, electric, and cable companies are all committing "extortion" whenever they send you a notice saying "you're late, pay up x dollars by this date or your service will be cut off". If that were the case, you'd get everything for free, as no one could pay up without resorting to so called extortion.
The guy may not have been 100% illegal, but he's borderline, because it seems he acted in bad faith.
He lined up an unsavvy client and gave them a price they couldn't refuse. They took the bait. He hooked them for three years, got them used to doing things with the site, and then when the time was right, he said "hey, in order to keep this vital tool you have, you have to pony up $300k, or I pull the plug."
That's as bad as someone being unsavvy and paying a company to design and host your website, and then after you've gained a very public presence, having that company say "oh yeah, by the way the domain is registered in our name, not yours, and we're going to sell it to your competitor if you don't give us $200k".
Or to translate this to non-computer talk, that's like bringing your car to the mechanic, telling him to fix whatever's wrong with it, and then having him tell you "sorry, my fee is $10k if you want your car back, since we didn't agree on a rate ahead of time."
These all sound the same to me.
Ralph
Without knowing more about the site and how much work it took to maintain, I don't think we could say that 300k was overcharging. I was objecting to the "it should only cost $100 a month to host!" arguments, because you can still make good money if you do professional work designing and updating a site.
Regardless, the moral of the story is: get a contract, and talk to a lawyer beforehand.
Just because one agrees to help an old neihbour weed his garden, doesn't mean one has agreed to do it for life.
Just as agreeing to host a website doesn't mean one is agreeing to host it for life either.
Fact is 3 years is a long time on the web (going by the concept that web years equal dog years, that's 20 years in the real world), meaning he's quite within his rights to withdraw his service, pending a satisfactory conclusion to negotiating a new agreement.
Remember all he's doing is just withdrawing his services, nothing more.
Executing FrontPage is what got them into this mess.
My website had 2648739 hits last month. The approximate hardware value of the server is in the neighborhood of $500. My bandwidth costs come out to about $50 or so a month for DSL. Count me in with the ones who don't believe his $300,000 charge for hosting the website.
Baloney. The site belonged to Richard, he paid for it, and he had provided it free to the sheriff for three years. It even said on the site that it was owned by Richard's company, NOT the sheriff's department. Richard is perfectly free to do whatever he wants with it. He can ask anything he wants for the site (even a ridiculous $100,000/year) and the sheriff can either pay it or not. If he decided to charge for the site after three years in violation of a verbal agreement it is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. The OJ Simpson comment by the prosecuter is absurd - he is clearly incompetent if he believes there is a correlation.
Just because the sheriff was stupid enough to rely on a free site that he did not own does not mean that the developer (Richard) was a criminal. This seems to be an abuse of police power to me. It is clearly a civil case and not a criminal case. If a business in town went to the sheriff's office with a similar claim of extortion they would tell him to sue the guy and then show him the door. Just because the Macomb sheriff has arrest powers doesn not mean he should abuse them.
One point I'd like to clarify here is that before everyone goes into sticker-shock over $300k, understand that we're talking about more than bandwidth and hardware expenses. According to what I can see on the wayback machine, the website had a large amount of content. It was not a dubiously popular online business card and photo album. There were updated articles and stories every day. So, how did that content get organized into a website? Did Richard just turn on cheap hosting while the sherrifs demonstrated their web design and organizational skizzles? Maybe that's what they're trying now (from the looks of it) but at the time I would wager that Running Wolf bore the burden of translating police blotter feeds and random user requests into a website that was effectively a news portal.
Also, I don't think the PD imprisoned Richards, impounded his equipment, and charged him with 4 felonies so rapidly over a simple bruised ego. If the website was so important to their infrastructure, prosecuting Richard into the stone age won't bring it back. The important thing I see them doing is confiscating the equipment. Outside of spite, that would serve them no purpose unless there was data on the equipment they hoped to recover (apparently as quickly as possible). This implies that they were relying solely on Richard's free website to house all of their data, and they needed it back just to take care of business. So, if it was their data, shouldn't they have had backups? No seriously, I mean hard copies so you can get your job done during a power failure.. They obviously relied on the workings of the website desperately.
So, here's the rub. You just don't imprison people over shutting down a volunteer website. The PD can't claim to have any investment in the venture, since they never invested a wooden nickel. The PD may have volunteered their content, but Richards was vested with no responsibility of guarding that content with his freedom as a citizen. We could easily replace Richards in this story with Geocities. Sherrifs find nifty WSYWIG content manager and start a free website on geocities. Sherrifs post their nifty web address on cop cars and trust all of their content to this website. Geocities shuts off their account automatically for any odd reason, and all hell breaks loose.
