One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves

Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by JoachimSchipper on Sunday April 10, 2011 @01:53AM (#2428948)

"WHOIS may be wrong" is a very good point.

However, if he were actually certain to get the right guy, what's so bad about "attacking his family" as you define it? Putting a thief in jail does reduce the income of his/her family, but I wouldn't blame the victim for doing so!

You could argue that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, but that's a much more subtle argument than you appear to be making.

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by jedsmith on Sunday April 10, 2011 @12:10PM (#2429724)

> However, if he were actually certain to get the right guy, what's so bad about "attacking his family" as you define it?

Spoken like a bachelor. Two things I firmly believe in, especially when it comes to Internet squabbles, disagreements and such:

- Don't mess with someone's livelihood.

- Don't mess with someone's family.

They're related. You're going to sit here and tell me that it's justifiable that the alleged guy lose his job over this, possibly taking food out of his kids' mouths? If I copied your Web site and someone pulled a stunt like that with my employer, I'd be out for blood. You hurt my family, I hurt you. You'll understand when you have one.

You can't parallel this to putting someone in jail, because there wasn't really a crime committed (I'd like to see a prosecution), and OP is not the law.

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by JoachimSchipper on Sunday April 10, 2011 @12:35PM (#2429788)

I upvoted your comment because you are contributing to the discussion, and because I hope to understand you. You're right that I have no kids (I do have a girlfriend, though). I've also explicitly assumed throughout that the guy who was fingered really was the guilty party.

Under this assumption, though, I don't see what's so bad. First off, the guy did do something that he shouldn't; secondly, the actual punishment is almost certainly zero. Not only are we, indeed, not talking about jail time, we're not talking "meticulously SEO johndoeisathief.com to the top of Google" either; we're not talking "start a Twitter shitstorm until his boss fires him"; we're not even talking "publicly call him out" - the data in the post probably probably does identify exactly one person, but it's hard to actually make that link. I do admit that blacking out some more data would be prudent, but - what exactly would you be so upset about?

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by jedsmith on Sunday April 10, 2011 @12:46PM (#2429810)

That's a different argument than you started with. You lost the plot somewhere, which is that I think attacking his employment over this goes beyond a line. There is only one reason to proudly put in your attack:

    Someone that works at X should know better!

What reason do you think that is? Now they need to take a hard look at their decision to hire this guy; what is he up to in his private time? Suddenly, his private actions have become publicly tied to our company.

There's a reason I don't have my employer in my profile -- I have personally seen someone take a comment the wrong way, and spend days calling the employer to report what a piece of shit the employee is, and how much he was into drugs, and so on. Merely naming the guy's employer here casts them in a bad light.

Think back to Noirin Shirley accusing the guy from Twitter of sexual assault via her blog. When the media inevitably ran with it, it wasn't "an Apache member accuses another Apache member," it was "a Google employee accuses a Twitter employee," because that's a much juicier story. Now Google and Twitter have been sideswiped in something that isn't even their business, and I wouldn't have been surprised if Twitter had cut him loose over it. I don't think they did, so that is a lucky thing for him.

In this economy, I'm just as stretched as everyone else. Anybody who goes after my paycheck is playing with fire; that's all I'm saying.

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by JoachimSchipper on Sunday April 10, 2011 @01:02PM (#2429852)

I see where you are coming from. I agree with you that e.g. phoning his employer would be an overreaction; and I agree with you that my earlier message was very unclear in that respect, although I wouldn't have posted it if he did, in fact, try to get the alleged thief fired.

Right now, though, "company X" does not seem to be heavily involved - the text in the original is in an image and not indexed. Don't you think that the actual damage is likely to be small?

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by gaius on Monday April 11, 2011 @09:55AM (#2432553)

Don't mess with someone's livelihood

But that is exactly what the scammer was doing! Person A does something wrong, person B catches them with their hand in the cookie jar, person A turns it around and said "person B is stealing my family's cookies!" Sorry, doesn't work like that.

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Re:One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves by narrator on Sunday April 10, 2011 @11:31AM (#2429627)

FYI, the term for directing internet vigilantism at an innocent third party is known as a "Joe job"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job). It originated as a spammer's revenge tactic.

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