No, I don't think it's "very simple". In fact, I think it's rather confusing. It's fairly standard in the technology industry of "Major Version Number.Minor Version Number". Or to use year numbers as year numbers for marketing purposes (Windows Server 2003, Office 2004, etc.). The mixed paradigm is quite confusing, even if there's a perfectly simple system behind it.
I have no problem with silly code names, as long as they are used as release code names and don't become product names. I use Ubuntu and it's a great OS, but the reason the name "feisty" is used more than the version number "7.04" is because the version numbering system is confusing and counter-intuitive. Mentally, 6.06 and 6.10 sound like they should be very similar, and 7.04 sounds like a new major version release.
Wouldn't it be more in line with the overall community standards to have each 6-month release counted as a minor version number, and each LTS release counted as a major version number (or better yet, the version after a stable LTS release be a.0 version to emphasize that it's new and less stable)? I.e. "Drake" == 1.4 "Edgy" == 2.0 "Feisty" == 2.1 "Gutsy" == 2.2 "Hardy" == 2.3.
I think people would actually use those numbers more often.
I also think it's going to look a little silly when 2014 rolls around and the version number is 14.08 or something like that. It'll look like your classic version number inflation.
I agree. Invite him privately to do a panel discussion with either yourself or some other third party folks who can present an effective, but non-foaming-at-the-mouth counterpoint to the MPAA's position on copyright issues. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to get some relevant folks to agree to do such a panel, depending on what your geographic location is.
If he refuses, publish an open invitation to him in the school paper to do a panel discussion, in which you very politely but correctly point out policy positions of the MPAA that might be questionable to some.
Then if he still refuses, he looks like a pussy and your point is made. If he agrees, then you or the relevant third parties get to make their point in a positive, discussion-focused setting.
Just make sure everything is done in an uber-polite manner so as to avoid offending anybody or making anything personal. You never want to be disrespectful to your school's honored alumni, but it doesn't mean you have to agree with their positions on everything.
Because the CEO still works for the shareholders and Board of Directors and has to obey the laws of corporate governance and of the land? Similarly, the President and his management team answer to the people and the Constitution, and can't fire somebody for refusing to obey orders that are illegal or blatantly opposed to the rule of law.
In any case, part of the problem is that nobody will admit that the agenda came from the "CEO-in-chief", it's just a bunch of flunkies taking a fall to protect Dubya.
Callwave already gives me a service that for my needs, is better than the AT&T/iPhone visual voicemail. Speech-to-text on voicemails, with SMS or email delivery, and playback of voicemails from a link in the email.
The only thing lacking from iPhone now is working, standard IMAP IDLE push email (i.e. not a half-working proprietary thing with Yahoo).
As soon as somebody releases a working Chattermail-like app for iPhone, or Apple fixes their built in mail app to not suck balls, I'll switch over. For now, I can't give up my Treo's email capabilities to go back in time to the days when you had to press "Check Mail" to get your new messages or wait for every-fifteen-minute updates.
I would expect, as a more internet saavy pool of users than the general population, that Firefox users tend to spend more online. I know I use Firefox and I'm probably in the top few percent of people in terms of money I spend online, since I tend to buy everything from clothes to electronics online.
Agreed - I've moved over to a Macbook as my laptop platform, and I need to use Quickbooks regularly, so I just run it in a Parallels VM on Windows XP. Works flawlessly, and runs much faster than it did on my old Thinkpad. The Core 2 Duo 2GHz is much beefier than the Pentium M 1.4GHz on my Thinkpad, and I have half a gig of my 2 gigs of RAM dedicated to my Parallels VM.
Virtualization technology has gotten to the point where there is no reason for slavery to a single app to tie you down to an OS anymore. And the prevalence of multicore processors and the cost of a couple gigs of RAM have actually made it feasible to run an OS in the background much of the time with no noticeable performance degradation of your system, and at nearly native speed.
It is finally possible to run Windows side-by-side with Mac and Linux and wean yourself onto using a new platform without giving up those critical apps that you can't live without.
Well that's already been done (see here for a demo of installing/deploying an app to an iPhone), so do you mean when it's easy enough for Joe Average to do it? That's still going to be a bit of time. But it's just a matter of putting together some pretty automation software to go through all the steps to run jailbreak, get SSH access working, and SCP over the necessary files.
Clearly this app had to be installed to be run, right?