The only other thing Richard had that the PD could chafe over needing was the domain name. but it's only a name. It only has value because of the promotion and acceptence of the website itself. Again, they could have just as easily came to rely on Geocities web and email addresses, printing them on police cars and letterhead. That wouldn't entitle them to any kind of squatting rights over the geocities.com domain, or to have geocities officials arrested on nutty criminal charges.
The truth is that the Police Department was simply freeloading the whole time. When the dust settles they aren't out a shiny penny, just all of their convenient functionality and a contact address or two. Richards is out 3 years of work, all expenses involved whatsoever (whether $300k or what) and a very real possibility of 20 years in prison with even more fines. The PD are the scam artists, not the web design firm.
The way I see it, they essentially sweet talked their way into free room and board at someone's house, and eventually raised hell over all the heartache involved at being kicked out. "But all my letterhead has this address. But all my belongings are here and I refuse to take them anywhere else. Maybe I forgot to get my name on the lease at any point, put people come here to see me not you, so it's my house. I'll now arrest you for not handing over the keys and leaving while you had the chance." It reminds me of that movie "Pacific Heights" with Micheal Keaton.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
The US media, as bad as it is, is unfortunately the best that I have ever encountered. In Europe much of the supposed media is nothing more than the National Enquirer. In many dictatorships the media is controlled either directly (command) or indirectly (fear) by the regime. In many countries, the news is irrecognizably distorted by skewed viewpoints so radical that you'd be begging them to bring back the old liberal/conservative stuff. And in most of the parts of the world that I have visited, even in the countries that we help out the very most, the media gives a clear anti-American slant.
Spend some time abroad, dude. You'll be kissing the U.S. soil when you make it back home.
Wait a second. Slashdot is journalism?
./ for years now, and I always thought that it was a BBS that was extremely popular because it linked to lots of news stories, which gave its members a constant stream of new topics to "discuss".
:-)
I've been reading
Slashdot is what happens after journalism.
First off, it wasn't MY comment that said it was journalism, but it got me to thinking...
Well, is it? Here is one definition of journalism: "The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts."
Now it could certainly be argued that what Slashdot editors do is not journalism, because they simply take submissions and repost them (with a little commentary). But that is awfully close to what the nightly news is. But that isn't real journalism either.
There are the Slashdot interviews, which is more like journalism. Hmm, but all the editors do is facilitate - we do all the work there by coming up with the questions. BTW, what ever happened to the Bruce Perens interview from July 2003?
Ask Slashdot is interesting, because we pose the questions and the answers. The editors just deem the topic interesting enough to post.
But this all brings back my question - what is Slashdot? Is Slashdot the editors and the webpage? If so, then it could hardly be considered journalism. Or is it the collective of that and all the moderated comments? Some responses to articles are decently thought out and researched. They provide links to other sources and facts. It could be that Slashdot is what happens after journalism, as you say, but it woulnd't be too hard of a stretch to say that Slashdot could be used as research for journalism. (In which case it would be what happens BEFORE journalism) I have seen Slashdot stories linked to from other news sites in their stories.
What if someone took the top 20 stories from Slashdot over a year, compiles all of the responses that they thought were the best, and wrote a book? Would that be journalism?
I had a roommate in college who got his degree in journalism, and I thought it was all about never needing to study, drinking a lot, and taking blow-off classes.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
First of all, the stories say Pat did not give anybody anything. He bought a domain name (macombsheriff.com), and he built an (apparently popular) community and law enforcement resource. He developed it himself. He hosted it himself. He maintained it himself. He did that for three years -- the entire time trying to engage in discussion with the sheriff about funding.
The sheriff refused to discuss finances. Pat could no longer provide all that effort for nothing, and shut down his site. Then he sold his domain name.
The closest analogy I can think of is this:
The local convienent mart offers free coffee to cops who come in. They do this for years. They decide money is tight and they can't afford to give away coffee anymore. THEN, the store gets raided of all its doughnuts and pastries, and the owner is charged with extortion and larceny for no longer providing free coffee!
Hopefully nobody here would think that would be an appropriate use of law enforcement powers.
He who trades with the borg - becomes one with the borg ...
If the sheriff didnt' want to pay they could have negotiated with somebody else to host the site! They should have done this the moment he presented his "demands" and cloned the site while still in good graces. The civil case over the domain name and material would have easily gone to the sheriff anyway...because the guy did voulanteer to do it for free. Whole thing would have taken about 2 hours of a judge's time to settle.
of course now that the guy's sat in jail he won't part with it for anything...and probably won't settle unless he can get the sheriff on the other side of the bars!!!
The parent post was modded "Overrated". Cowardly moderators use this to avoid judgement in the metamoderation queue. Most likely some piggy lover. Next time have the balls to mark it something else let your others decide if you're right or wrong.
