7 ms·

May be I missed it but can someone tell me what was the crime the company was committing ? Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as stalling LE

May be I missed it but can someone tell me what was the crime the company was committing ? Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as stalling LEOs and Warrants in whatever way they can. A lot of this is not really "crime" as in kidnapping people or shooting people dead in some alley. Is having shell companies a crime ? I know a ton of bay area "startups" than engage in these sort of tricks to maximize the brand damage. Ask.com and other toolbar companies are great examples where they will just rebrand the same toolbar as X and sell it to 10 companies which were owned by same entity. Half the companies with "explosive" growth were using mass mailing techniques than involved spamming. Many used foreign companies to skirt US law related to spamming. I think author is overthinking.

ikeboy 7y ago
See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361670 None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell. The crime they were actually charged with was using these shell companies to get more IP addresses than they were "entitled" to get. See the indictment at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.scd.250342/gov.uscourts.scd.250342.2.0_1.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.scd.250342/...
- saber6 7y ago
  > [...] as far as I can tell. It appears the law in this case feels differently. The owners claimed under legal penalty that they had certain assets (paying customers, needs for IP addressing, etc). These statements appear to have been completely false. Thus, the trial. And yes, lying to ARIN (or any RIR) about your customer base (need for IPv4 addressing) is just plain crappy. IPv4 addressing is a common resource - a 32-bit fixed address space - similar in concept to physical frequency allocation by the FCC. There are 4.2B IPv4 addresses (minus some for RFC1918 and MCAST, etc). To lay illegitimate claim to them is really wrong, and more importantly, legally risky now.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    No, they were not charged for any of the things claimed to be crimes in the article. The trial is about different alleged wrongdoings than OP is going on about.
    - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
      There's also other cases with charges pending, as well as a nasty Divorce case.
      - ikeboy 7y ago
        What other charges are there?
        ganoushoreilly 7y ago
        Last I heard, the Fbi is going after him separately for wire fraud against multiple banks.
        ikeboy 7y ago
        The only criminal case I can find is the one from last May. Googling "fbi wire fraud amir golestan" doesn't turn up anything relating to wire fraud against banks, and searching courtlistener for his name only turns up civil cases and the same May case. Do you have any links? Or is this based on personal knowledge that isn't public yet?
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > No, they were not charged for any of the things claimed to be crimes in the article. Both a fraudulent system of shell companies and knowingly profiting by enabling spam are alleged on the article, and both have been the subject of criminal charges against the firm and it's CEO. [0] [0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/a-tough-week-for-ip-address-scammers/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/a-tough-week-for-ip-addr...
- dylan604 7y ago
  Every time I sign up for any kind of banking service (loan,credit,checking,etc), there's a note about by signing the document I am acknowledging that providing false information would be a bad idea. How is it not fraudulent to deceive potential investors by using false user data/stats? I've never read any investor agreements, but I'd assume there's some sort of similar statement/clause.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    >How is it not fraudulent to deceive potential investors by using false user data/stats? Where did that happen? It certainly isn't alleged by OP.
- sneak 7y ago
  Thing is... you don’t “get” an IP address. Having ARIN reserve you a netblock in their database doesn’t get you anything that you didn’t have prior to them doing that. IP “ownership” is not a real thing.
  - notriddle 7y ago
    That's... really irrelevant. The point is that they were using shell companies to trick ARIN into reserving more netblocks than normal.
    - sneak 7y ago
      If an ARIN reservation doesn’t get you anything, then tricking ARIN to get more of them isn’t fraud.
      - nybble41 7y ago
        It does get you something, though: the service of ARIN telling everyone that you "own" those addresses. Lying to someone so that they will perform a service for you is fraud even if you're not receiving any property. If you're running your own closed-off private network you can use whatever addresses you want, and I would agree with you that IPv4 addresses, as such, are not property. However, if you're connecting to the public Internet then your peers are going to care about whether the address ranges you claim were officially assigned to you by ARIN.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell The fake “Channel Partners” addressed in the article are paragraph 4 of the indictment. The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment, the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. It seems preposterous to view those as unrelated.
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    >The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. >the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in responding to subpoenas, or any illegal use of the IP addresses by spammers, etc. The article lists a bunch of things and either implies or explicitly says they are crimes, when none are. This includes having multiple shell companies, which is perfectly legal. Submitting false documentation for those shell companies is illegal, but is not mentioned by OP, presumably because they would not have been in a position to observe any of that documentation.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. It says that when a parent company agent was in possession of a warrant addressed to the parent company at the location of one of the fraudulent “Channel Partners” they were ordered to interact with law enforcement as if they were exclusively an agent of the “Channel Partner”. Now, I suppose that could be argued to not be primarily intended to evade compliance with the warrant but instead to maintain the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners”, but either way it's a deliberate act in furtherance of a crime that could be separately prosecuted.
      - ikeboy 7y ago