I mean, there are binary builds of some apps already, which may not be particuarly useful apps to run on your iPhone (like Apache and Python), but they are apps nonetheless. See this page.
So, it's now a matter of making some useful third party apps. Then there'll be a reason to clean up and streamline the hacking and install process.
And the wife doesn't sound like quite as much of a sweet, innocent victim anymore either. She started cheating on nutjob number 1 with even bigger nutjob number 2, the admitted murderer with bizarre sexual tastes, and exposed her children to that crap until a judge ordered her not to.
This is an admittedly fascinating story for some reason. But when you remember that it's all real, you can't help but shed a few tears for these kids, who are going to grow up with no mother, with a twisted father who probably killed their mother and will be rotting in jail for years to come, with a paranoid, delusional grandfather and kook for a grandmother in the US.
Maybe they're better off being in Russia after all. You come away from that story sort of despairing of their chances for growing up to be reasonably mentally healthy adults.
Yeah, this was the first I'd read that his best friend has admitted to committing several murders in the past, and had been having an affair with his wife too. This has turned from a geek-commits-murder into a *really* crazy love triangle story.
Sort of complicates the case for the prosecution. Though the missing passenger seat and condition of Reiser's car and his refusal to explain it certainly makes him sound guilty to a juror (or anyone else).
After reading this article I did understand a bit better how a man could be driven to do something... drastic. If your wife started doing drugs with and fucking your tattoed, bi-sexual, BDSM-obsessed best friend, and then dumped you for him, and was exposing your children to that (at least until the judge forced her not to), well, I could see that pushing a guy who wasn't fully mentally grounded in the first place over the edge.
The other has been working in the US for over 15 years, has been married to a US citizen for 6 and has a 5 yo son with dual citizenship, and has no intention of becoming a US citizen because it's just too much of a pain in the ass and not worth it to him.
That's strange - if you are married to a US citizen, you don't need an H-1B, you can get a green card (i.e. having permanent resident status). For a person in this scenario, it's probably less paperwork to get a green card than to keep renewing an H-1B (citizenship is something else, that's another series of hoops to jump through, and occurs years after you get a green card anyway). Furthermore, there is a limit of seven years on H-1B status. Seems sort of unlikely somebody who'd been here for 15 years could be here on an H-1B.
Furthermore, I can't imagine why a person in that situation would hobble their competitiveness in the job market with an H-1B. A green card holder can take and leave jobs as they please, whereas an H-1B holder is very much beholden to their employer's whims.
No, you apparently mistook (or intentionally distorted) my vagueness as an attempt to conceal some underlying failure. In fact, that vagueness only means that I can't discuss any specifics nor do I really know enough to do so (I'm not involved in that side of the business).
The definition of "won" for clients is that they got rid of unwanted, misleading, unfair content out there about them, and we have many clients for whom we have successfully removed or neutralized content. We see it as a substantial positive if we reduce the number of clients who have to resort to filing lawsuits.
Not every case of undesirable information warrants legal action, and not every case is a viable candidate for legal action. In any case, legal referral is a last resort tool, not a first line service.
And as you probably know, the wheels of justice in the US turn rather slowly. I don't think it's plausible that any referred cases could have been seen through to completion in the time since ReputationDefender started doing business.
Well, that's a dismissive analysis, and that is only a portion of the business.
First of all, there is a technical problem of person-oriented search. This is a large part of finding content, both undesirable and otherwise, that refers to a particular person, and it is a rather complicated technical problem. It involves grouping together search engine results, and resolving a general co-reference problem across disparate types of content - how do you know that "John Smith" in one web page refers to "John Smith" in another web page? A combination of automation and human input is currently required, but this is an active area that ReputationDefender is involved in R&D for. This is more than just "Googling for your own name", as some have suggested in the past.
If you want to Google for your own name, by all means, go ahead, it's free, though often a good starting point. But that's different from the MyReputation service, which involves aggregating from a large number of sources (meta-search), prioritizing, clustering, annotating, and pushing intermittent updates on search results to clients. This may not be useful to everyone, but it is definitely quite useful to some people. We've heard many people say "Oh wow, I didn't know that was out there".
Secondly, removal efforts, which you describe, are one service that ReputationDefender offers. Even that service is substantially more nuanced than you make it sound - there is a database of techniques and practices that the services group has developed, and clients often do find this service to be valuable to them. Just because something isn't rocket science doesn't mean it's not useful to many people. Additionally, the fees for content removal efforts are by no means exorbitant.
