Jaycee Lee Dugard was a kidnapping and rape victim of Phillip Garrido. Dugard was kidnapped from her home in South Lake Tahoe about 18 years ago when she was age 11. Garrido, the kidnapper will face 29 felony charges which include rape and kidnapping. His wife will also be charged. Dugard was kept in a tent and in sheds along in the couple’s backyard along with the two daughters she had with Garrido. This is one of the most chilling news articles to have surfaced within the last week.
Garrido has a personal blog on Blogger that is now flooded with hate comments. After the jump is a screenshot of some of the hate comments he has received. But another chilling discovery that was found on the Internet regarding Garrido is a mystery van following a Google Street View vehicle. The van was suspected to belong to Garrido himself. Pictures of the van following the Street View car are posted on BoingBoing. Above is one of the pictures of the van.
Perhaps the reason why the van followed the Google Street View car was because it had cameras all over it. Anyone snooping around anywhere with cameras are usually uninvited.
Rosemary Port (pictured left) is a writer that had a blog called “Skanks in NYC.” The blog apparently defamed a model by the name of Liskula Cohen. Cohen sued Google, who was forced by a judge to reveal the Port’s identity. Port was anonymously blogging under a Google Blogger account.
Now that Port’s identity is out in the open, she is mad and is not going to take it. This is why she has informed the media that she plans to sue Google for $15 million for allowing invasion of privacy. Port is a 27 year old studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
She is specifically suing Google for “breaching its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity.” Given that Google probably has a team of lawyers on retainer, Port may have a hard time seeing any money coming out of Google but at least she is getting more publicity out of the whole situation.
A 29 year old girl by the name of Rosemary Port (pictured left) was the author of a blog called Skanks in NYC. The blog heavily criticized model Liskula Cohen (pictured right). On the blog, Cohen was called an “old hag” and other defamatory comments. As a result, Cohen decided to send an injunction to Google subsidiary Blogger.com to reveal the identity of the anonymous blog writer.
Cohen won the injunction last week. Cohen decided to tell her lawyer Steven Wagner to drop a $3 million lawsuit against Port because she was willing to let by-gones be by-gones. “This is about forgiveness,” Cohen said. “It adds nothing to my life to hurt hers. I wish her happiness.”
Port is upset at Google for revealing her identity and felt that her privacy has been tampered with. Port is also scared that her name is public. The reason why Port wrote defamatory comments against Cohen is because Cohen supposedly talked negatively about Port’s boyfriend Daniel Dimin.
Today a judge ruled in favor of Cohen that she has the right to know who the anonymous blogger was for a website called “Skanks in NYC.”
Cohen’s argument was that she was defamed on the Skanks in NYC blog and that she had the right to know who called her an “old hag.” Judge Joan Madden wrote that “the thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman.” Google will now be forced to reveal the identity unless an appeal is made.
On August 23, 1999 a startup company by the name of Pyra Labs started a service called Blogger. Blogger was a service that directly competed with Xanga. Pyra Labs was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan.
About four years after launching, Google bought out Pyra Labs and hired the team. Williams himself did not stick around Google for long because he decided to start another startup company known as Twitter. Twitter is known as a “micro-blogging” service.
As part of the 10th year anniversary, the Blogger team at Google is promising their users a bunch of new features. Although the new features have not been revealed yet, the company said that they have listened to a lot of the feedback that was given about the service.
One of the biggest problems with Blogger today is spam abuse. Signing up and setting up a blog using the service is so easy that spammers can quickly take charge. Last year, Sophos an anti-virus company estimated that Blogger accounts for 2% of all malware on the web.
Abdel Rahman Fares, 25 runs a blog called “My tongue is my pen” on Blogger. Fares is part of an organization called Muslim Brotherhood. Fares had been backing calls for a national day of protests against the Egyptian government. In the province of Fayoum, Fares was arrested while handing out flyers for the protest tomorrow.
The charges against Fares was suspicion of handing out literature promoting the ideology of the Brotherhood and was calling for strikes. One of the recent blog entries Fares wrote was about how state security officials requested him to come to their offices. He did not write about whether he went or not.
The Society of Muslim Brotherhood is an outlawed organization in Egypt, but they still openly operate in the country. Many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s members have been detained without charge.
Now more than ever, employers and professionals are Googling the names of the people that they often associate with. I’ve heard cases where managers of companies would Google and even check Facebook profile pictures of those that they are about to hire. Somehow that will affect their decision about the person’s credibility too.
This is what makes the case of Liskula Cohen very interesting. There is a blog called Skanks in NYC that demeans pictures of people and uses their full names. All of the pictures on Skanks in NYC of Liskula Cohen are personal pictures. Cohen will has recently appeared on the cover of Vogue.
Since Skanks in NYC is hosted on blogspot.com (the domain owned by Google’s Blogger subsidiary) with an anonymous name, it makes sueing that individual or group people even harder. This means Cohen would have to go directly to the owner of the website, Google Inc.
“Essentially, Cohen has to demonstrate defamation twice: once to show that she has a sufficient case that the identity of the blogger should be unmasked. At that point, the case could proceed against the actual author of the blog, at which point the defamation would have to be demonstrated all over again,” wrote John Timmer of Ars Technica regarding the case. “None of this will be easy, as US courts generally set a high standard for defamation of public figures, and Cohen has made a name for herself in ways that go beyond modeling by getting hit in the face with a vodka bottle at a Manhattan club.”
This truly will be an interesting case. It is very similar to the city of Memphis pushing to find out who the owner of MPD Enforcer 2.0 is.
Amit Chowdhry | July 23, 2008 | 866 views | Comments Categorized under Blogger, Google
Free blogging website and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary, Blogger is one of the biggest targets for spammers. The free blog hosting company hosts roughly 2% of malware on the web. The statistic was provided by Sophos, an anti-virus company.
“Blogger accounts for around 2% of malware,” stated Sophos senior technology consultant, Graham Cluley. “It’s head and shoulders above the rest [of the blogging services].”
Spammers take advantage of Blogger since Google indexes their subsidiary pages regularly. “The attraction for the bad guys in targeting Blogger is that things pretty much get spidered instantly into Google, because it [Blogger] is part of Google,” added Cluley. Cluley gave Google credit for getting rid of malicious sites as they are flagged, but over 16,000 spam sites are created everyday. There is only so much that a search engine company can do.
Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in 1999. Google bought Pyra Labs in 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Blogger accounts are hosted under the domain name, blogspot.com.
Shortly after Google acquired Feedburner[1], premium services have become free and now there is one-click integration of Feedburner into Blogger[2]. Blogger is Google’s free blog account set-up service. Blogger blogs are called blogspots.
First thing that you have to do is create a Feedburner account (if you do not already have one) and retrieve a Feedburner RSS address. Once that is done, you plug it into your blogspot Settings | Site Feed information. This process has become a lot simpler from before.
Before, Blogger users had to autodiscovery tags within Blogger template codes or pretty much use some hacking skills. The integration of Feedburner into Blogger is an excellent example of how Google acts quickly with their acquisitions (with the exception of Dodgeball).
Note: Also after Google acquired Feedburner, premium services became free. Feedburner’s premium services used to cost roughly $5 per month.
References: [1] Feedburner.com
[2] Blogger.com
[3] Burning Questions: The official Feedburner weblog: FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs
Shortly after Google acquired Feedburner[