        >the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners” You still don't get it. The fraud was submitting false documentation to ARIN. Operating multiple shell companies is perfectly legal, as long as you don't submit false sworn affidavits and otherwise lie in the course of your activities. Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying. It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on it, and he says he wasn't permitted to reach out to LEO to clarify. Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.
- pdm55 7y ago
  In support of your comment: "As Micfo amassed VPN clients using the illegitimately-obtained IP addresses, a lot of traffic — some being criminal — filed through its network without a trace, according to government subpoenas directed at Micfo and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Golestan and Micfo are not charged with being part of or even aware of illegal activity transmitted via VPNs across Micfo’s servers. The DOJ charged him and the company with “defrauding the internet registry to obtain the IP addresses over a period of several years.” Prosecutors said Golestan’s alleged scheme was valued at $14 million, which was based on the government’s estimated value of between $13 and $19 for each address in the secondary market, according to the court complaint. Born in Iran, Golestan, 36, started Micfo in 1999 in the bedroom of his childhood home in Dubai before emigrating to the U.S." https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2020/secure-smart-cities-cybercriminals/ https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2020/secure-smart-cities-c...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> May be I missed it but can someone tell me what was the crime the company was committing ? From the description in the article, obstruction of justice, at a minimum, possibly also with the intent of furthering other crimes and civil wrongs by the firm or it's customers. > Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as stalling LEOs and Warrants in whatever way they can. Many companies will do anything within the law to do this, which is, of course, not a crime. But “whatever way they can” is a crime. > A lot of this is not really "crime" as in kidnapping people or shooting people dead in some alley. Yes, obstruction of justice is a different crime than murder or kidnapping. It's just as real of a crime. > Is having shell companies a crime ? No, but using them fraudulently can be a crime and/or a civil wrong, and which has been involved in both civil liability already established against the firm and CEO in question and which is seems to be a key part of the mechanism of the fraud involved in the 20-count federal criminal indictment against them. [0] [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-shines-light-on-webs-dark-corners-11581944400 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-sh...
Spooky23 7y ago
Fraud. You didn’t miss it. Everything after that first question were excuses for why it’s ok to break the law.
- Karishma1234fff 7y ago
  Which law is being broken? Also (in my personal opinion) criminality should be obvious to a general person, some kind of complex technical illegality may not make the whole company a "criminal organization". A lot of reputed companies like Google get fined on regular basis world over does not make them criminal organizations. A lot of companies would also willingly break the law depending on the risk tolerance they have, many of those laws result into civil penalties and not jail time for CEO so that also matters. I was genuinely hoping OP worked from some underground enterprise that provided hitmans to rich people or something. La John Wick style. But thats just the romantic in me.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Misrepresentation when money or other tangible things are at stake is fraud. There are civil frauds and criminal frauds. Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police. You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver. That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > criminality should be obvious to a general person This standard would work for about 5 minutes before a criminal complicated things enough that their crime was no longer obviously wrong.
rblatz 7y ago
I read a few other posts on the authors blog and I think overthinking is a common issue for them. The strangest one was they flew in for an interview the night before, got settled in at 11pm and decided not to sleep because they had to check out at 9am.
normalnorm 7y ago
Am I the only one getting depressed with all the excuses and rationalizations in this thread? It's the same with "adtech" and the like... "Hey, I'm not killing anyone, what's the harm?" Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans. A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market! Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it. But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something. Fuck all this.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You're not the only one. And don't even get me started on adtech. I share your sentiment 100%. See [0]. -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.
  - normalnorm 7y ago
    Excellent blog post. You mention several things that we are so used to, that we don't even notice the abuse, such as the polluting of culture by association of works of art with commercial brands through relentless advertising. To this day, I associate Carmina Burana with cheap male cologne. Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> I know a ton of bay area "startups" than engage in these sort of tricks to maximize the brand damage. (...) Half the companies with "explosive" growth were using mass mailing techniques than involved spamming. Many used foreign companies to skirt US law related to spamming. Yes, I think we all know some. And it's true, skirting the law and abusing the commons gives one a competitive advantage. But that doesn't make it OK. The market isn't the arbiter of ethics. It only means that not enough is done to stop that behavior, that the border between legal and illegal is too low, or too misaligned with what's actually happening. That people still underestimate the extent to which money trumps ethics in everyday decision making.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > skirting the law and abusing the commons gives one a competitive advantage. But that doesn't make it OK. The market isn't the arbiter of ethics. Sadly, this is a bit naive, market have become the arbiters of ethics, namely: if it successful, it's good. This isn't a traditional moral code from, e.g., Kant, Bentham, or Locke. Rather, it's an ethics based on capitalism. Sure, wonky economics professors justify capitalism by saying it's the most efficient or provides the most utility, arguably grounded in traditional Bentham morality. But capitalism has never simply been an economic policy, there has always been an ideological component to it (see for example, Ayn Rand). Maximizing returns on investment isn't just "efficient", it's "right".