There are other services offered by ReputationDefender as well, including higher priced offerings, that work quite differently and rely on making content less easily discoverable using SEO-related techniques, rather than actually seeking its removal. Again, those might not pique your interest, but there are quite a few satisfied customers who do think they are rather valuable.
As for the involvement of lawyers, it has only occurred in a very few cases. In cases with a strong legal mandate, ReputationDefender has in some cases been able to get law firms interested in representing clients who otherwise might not have been able to afford legal representation, and certainly not of the caliber than has become involved. Clients have been happy when they previously felt powerless about awful things being said about them, and suddenly found that their case was interesting enough to a group of high powered lawyers to take it on.
None of these things might seem valuable to you if you haven't been in a situation to need them before, or if you are so technically savvy as to need no help in any of these areas, but there are quite a few people who do find them useful.
By way of disclaimer, I am a consultant to ReputationDefender and a shareholder in the company, so I am surely biased on these matters, but I am open minded to legitimate critiques. But your description of what the company does is radically oversimplified.
Actually, ReputationDefender is very much oriented towards individuals. Some clients may be small business owners and the like, but its definitely not targeted at large corporate clients who already have access to arrays of lawyers, PR firms, etc.
There are probably other companies out there offering similar services for corporate clients, but ReputationDefender has always been about helping regular people monitor what's being said about them online, tracking down personal information about private citizens that shouldn't be publicly available, and representing regular people who have been unfairly maligned online.
As the other poster mentioned, she clearly wanted to be named in this article and didn't have a problem with it or she wouldn't have volunteered to be interviewed and named as a client.
No, when a Jew kills non-Jews (Palestinians, Muslims, whatever other grouping) just for who they are, the condemnation by Jews is nearly universal. If you ask Jews if they think it's okay to blow yourself up with a bomb in a crowded market just to "take out" some Palestinians, 99.999% will say no. There is no culture of death, or glorifying martyrdom, or support for killing people who marry outside of their faith, or anything remotely like what you see in parts of Islamic culture in any part of Jewish society.
Prefering that members of an ethnic/religious community marry within that community is a common feature of many communities, especially when it comes to your own children. Nonetheless, the reality is that in America, Jews marry non-Jews all the time (as happened with my parents), and their families don't kill each other, they deal with it. In the most severe cases family members stop talking to each other for a time.
Christians (at least in the modern context) similarly don't generally kill somebody just because they refuse to convert to their religion. Things may have been different in historical times (the Inquisition, etc.) but it's not terribly fair to hold that against modern Christians.
No, Islam is quite different from Christianity and Judaism in this sense.
Don't be a wuss. Palm was one of the last platforms to develop for that made you feel like a freaking MAN when you finished an application.
OK, OK, maybe it sucked to develop for. But just try using a Windows CE/Pocket PC device for a while and you'll see how much they suck in comparison (from a user's perspective).
Actually, I'd go a step further. It might be useful to actually *not* host the DTD itself at that URI. As I recall, there was never a requirement that DTDs actually be located at the URI if it was treated as a URL.
If instead the URL just returned a page that said: "You can find a copy of the appropriate DTD at the following locations..." and listed them, it would remove the temptation to introduce a programmatic dependency on that URL being live but still give people a way to find that resource, and force developers to map the URI to a file internally in their applications.
Is that John Sweeney was reprimanded so heavily for "losing it". When I read his description of what they had done to him as he was trying to report the story, I concluded that I surely would have lost it too.
Reporters are supposed to keep their emotions out of the picture when reporting on a story, and normally you would expect an outburst like that to result in a reprimand at the least.
But in this case, the subject of the story chose to blur the lines between the journalistic process and impinging on somebody's right to a modicum of privacy. The CoS had a dozen people stalk and follow the journalist - that's beyond "creepy", that is a downright illegal attempt to harass and threaten.
Fuck Scientology, and a wholehearted round of support to all those who would expose them for what they are - a cult of absolute thuggery that believes in a ludicrous fantasy that makes the Judeo-Christian tradition look entirely factually plausible in comparison.
This is nonsense. Maybe those who are widely open about it meet that description, but I know several highly functioning, middle aged adults, with careers ranging from moderately to extremely successful (off the top of my head I am thinking of a lawyer, a social worker, some high powered wall street guys, and some entrepreneurs) who all enjoy smoking pot quietly in their homes recreationally. The thing is these people don't necessarily talk about it openly for obvious reasons.
