Dealing With Venom on the Web

theodp writes "In a world where nastiness online can erupt and go global overnight, BusinessWeek finds Corporate America woefully unprepared and offers suggestions for how to cope, including shelling out $10,000 to companies like ReputationDefender.com to promote the info you want and suppress the news you don't. And in what must be a sign of the Apocalypse, BW holds Slashdot's moderation system up as a model for maintaining civility in message boards."

Comments

civility

[Anonymous Coward]

Please go sodomize yourself with a retractable baton. ^-^

Re:Slashdot moderation maintains civility?

[philpalm]

College educated? In the Industry? I got here because for a time I could download Slashdot to my palm device (drat they closed the quick method). As soon as slash dot "dumbs down" there will be more morons and illiterates here as opposed to Answers on Yahoo. Your comment adding your "two cents" is so baby boomerish, I wonder how long you had to lay with Digg to realize that you were with the wrong crowd?

You gotta be kidding me...

[MSFanBoi2]

Post anything remotely pro-Microsoft, anti-Apple or anti-Microsoft and chances are your post will be modded into oblivion even when its 110% accurate...

Are you trolling?

[fourchannel]

Ok I'm 99% positive that you are trolling. In the unlikely case that you're not, I'm am positive that you are seriously ignorant on what actual hacking it. The malicious, criminal, and intrusive computer user you speak of, is called a cracker. A hacker is someone who possesses some significant intelligence and has a natural curiosity about how things work, and how to build new things with computer systems.

And a few notes...

1. AMD is an American company. They are not knock-off copies of Intel, their chips are drastically different in design. They just happen to execute x86 code like Intel's.
2. You don't need a faster graphics card, or faster processor to crack into a system. Most piece of crap computers out there, if used intelligently and expertly, are plenty fast to get the job done. Remember, cracking involves intruding into another system. You don't wreak havoc on your own comp, you break into someone else's and use theirs to rain hell.
3. Neuromancer is a great book. I've read it before. It also tells you nothing about how to actually break into a computer system. It was written in the 80's, and is a work of fiction. It does bring up some topics like encryption, firewalls, and ICE (synonymous with virus). It does not even mention TCP/IP or packets in the entire book. You need to understand these topics before you can even start to understand how crackers undermine security systems of actual computers. It still a good book to read though.
4. To be a cracker, one must have some significant intelligence. If your child is smart enough to be one, I'm sure he will be resourceful and find other ways to learn about these things. He won't get it from Neuromancer, or playing Quake (a video game, nothing more). He will also be smart enough to keep you from realizing what he's learned about. He will also be smart enough to avoid using your own house as the platform to crack from. This will get him in trouble. Your child will first find a way to break into another person's computer and then use theirs to launch his cracking attempts.
5. Finally, try to understand why he would want to break into someone else's computer. Maybe he's not malicious, but just doesn't think that a virtual world is the same as the real world. These are just machines after all. He might simply think of it as a game. Maybe you should try and encourage him to be a good person, and not scare him into being apprehensive for the rest of his life. I assure you, most people who are smart enough to crack into computer systems, are also intelligent enough to have a good deal empathy towards the people who did not get a choice in being idiots. Most of them, definitely not all, have some good will to them. They are good people for the most part.

I could not bring myself to finish reading your article. For one, it is misguided, and two full of wrong information. Do I know everything myself? No. Do I something about most, not all, of the topics you bring up? Yes. I still think that you are just trying to troll though.

Venom of the web

[Orion Blastar]

you cannot control message boards.

Your competition can use anonymous proxies and tor servers to go online with sockpuppet accounts and totally trash your name or your company's name and there is nothing you can do about it!

Even better if they recruit people from colleges and other message boards to go about and repeat their libel about you and your company so that their hands don't get dirty.

The Democrats do this quite a bit against Republicans, more so than the Republicans do it against Democrats. Simply because public schools and colleges are staffed mostly by left-wing political zealots pretending to be teachers and teaching left-wing dogma. Then when their students get on the Internet, they trash everything that is not left-wing and form sites like Wikipedia, The Daily Kos, blogs, forums, whatever they want.

There ought to be laws against that sort of thing, and there are for commercials on TV and radio, but not for the Internet because you cannot police the Internet with the level of anonymous users from anywhere in the world.