ikeboy 7y ago

See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361670 None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell. The crime they were actually charged with was using these shell companies to get more IP addresses than they were "entitled" to get. See the indictment at https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.scd.250342/gov.uscourts.scd.250342.2.0_1.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.scd.250342/...

saber6 7y ago
> [...] as far as I can tell. It appears the law in this case feels differently. The owners claimed under legal penalty that they had certain assets (paying customers, needs for IP addressing, etc). These statements appear to have been completely false. Thus, the trial. And yes, lying to ARIN (or any RIR) about your customer base (need for IPv4 addressing) is just plain crappy. IPv4 addressing is a common resource - a 32-bit fixed address space - similar in concept to physical frequency allocation by the FCC. There are 4.2B IPv4 addresses (minus some for RFC1918 and MCAST, etc). To lay illegitimate claim to them is really wrong, and more importantly, legally risky now.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  No, they were not charged for any of the things claimed to be crimes in the article. The trial is about different alleged wrongdoings than OP is going on about.
  - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
    There's also other cases with charges pending, as well as a nasty Divorce case.
    - ikeboy 7y ago
      What other charges are there?
      - ganoushoreilly 7y ago
        Last I heard, the Fbi is going after him separately for wire fraud against multiple banks.
        ikeboy 7y ago
        The only criminal case I can find is the one from last May. Googling "fbi wire fraud amir golestan" doesn't turn up anything relating to wire fraud against banks, and searching courtlistener for his name only turns up civil cases and the same May case. Do you have any links? Or is this based on personal knowledge that isn't public yet?
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > No, they were not charged for any of the things claimed to be crimes in the article. Both a fraudulent system of shell companies and knowingly profiting by enabling spam are alleged on the article, and both have been the subject of criminal charges against the firm and it's CEO. [0] [0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/a-tough-week-for-ip-address-scammers/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/05/a-tough-week-for-ip-addr...
dylan604 7y ago
Every time I sign up for any kind of banking service (loan,credit,checking,etc), there's a note about by signing the document I am acknowledging that providing false information would be a bad idea. How is it not fraudulent to deceive potential investors by using false user data/stats? I've never read any investor agreements, but I'd assume there's some sort of similar statement/clause.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  >How is it not fraudulent to deceive potential investors by using false user data/stats? Where did that happen? It certainly isn't alleged by OP.
sneak 7y ago
Thing is... you don’t “get” an IP address. Having ARIN reserve you a netblock in their database doesn’t get you anything that you didn’t have prior to them doing that. IP “ownership” is not a real thing.
- notriddle 7y ago
  That's... really irrelevant. The point is that they were using shell companies to trick ARIN into reserving more netblocks than normal.
  - sneak 7y ago
    If an ARIN reservation doesn’t get you anything, then tricking ARIN to get more of them isn’t fraud.
    - nybble41 7y ago
      It does get you something, though: the service of ARIN telling everyone that you "own" those addresses. Lying to someone so that they will perform a service for you is fraud even if you're not receiving any property. If you're running your own closed-off private network you can use whatever addresses you want, and I would agree with you that IPv4 addresses, as such, are not property. However, if you're connecting to the public Internet then your peers are going to care about whether the address ranges you claim were officially assigned to you by ARIN.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> None of the things mentioned here are crimes, as far as I can tell The fake “Channel Partners” addressed in the article are paragraph 4 of the indictment. The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment, the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. It seems preposterous to view those as unrelated.