Normal, functional, successful people do smoke pot in the US too.
Again, I can't reply to the specifics of that, and I'm not a lawyer at all. However, I can say from personal experience that legal commentary that has been informed by a variety of mistaken assumptions or partial information is very likely to reach incorrect conclusions.
I'd certainly hope that any startup company would seek legal advice on structuring their business appropriately and ensuring that their basic business processes were being structured in a way that complied with all relevant laws before they started raising money and offering services to the public.
I personally wouldn't want to be associated with any business that didn't take these steps.
That's not the case here. ReputationDefender, which is unregulated, wants you to take the responsibility for their actions, while being rather vague about what those actions might be. This is an open-ended risk.
Disclaimer: everything I am saying below is common sense and I am posting as an individual, not on behalf of ReputationDefender, despite my affiliation with the company. And I'm definitely not qualified or authorized to make legal comments about a User Agreement.
Occam's Razor says the User Agreement is vague about those actions because there are many different plausible actions depending on the circumstances, not because the company is in the business of running around and doing unwanted interventions on behalf of customers. That just wouldn't make any sense, and there would be no mileage in that for anybody.
To the best of my knowledge, all actions undertaken on behalf of customers beyond searching, aggregating and ranking content have always been authorized or requested in advance by a user via email or phone communication. I can't imagine a situation in which anything else would make sense.
Perhaps the User Agreement needs to be a bit more clear about that, and I'll make that suggestion. I think the lines in question are there to ensure that people understand there are risks associated with certain strategies for content removal from certain venues.
Also, I'm not aware of any profession in which a person assumes responsibility for the behavior or reactions of unrelated third parties. I hope you don't think "Realtors, stockbrokers, accountants, private detectives, employment agents, and lawyers" do that.
As for your comments about regulation and insurance, I find them bizarre. Most businesses that enter new territory don't have an existing regulatory authority to oversee them. I don't know how you could hold that against somebody. And almost every business is insured - that only protects them from legal liability within certain limits, and doesn't in general guarantee certain results. No insurance company underwrites the risk that a negotiation will not go as desired, or that a transaction will not occur as planned, or that your wife won't get angry if she discovers a private detective spying on her, etc.
Letters are hardly some great proprietary technology.
The company's proprietary technology presently is in the area of personalized search aggregation and relevance matching/ranking. The accumulated knowledge and techniques used for services work (such as content removal) are proprietary, but they are not technology-driven. This business is a technology and service business, not a pure technology business.
And SEO does not remove anything.
Of course not, but it achieves the result that most clients want, which is making slanderous and disparaging information less available and less disruptive to their lives.
I suppose there could be some use for the service, but I'm not impressed. This article seems like a slashvertisement anyway.
It is entirely plausible that you are not in the target market for the service. Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful to somebody else. And I definitely had nothing to do with submitting this article to Slashdot - I was rather surprised to see it here, though we've gotten quite a bit of press recently, so these things get around.
See the FAQ. ReputationDefender doesn't serve corporate clients. Also see my other reply - I realize the marketing copy in question may not be to your liking, but realize that it's not really targeted at a technologically sophisticated audience with lots of time on their hands and the saavy to deal with these sort of issues themselves.
ReputationDefender does a lot more than just emailing website maintainers. Obviously, there are additional service fees for higher levels of service, as the article in question alludes to, ranging from SEO services, to arranging for legal counsel in certain cases (when appropriate).
The specific range of possible services is highly dependent on the type of content in question, where it is hosted, who has posted it, etc., and there's a detailed series of procedures that the company has developed for a pretty wide variety of scenarios. We have a great combination of cool technology for personalized search result aggregation and filtering, with a dedicated team of customer service professionals and a body of institutional knowledge on dealing with a wide variety of online reputational issues.
Obviously, in some cases, you can do all of this yourself, write your own friendly and potentially more insistent letters, notify the appropriate authorities, administrators, or other relevant parties, do your own personal SEO, find your own legal representation if necessary, and so on and so forth, to deal with the range of issues that can come up in this area. But many people find value in having a service offering like ReputationDefender that will coordinate all of this, and make all these offerings available in one place.