Incident #1: An aqcuaintance tells me the law firm she works for needs some computer help. I tell her my fee is x per hour, with reimbursement for one hour's travel and parking. She asks if that's OK, and they agree (verbally) I show up on time, and work steadily and quickly throughout the day - always at the request of an attorney - in other words, none of the work I did was of my own initiative. I tried to leave at three o'clock, but the attorneys kept "tugging at my sleeve" and asking me to do one last thing, so I left at 5:00. I send them a bill for everything, and hear nothing back. I call about six weeks later, and they send only 60% payment. When I ask why they said, "they've never gotten such a big bill for computer work before." But she leaves me with the impression that maybe they'll pay the rest down the road. I call this woman occasionally to collect the rest - she always sheepishly apologizes, says I'll get paid. I finally have to write a severe letter, return receipt required to get someone to call me back. One of the senior partners calls me, reiterating that same stupid argument. I tried to tell him that all of the work was driven by their requests, that I tried to leave but couldn't and that I charge less than most consultants do. All of this fell on deaf ears. He was willing to pay some of the remainder, so I took what he offered. I thought I learned how to handle this. I decided that whenever I did a job and didn't get paid right away, I'd have a person with financial authority sign off on a pro forma invoice. Incident #2 - I'm called to fix a computer in NYC that can't send Outlook emails. I get there, and play with the settings for a few minutes. I suspect a corrupted .pst file, so I use the Inbox Repair tool - it takes over an hour to run, and doesn't work. The person using the PC had to use it a couple of times and kick me off, so that burned up some time. Then, I hit upon the idea of making a new .pst file, but I didn't want to make any changes until I made a "safety copy" of the drive. Ghost took an usually long time, over an hour to copy the drive. Setting up the new file only took about 20 mins, including copying emails to the new one.
I create a pro forma invoice and have the office manager sign off. I kept the original. He was surprised at the high amount (Charged for three hours' work and only .5 hrs travel), but signed anyway.
So I sent an invoice as a PDF to their HQ. I also sent a copy of the signed pro forma.
*It still wasn't enough!* They told me they'd only pay part of the bill because they claimed I took too long to do the job! I told them why it did, and reminded them that someone who was financially responsible signed off, but those counter arguments failed! We finally settled on a reduced bill.
I'm not even sure of how I can protect myself from this kind of crap in the future. I guess even having an office manager approve a pro forma isn't good enough.
The only thing I can think of is to do a pro forma with everything in writing and have someone who's *really* responsible for check disbursement approve it.
Having seen perfectly good stories rejected, and seen other, questionably newsworthy stories posted, with comments at the end like "go off and discuss among yourselves", I've felt, sometimes, like the gatekeepers view slashdottee's like their children with articles posted as gifts to us. I've felt (at times) they hand out the articles like like "toys" to children where they are then told to go play with their toys for a while. I think it may be the case that sometimes they are rushed or overbusy and just through out "whatever" -- where they may not realize that either they are being played by a submitter they normally trust or they might be unconsciously creating their own spin on an article.
I often feel that the slashdot.org system has one central flaw that distorts the community feel of the board: users are not allowed to moderate initial postings. While comments can be moderated by the user community, allowing good opinions to be highlighted and things that are deemed "not good" to be rated down, I feel that for slashdot to be a community resource, the community should be allowed to moderate the initial submissions as well as responses.
I "wish" that could be implemented and the initial submitters wouldn't take it personally any more than we are told to take frequent initial submission rejects personally, but I don't see the "powers that be" being very motivated to add such a feedback mechanism as there isn't really a competitive board to drive such a change.
Aren't reciprocal systems wonderful? On some days of the week I believe that the nature of human communications can give rise to a system similar enough to the consciousness borne from the communication of information in the human brain to be possibly considered a "mind", although it would be one for which a common context with a human mind is practically unimaginable.[1][2]
Of course, if there is such a mind, the internet has made it a hell of a lot smarter and faster.
Whether or not groupthink is involved, Slashdot definitely has a personality. Any individual post is by itself pretty insignificant. I will preemptively disclaim that this applies to this post as well. You may wish to consider the greater holistic ramifications before you reply, if you intend to. Someone usually does.
This is probably all bullshit. Don't listen to anything I say.
[1] Yar. Diagram that.
[2] Or unimaginably simple. Maybe it can find a common context, even if we can't. Maybe it already has.
"Claims of more or less scientific validity prevent people from being able to question your viewpoint." Maybe certain (bogus) claims are, but scientific scrutiny is actually THE ONLY manner in which a viewpoint can be questionned in a meaningful way. If you just stay with emotions and opinions, you never get anywhere, when the viewpoints are diametrically oposed.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
3 years of is time is also included in that $300,000 figure. $300k sure as hell would not cover 3 years of my time and that leaves no money left to buy your metric assload of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent