Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 6 Dec 2010 16:27:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101204/16354312130/mistakes-were-made-how-tons-people-started-slamming-easydns-actions-everydns.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101204/16354312130/mistakes-were-made-how-tons-people-started-slamming-easydns-actions-everydns.shtml Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Of course, it turns out that this isn't quite true (and the research wasn't done at Cambridge). However, it is true that when people are reading quickly, they can sometimes sort of "guess" the word they're going for with the first and last letter. It seems that happened on a large scale last week, much to the chagrin of one particular company.

As you may recall, last week we were among those who wrote about EveryDNS killing Wikileaks.org's website, claiming a terms of service violation for getting DDoS'd. Before I did the post, I had checked EveryDNS's website, and hadn't seen any info about the takedown. Soon after I posted the story, however, the very first comment in the story said "Check EasyDNS.net's website" claiming there was an explanation. I quickly went to EasyDNS... and immediately noticed it looked entirely different than the EveryDNS site I had gone to originally, and rechecked the article. It was clearly supposed to be EveryDNS (as I had written), and the commenter was wrong (I also found the post that EveryDNS did put on their website about the issue). I pointed out that the commenter meant EveryDNS (and that I had now seen EveryDNS's explanation).

It turned out that that first commenter's mistake -- swapping EasyDNS for EveryDNS was done by a lot of people. I discovered that later, when someone from EasyDNS stopped by our comments to ask us to make the "correction" more prominent. And I was confused, because we hadn't made any error -- but had only corrected someone else in the comments. I then went and saw that EasyDNS had an entire blog post slamming journalists for repeatedly using their name in the stories about Wikileaks, including the NY Times, the Financial Times, Gawker, GigaOm... and us. Of course, we hadn't made the mistake, and I found it a bit amusing that, in a story about a lack of fact checking and publishing false information, EasyDNS had done exactly that to us. So I dashed off a quick comment on their blog post, and the EasyDNS guys were quick to correct the error and apologize both in the post and over email (thanks!). But it does highlight how easy it is to make a quick mistake when reporting on such things... even when you're reporting on mistakes!

Of course, the mistake had little impact on us... But for EasyDNS, it's apparently been a massive pain. The company has spent the past few days alerting people via Twitter that they were falsely accused, had nothing to do with Wikileaks, and did not, in fact, take the site down. Yet, it's one of those things that doesn't die (though, the company also put up a post about whether or not it would work with Wikileaks -- and also now appears to be doing some of the heavy lifting for elements of Wikileaks, these days) .

This is one of the reasons that I get a little wary of internet mob justice, of course. Lots of people are running around blaming the wrong company, because they're swapping an Every for an Easy. Of course, the IP lawyers in the house will say that this is what trademark law is supposed to be about -- that there shouldn't be two such companies since people can (and obviously do) confuse them. But it appears that both companies lived peacefully together in the world for quite some time before all of this mess.

In the end -- I'm not sure there's a good answer to all of this. The fact is mistakes happen. We make them all the time too (though, we didn't in this case -- even if we got blamed for one!). It can suck for those on the receiving end. For us, in this case, it wasn't a huge deal, but for EasyDNS, it clearly has been a major distraction. Hopefully it's active efforts on Twitter and various comment boards will help clear things up for most people. Perhaps the real lesson is that when you do make a mistake, and are informed of it, you should correct it as quickly as possible, and apologize for the mistake. And then everyone can get on with their lives.

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]]> error-correction http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101204/16354312130 Thu, 2 Dec 2010 22:48:10 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101202/22322512099/wikileaks-says-its-site-has-been-killed.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101202/22322512099/wikileaks-says-its-site-has-been-killed.shtml entire Wikileaks.org site has gone down again and the Wikileaks folks are claiming that the domain was "killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks." That's a bit cryptic and Wikileaks has not been above jumping to conclusions at times. It's unclear, for example, if it was just the company EveryDNS who did something on their own, or if the US government was involved. It could be as simple as the sort of pressure Senator Lieberman is applying on US companies. Update: The EveryDNS website says they made the decision because the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks violated their terms of service in that it could interfere with other websites. I understand the fear that it could cause problems with other websites, but it seems weird to say that getting attacked by a DDoS violates your terms of service. It's something totally out of the control of the website.

Either way, it is a bit silly to think that taking down Wikileaks' website would actually do anything in this situation. The data that they're releasing is out there and plenty of people can easily find it. It won't take long for them to set up another website if they want to -- and while it may be a bit harder for people to find them, to date, the organization hasn't exactly had any problems getting everyone else to promote what they release for them. Whatever the reason is for taking the domain name offline, it's difficult to think it would be effective in stopping Wikileaks in any way. If anything, it just calls that much more attention to the organization.

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