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No, I don't think it's "very simple". In fact, I think it's rather confusing. It's fairly standard in the technology industry of "Major Version Number.Minor Version Number". Or to use year numbers as year numbers for marketing purposes (Windows Server 2003, Office 2004, etc.). The mixed paradigm is quite confusing, even if there's a perfectly simple system behind it.
.0 version to emphasize that it's new and less stable)? I.e. "Drake" == 1.4 "Edgy" == 2.0 "Feisty" == 2.1 "Gutsy" == 2.2 "Hardy" == 2.3.
I have no problem with silly code names, as long as they are used as release code names and don't become product names. I use Ubuntu and it's a great OS, but the reason the name "feisty" is used more than the version number "7.04" is because the version numbering system is confusing and counter-intuitive. Mentally, 6.06 and 6.10 sound like they should be very similar, and 7.04 sounds like a new major version release.
Wouldn't it be more in line with the overall community standards to have each 6-month release counted as a minor version number, and each LTS release counted as a major version number (or better yet, the version after a stable LTS release be a
I think people would actually use those numbers more often.
I also think it's going to look a little silly when 2014 rolls around and the version number is 14.08 or something like that. It'll look like your classic version number inflation.
I agree. Invite him privately to do a panel discussion with either yourself or some other third party folks who can present an effective, but non-foaming-at-the-mouth counterpoint to the MPAA's position on copyright issues. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to get some relevant folks to agree to do such a panel, depending on what your geographic location is.
If he refuses, publish an open invitation to him in the school paper to do a panel discussion, in which you very politely but correctly point out policy positions of the MPAA that might be questionable to some.
Then if he still refuses, he looks like a pussy and your point is made. If he agrees, then you or the relevant third parties get to make their point in a positive, discussion-focused setting.
Just make sure everything is done in an uber-polite manner so as to avoid offending anybody or making anything personal. You never want to be disrespectful to your school's honored alumni, but it doesn't mean you have to agree with their positions on everything.
Because the CEO still works for the shareholders and Board of Directors and has to obey the laws of corporate governance and of the land? Similarly, the President and his management team answer to the people and the Constitution, and can't fire somebody for refusing to obey orders that are illegal or blatantly opposed to the rule of law.
In any case, part of the problem is that nobody will admit that the agenda came from the "CEO-in-chief", it's just a bunch of flunkies taking a fall to protect Dubya.
Callwave already gives me a service that for my needs, is better than the AT&T/iPhone visual voicemail. Speech-to-text on voicemails, with SMS or email delivery, and playback of voicemails from a link in the email.
The only thing lacking from iPhone now is working, standard IMAP IDLE push email (i.e. not a half-working proprietary thing with Yahoo).
As soon as somebody releases a working Chattermail-like app for iPhone, or Apple fixes their built in mail app to not suck balls, I'll switch over. For now, I can't give up my Treo's email capabilities to go back in time to the days when you had to press "Check Mail" to get your new messages or wait for every-fifteen-minute updates.
I would expect, as a more internet saavy pool of users than the general population, that Firefox users tend to spend more online. I know I use Firefox and I'm probably in the top few percent of people in terms of money I spend online, since I tend to buy everything from clothes to electronics online.
Agreed - I've moved over to a Macbook as my laptop platform, and I need to use Quickbooks regularly, so I just run it in a Parallels VM on Windows XP. Works flawlessly, and runs much faster than it did on my old Thinkpad. The Core 2 Duo 2GHz is much beefier than the Pentium M 1.4GHz on my Thinkpad, and I have half a gig of my 2 gigs of RAM dedicated to my Parallels VM.
Virtualization technology has gotten to the point where there is no reason for slavery to a single app to tie you down to an OS anymore. And the prevalence of multicore processors and the cost of a couple gigs of RAM have actually made it feasible to run an OS in the background much of the time with no noticeable performance degradation of your system, and at nearly native speed.
It is finally possible to run Windows side-by-side with Mac and Linux and wean yourself onto using a new platform without giving up those critical apps that you can't live without.
Well that's already been done (see here for a demo of installing/deploying an app to an iPhone), so do you mean when it's easy enough for Joe Average to do it? That's still going to be a bit of time. But it's just a matter of putting together some pretty automation software to go through all the steps to run jailbreak, get SSH access working, and SCP over the necessary files.
Clearly this app had to be installed to be run, right?
I mean, there are binary builds of some apps already, which may not be particuarly useful apps to run on your iPhone (like Apache and Python), but they are apps nonetheless. See this page.
