greatmomentsinpr

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Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Amazon.com Says 'Embarrassing' Error, Not Hacker, Censored 57,310 Gay Books
Inept PR Guy Mark Penn Invites You to His 'Dungeon of Rotting Humanity'
Tesla Praises Leaked Car Photos It Wants Erased from the Internet
Tesla Flack Bitches About 'Silicon Valley Gossip Blog'
Facebook Haters Reach a Million Strong
Why Barack Obama Should End White House Press Briefings
Lesley Stahl Investigates Marissa Mayer's Matchless Fashion Sense
CNET: Apple Lied About Layoffs We Reported
More Job Cuts at Apple?

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Novaload
06/14/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Yahoo itself sends me more than 10 spams a day, not to mention the barrage of crappy and grotesque ads.

This is some politically motivated BS. It's painfully obvious.
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Drunken Economist
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Score -1 for the cloud. *No* warning before deletion? The weakest link [or in this case minds] in this are at Yahoo and the dickweed founder of Flickr.

Another rule of the cloud according to Yahoo: 'There is no backup.'

Think about that the next time you put something there.
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iplaudius
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Regardless of who’s the more sympathetic character in this mess, deleting the photos from a Pro account without warning is a bad business decision. What I learned from this is that Yahoo! cannot be trusted with data.
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Moff
06/12/09

@iplaudius: And I'm not using them for Web searches anymore, either.
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GiovanniGautham
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
SURE - it's all freedom of speech when we're making fun of George Bush, but WOW the hypocrites come out when we poke fun at Barack Obama.
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badasscat
06/12/09

@GiovanniGautham: Freedom of speech applies to the government, not private corporations hosting your photos. That was true when Bush was in office and it's just as true now.
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daveyjonesisdead
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
"petty" "falsely-noble" issue? I say we torture the Butterball for a while to give him some perspective.
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Drunken Economist
06/12/09

@daveyjonesisdead: I say we just torture him for his tortured grasp of diction.
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Wendy_Kroy
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
This is bad - not just for Flickr, but for all other services (like Google, really) that encourage users to upload their irreplaceable data on "secure" central servers. If Flickr can repossess my work product - and, say, Google can repossess all my Google Docs - that undermines the "cloud computing" gospel they've been preaching for the past couple of years. Yeah, there are drawbacks to keeping my data on my hard drive, but at least I don't lose access to it just because I may act like a "dick."
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Moff
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
This has really made me think twice about whether I should waterboard other people and cats.
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Ryan Tate
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
If Flick deleted 1,200 of my pictures (and that's about how many I have on there) with no warning and no way to get them back, for posting all of 20 comments with a mild political message, I wouldn't want to be called "a dick," "retarded" and "petty" by the company founder, who openly admits he has no idea what's going on and no specific beef with the person he's calling names.

But as a pure observer in this case the reflexive hostility is fascinating to me. It's like, "oh, another idiot customer worked up about his stupid photos he stupidly uploaded to us and now he's all upset we deleted them. What a waste of time for everyone who has to deal with this." Not sure if everyone at the company is that burned out or just Butterfield.

Now if he'd said, "that was a dick move commenting on Heather's photo," whole other story.
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badasscat
06/12/09

@Ryan Tate: If the only place in the world you store your photos is on Flickr, then you may not be a dick, but you are an idiot.

Flickr has a bulk photo upload tool. If they delete your account, you make a new one and re-upload those 1200 photos. It would take at most an hour, 59.5 minutes of which is just you writing snarky Gawker comments while your computer uploads in the background.

I just don't get people who whine about their stuff being deleted from web sites owned by other people. If you want your stuff backed up, either do it yourself or get your own damn web site where you're paying for someone else to do it for you. Flickr's a free web site (he didn't have a pro account), and you have basically no protection on it. Anyone who thinks differently is a fool, if not a dick.
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badasscat
06/12/09

@Ryan Tate: and btw, note I am using the royal "you" in my comment, not talking about you specifically. Just using your comment as a jumping off point.
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Drunken Economist
06/12/09

@badasscat: We know which you you're talking about. Problem is, sure you can upload all those pics, but what about the metadata? keywords, Geocache, etc?

Of course, if you're on a Mac using iPhoto or another asset manager that's moot. But who does that?
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Thomas Lord
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
I think Champ and Butterfield just doubled the odds that this case winds up before the Supreme Court of the United States.