So, it's now a matter of making some useful third party apps. Then there'll be a reason to clean up and streamline the hacking and install process.
Don't mess with our Weapons of Moderate Destruction.
And the wife doesn't sound like quite as much of a sweet, innocent victim anymore either. She started cheating on nutjob number 1 with even bigger nutjob number 2, the admitted murderer with bizarre sexual tastes, and exposed her children to that crap until a judge ordered her not to.
This is an admittedly fascinating story for some reason. But when you remember that it's all real, you can't help but shed a few tears for these kids, who are going to grow up with no mother, with a twisted father who probably killed their mother and will be rotting in jail for years to come, with a paranoid, delusional grandfather and kook for a grandmother in the US.
Maybe they're better off being in Russia after all. You come away from that story sort of despairing of their chances for growing up to be reasonably mentally healthy adults.
Yeah, this was the first I'd read that his best friend has admitted to committing several murders in the past, and had been having an affair with his wife too. This has turned from a geek-commits-murder into a *really* crazy love triangle story.
Sort of complicates the case for the prosecution. Though the missing passenger seat and condition of Reiser's car and his refusal to explain it certainly makes him sound guilty to a juror (or anyone else).
After reading this article I did understand a bit better how a man could be driven to do something... drastic. If your wife started doing drugs with and fucking your tattoed, bi-sexual, BDSM-obsessed best friend, and then dumped you for him, and was exposing your children to that (at least until the judge forced her not to), well, I could see that pushing a guy who wasn't fully mentally grounded in the first place over the edge.
The other has been working in the US for over 15 years, has been married to a US citizen for 6 and has a 5 yo son with dual citizenship, and has no intention of becoming a US citizen because it's just too much of a pain in the ass and not worth it to him.
That's strange - if you are married to a US citizen, you don't need an H-1B, you can get a green card (i.e. having permanent resident status). For a person in this scenario, it's probably less paperwork to get a green card than to keep renewing an H-1B (citizenship is something else, that's another series of hoops to jump through, and occurs years after you get a green card anyway). Furthermore, there is a limit of seven years on H-1B status. Seems sort of unlikely somebody who'd been here for 15 years could be here on an H-1B.
Furthermore, I can't imagine why a person in that situation would hobble their competitiveness in the job market with an H-1B. A green card holder can take and leave jobs as they please, whereas an H-1B holder is very much beholden to their employer's whims.
No, you apparently mistook (or intentionally distorted) my vagueness as an attempt to conceal some underlying failure. In fact, that vagueness only means that I can't discuss any specifics nor do I really know enough to do so (I'm not involved in that side of the business).
The definition of "won" for clients is that they got rid of unwanted, misleading, unfair content out there about them, and we have many clients for whom we have successfully removed or neutralized content. We see it as a substantial positive if we reduce the number of clients who have to resort to filing lawsuits.
Not every case of undesirable information warrants legal action, and not every case is a viable candidate for legal action. In any case, legal referral is a last resort tool, not a first line service.
And as you probably know, the wheels of justice in the US turn rather slowly. I don't think it's plausible that any referred cases could have been seen through to completion in the time since ReputationDefender started doing business.
Well, that's a dismissive analysis, and that is only a portion of the business.
First of all, there is a technical problem of person-oriented search. This is a large part of finding content, both undesirable and otherwise, that refers to a particular person, and it is a rather complicated technical problem. It involves grouping together search engine results, and resolving a general co-reference problem across disparate types of content - how do you know that "John Smith" in one web page refers to "John Smith" in another web page? A combination of automation and human input is currently required, but this is an active area that ReputationDefender is involved in R&D for. This is more than just "Googling for your own name", as some have suggested in the past.
If you want to Google for your own name, by all means, go ahead, it's free, though often a good starting point. But that's different from the MyReputation service, which involves aggregating from a large number of sources (meta-search), prioritizing, clustering, annotating, and pushing intermittent updates on search results to clients. This may not be useful to everyone, but it is definitely quite useful to some people. We've heard many people say "Oh wow, I didn't know that was out there".
Secondly, removal efforts, which you describe, are one service that ReputationDefender offers. Even that service is substantially more nuanced than you make it sound - there is a database of techniques and practices that the services group has developed, and clients often do find this service to be valuable to them. Just because something isn't rocket science doesn't mean it's not useful to many people. Additionally, the fees for content removal efforts are by no means exorbitant.
There are other services offered by ReputationDefender as well, including higher priced offerings, that work quite differently and rely on making content less easily discoverable using SEO-related techniques, rather than actually seeking its removal. Again, those might not pique your interest, but there are quite a few satisfied customers who do think they are rather valuable.
As for the involvement of lawyers, it has only occurred in a very few cases. In cases with a strong legal mandate, ReputationDefender has in some cases been able to get law firms interested in representing clients who otherwise might not have been able to afford legal representation, and certainly not of the caliber than has become involved. Clients have been happy when they previously felt powerless about awful things being said about them, and suddenly found that their case was interesting enough to a group of high powered lawyers to take it on.
None of these things might seem valuable to you if you haven't been in a situation to need them before, or if you are so technically savvy as to need no help in any of these areas, but there are quite a few people who do find them useful.
By way of disclaimer, I am a consultant to ReputationDefender and a shareholder in the company, so I am surely biased on these matters, but I am open minded to legitimate critiques. But your description of what the company does is radically oversimplified.
Actually, ReputationDefender is very much oriented towards individuals. Some clients may be small business owners and the like, but its definitely not targeted at large corporate clients who already have access to arrays of lawyers, PR firms, etc.
There are probably other companies out there offering similar services for corporate clients, but ReputationDefender has always been about helping regular people monitor what's being said about them online, tracking down personal information about private citizens that shouldn't be publicly available, and representing regular people who have been unfairly maligned online.
As the other poster mentioned, she clearly wanted to be named in this article and didn't have a problem with it or she wouldn't have volunteered to be interviewed and named as a client.
No, when a Jew kills non-Jews (Palestinians, Muslims, whatever other grouping) just for who they are, the condemnation by Jews is nearly universal. If you ask Jews if they think it's okay to blow yourself up with a bomb in a crowded market just to "take out" some Palestinians, 99.999% will say no. There is no culture of death, or glorifying martyrdom, or support for killing people who marry outside of their faith, or anything remotely like what you see in parts of Islamic culture in any part of Jewish society.
Prefering that members of an ethnic/religious community marry within that community is a common feature of many communities, especially when it comes to your own children. Nonetheless, the reality is that in America, Jews marry non-Jews all the time (as happened with my parents), and their families don't kill each other, they deal with it. In the most severe cases family members stop talking to each other for a time.
Christians (at least in the modern context) similarly don't generally kill somebody just because they refuse to convert to their religion. Things may have been different in historical times (the Inquisition, etc.) but it's not terribly fair to hold that against modern Christians.
No, Islam is quite different from Christianity and Judaism in this sense.
Don't be a wuss. Palm was one of the last platforms to develop for that made you feel like a freaking MAN when you finished an application.
OK, OK, maybe it sucked to develop for. But just try using a Windows CE/Pocket PC device for a while and you'll see how much they suck in comparison (from a user's perspective).
Actually, I'd go a step further. It might be useful to actually *not* host the DTD itself at that URI. As I recall, there was never a requirement that DTDs actually be located at the URI if it was treated as a URL.
If instead the URL just returned a page that said: "You can find a copy of the appropriate DTD at the following locations..." and listed them, it would remove the temptation to introduce a programmatic dependency on that URL being live but still give people a way to find that resource, and force developers to map the URI to a file internally in their applications.
Is that John Sweeney was reprimanded so heavily for "losing it". When I read his description of what they had done to him as he was trying to report the story, I concluded that I surely would have lost it too.
Reporters are supposed to keep their emotions out of the picture when reporting on a story, and normally you would expect an outburst like that to result in a reprimand at the least.
But in this case, the subject of the story chose to blur the lines between the journalistic process and impinging on somebody's right to a modicum of privacy. The CoS had a dozen people stalk and follow the journalist - that's beyond "creepy", that is a downright illegal attempt to harass and threaten.
Fuck Scientology, and a wholehearted round of support to all those who would expose them for what they are - a cult of absolute thuggery that believes in a ludicrous fantasy that makes the Judeo-Christian tradition look entirely factually plausible in comparison.
This is nonsense. Maybe those who are widely open about it meet that description, but I know several highly functioning, middle aged adults, with careers ranging from moderately to extremely successful (off the top of my head I am thinking of a lawyer, a social worker, some high powered wall street guys, and some entrepreneurs) who all enjoy smoking pot quietly in their homes recreationally. The thing is these people don't necessarily talk about it openly for obvious reasons.