-t
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abettertomorrow
06/12/09

@Thomas Lord: Oh, I'd say they multiplied those odds a million-fold
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urbororr
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Butterfield's a transparent dick by treating the kid like he's a troll. Flickr's mods blanched at the idea of the White House shutting down its prestigious Flickr stream. A "dick" used the forum to dissent. If it was 10 comments in a row, it would be spammy, true, but fuck them, and especially fuck Butterfield's "go for a bike ride, don't worry about torture!"
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Pragmatic
06/12/09

@urbororr: In fairness to Butterfield, it isn't apparent he knew what Johnson was asking him about.
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Ryan Tate
06/12/09

@Pragmatic: But that's kind of the point: He called him a "dick," "retarded" and "petty" while freely admitting he had no clue what was going on -- which is that Flickr nuked 1,200 pictures with zero warning.
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Pragmatic
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
Butterfield sounds like the dick in this case. Would it have been so hard for him to say I don't work there anymore and leave it at that? Why the personal attack?
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Pope John Peeps II
06/12/09

@Pragmatic: Well.... Why not? Since he doesn't work there, he doesn't have to be nice.
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DahlELama
06/12/09

@Pope John Peeps II: Agreed. Johnson sounds like a dick. No pun intended.
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City_Dater
06/12/09

@Pragmatic:

His reply is pretty restrained, given he's being addressed as "Stew" and "old sport" by a total stranger who apparently has some rather severe boundary issues.
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Awesome X
06/12/09

@DahlELama: Then who's on second? Hugeengorgedpenis?
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Evil Baby Ant Eater
06/12/09

@Pragmatic: Yeah... I don't know. I think if someone where to call me an "'ol sport" and lead in with "Well, looks like we have an extremely delicate situation going on here," I'm gunna go ahead and say his comments were intuitive, well thought out, and appropriately times.

And in re to Shepherd Johnson: Well it looks like we just may have a total dick-situation going on here.
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Ryan Tate
06/12/09

@k8idid8313: Regarding the "lead in," it's not clear whether this was the first correspondence between these two people.
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DennyCrane
06/12/09

In reply to Flickr Founder Calls Nuked User 'A Dick'
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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limber
04/14/09

In reply to Amazon.com Says 'Embarrassing' Error, Not Hacker, Censored 57,310 Gay Books
Only a very tiny percentage of the population has any idea what algorithmic engines are like to design and operate, and I'm one of them. Having looked at the ban/unban pattern, I find Amazon's explanation of a catalog error as totally plausible.

I believe them, that this is a categorization error, especially your man from France -- I once outsourced a medical classification system, and when I got it back the New Delhi-based team had classified homosexuality as "a mental illness of the genital area". This is one node, mind you, buried in about seventy pages of medical jargon, intended for Western content. I caught it before we launched it, but I can only imagine what would've happened if that team had been working on tagging rather than creating the classification structure. And when I'd gone looking for the tags, at first glance it would've just read "Homosexuality".

Considering all this blew up on Easter weekend, when everyone would've been away from any logs, I'm not surprised PR didn't have an immediate answer for the masses. Discovering the glitch is one thing; crawling through the enormous Amazon taxonomy to find what's throwing it? That's a nightmare.
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ljnd2
04/14/09

@limber: I was with you right up till the end - I used to do taxonomy work for BN.com. I know how this happened, in the same way you do. But I disagree with the PR. Even if you haven't unraveled what's going on, for something like this you don't wait to solve the problem to make a statement. You say, "We think we know how this happened, but it's extremely complicated and it'll take us a while to get to the bottom of it. That said, it was NOT any sort of executive decision, it is NOT a policy decision, and we're very very sorry that we messed up." You make it clear, in other words, that you understand that whole categories of books don't suppress themselves. And that untangling the mess is going to take a while.
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limber
04/14/09

@ljnd2: That's fair, yeah -- things would have been a lot better with specific language to try and still the waters. I don't know much about the art of PR, and frankly people have been so worked up, I'm not sure they'd've listened -- they're out there calling for scalps, arranging boycotts, demanding discounts and donations. PR could've done a much better job, I'm just not sure how effective it would've been.
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iplaudius
04/13/09

In reply to Amazon.com Says 'Embarrassing' Error, Not Hacker, Censored 57,310 Gay Books
I guess one unanswered question is whether the Conficker network was in fact used by Weev. It would be interesting if he were involved in Conficker.
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theMoJo
04/13/09

In reply to Amazon.com Says 'Embarrassing' Error, Not Hacker, Censored 57,310 Gay Books
Way to make a big deal out of nothing, really. I've read a lot complaining and criticizing Amazon's response and handling of the situation, but I really don't see anything they've done as particularly craptastic.
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apocalypse-nowish
04/13/09

@theMoJo: You should see it over at Jezebel. There are about ten pages worth of outrage over all of this. And in a week who is really going to care?
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hatey
04/13/09

@apocalypse-nowish: OMG. There are ten pages of outrage about EVERYTHING at Jezebel.
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MincnglyWhrdL'mer
04/13/09

@hatey: one can only wonder how they get anything else done...

thought. jezehellers are bots?
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limber
04/14/09

@theMoJo: It really, really is a big deal out of nothing. I have no damn idea why a simple tagging error is being hyped as a civil rights catastrophe.

Logic takes a holiday.
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