Normal, functional, successful people do smoke pot in the US too.
Furthermore, the competitors would be foolish to ever use the code. They'll get sued into the ground for copyright infringement.
This sounds ridiculous. It's unlikely to cost anybody anything except legal fees.
Again, I can't reply to the specifics of that, and I'm not a lawyer at all. However, I can say from personal experience that legal commentary that has been informed by a variety of mistaken assumptions or partial information is very likely to reach incorrect conclusions.
I'd certainly hope that any startup company would seek legal advice on structuring their business appropriately and ensuring that their basic business processes were being structured in a way that complied with all relevant laws before they started raising money and offering services to the public.
I personally wouldn't want to be associated with any business that didn't take these steps.
That's not the case here. ReputationDefender, which is unregulated, wants you to take the responsibility for their actions, while being rather vague about what those actions might be. This is an open-ended risk.
Disclaimer: everything I am saying below is common sense and I am posting as an individual, not on behalf of ReputationDefender, despite my affiliation with the company. And I'm definitely not qualified or authorized to make legal comments about a User Agreement.
Occam's Razor says the User Agreement is vague about those actions because there are many different plausible actions depending on the circumstances, not because the company is in the business of running around and doing unwanted interventions on behalf of customers. That just wouldn't make any sense, and there would be no mileage in that for anybody.
To the best of my knowledge, all actions undertaken on behalf of customers beyond searching, aggregating and ranking content have always been authorized or requested in advance by a user via email or phone communication. I can't imagine a situation in which anything else would make sense.
Perhaps the User Agreement needs to be a bit more clear about that, and I'll make that suggestion. I think the lines in question are there to ensure that people understand there are risks associated with certain strategies for content removal from certain venues.
Also, I'm not aware of any profession in which a person assumes responsibility for the behavior or reactions of unrelated third parties. I hope you don't think "Realtors, stockbrokers, accountants, private detectives, employment agents, and lawyers" do that.
As for your comments about regulation and insurance, I find them bizarre. Most businesses that enter new territory don't have an existing regulatory authority to oversee them. I don't know how you could hold that against somebody. And almost every business is insured - that only protects them from legal liability within certain limits, and doesn't in general guarantee certain results. No insurance company underwrites the risk that a negotiation will not go as desired, or that a transaction will not occur as planned, or that your wife won't get angry if she discovers a private detective spying on her, etc.
Letters are hardly some great proprietary technology.
The company's proprietary technology presently is in the area of personalized search aggregation and relevance matching/ranking. The accumulated knowledge and techniques used for services work (such as content removal) are proprietary, but they are not technology-driven. This business is a technology and service business, not a pure technology business.
And SEO does not remove anything.
Of course not, but it achieves the result that most clients want, which is making slanderous and disparaging information less available and less disruptive to their lives.
I suppose there could be some use for the service, but I'm not impressed. This article seems like a slashvertisement anyway.
It is entirely plausible that you are not in the target market for the service. Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful to somebody else. And I definitely had nothing to do with submitting this article to Slashdot - I was rather surprised to see it here, though we've gotten quite a bit of press recently, so these things get around.
See the FAQ. ReputationDefender doesn't serve corporate clients. Also see my other reply - I realize the marketing copy in question may not be to your liking, but realize that it's not really targeted at a technologically sophisticated audience with lots of time on their hands and the saavy to deal with these sort of issues themselves.
ReputationDefender does a lot more than just emailing website maintainers. Obviously, there are additional service fees for higher levels of service, as the article in question alludes to, ranging from SEO services, to arranging for legal counsel in certain cases (when appropriate).
The specific range of possible services is highly dependent on the type of content in question, where it is hosted, who has posted it, etc., and there's a detailed series of procedures that the company has developed for a pretty wide variety of scenarios. We have a great combination of cool technology for personalized search result aggregation and filtering, with a dedicated team of customer service professionals and a body of institutional knowledge on dealing with a wide variety of online reputational issues.
Obviously, in some cases, you can do all of this yourself, write your own friendly and potentially more insistent letters, notify the appropriate authorities, administrators, or other relevant parties, do your own personal SEO, find your own legal representation if necessary, and so on and so forth, to deal with the range of issues that can come up in this area. But many people find value in having a service offering like ReputationDefender that will coordinate all of this, and make all these offerings available in one place.