- ikeboy 7y ago
  >The article addresses some of the mechanisms by which they were used to evade legal process for the purpose of concealment No, it doesn't. It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. >the indictment deals with the fact that they were used for that purpose. Nope. The indictment is about using the shell companies to get additional IP addresses out of ARIN. It has nothing to do with any deficiency in responding to subpoenas, or any illegal use of the IP addresses by spammers, etc. The article lists a bunch of things and either implies or explicitly says they are crimes, when none are. This includes having multiple shell companies, which is perfectly legal. Submitting false documentation for those shell companies is illegal, but is not mentioned by OP, presumably because they would not have been in a position to observe any of that documentation.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > It says they responded to subpoenas for each entity. It says that when a parent company agent was in possession of a warrant addressed to the parent company at the location of one of the fraudulent “Channel Partners” they were ordered to interact with law enforcement as if they were exclusively an agent of the “Channel Partner”. Now, I suppose that could be argued to not be primarily intended to evade compliance with the warrant but instead to maintain the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners”, but either way it's a deliberate act in furtherance of a crime that could be separately prosecuted.
    - ikeboy 7y ago
      >the fraud of the independence of the “Channel Partners” You still don't get it. The fraud was submitting false documentation to ARIN. Operating multiple shell companies is perfectly legal, as long as you don't submit false sworn affidavits and otherwise lie in the course of your activities. Responding to a subpoena as the entity it was sent to isn't lying. It says there was one occasion where the subpoena had both Micfo and a channel partners' info on it, and he says he wasn't permitted to reach out to LEO to clarify. Regardless, it's not an act "in furtherance of a crime" - the crime was committed at the point they obtained the IP addresses.
pdm55 7y ago
In support of your comment: "As Micfo amassed VPN clients using the illegitimately-obtained IP addresses, a lot of traffic — some being criminal — filed through its network without a trace, according to government subpoenas directed at Micfo and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Golestan and Micfo are not charged with being part of or even aware of illegal activity transmitted via VPNs across Micfo’s servers. The DOJ charged him and the company with “defrauding the internet registry to obtain the IP addresses over a period of several years.” Prosecutors said Golestan’s alleged scheme was valued at $14 million, which was based on the government’s estimated value of between $13 and $19 for each address in the secondary market, according to the court complaint. Born in Iran, Golestan, 36, started Micfo in 1999 in the bedroom of his childhood home in Dubai before emigrating to the U.S." https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2020/secure-smart-cities-cybercriminals/ https://www.pymnts.com/innovation/2020/secure-smart-cities-c...

dragonwriter 7y ago

> May be I missed it but can someone tell me what was the crime the company was committing ? From the description in the article, obstruction of justice, at a minimum, possibly also with the intent of furthering other crimes and civil wrongs by the firm or it's customers. > Almost any company will have defensive strategies such as stalling LEOs and Warrants in whatever way they can. Many companies will do anything within the law to do this, which is, of course, not a crime. But “whatever way they can” is a crime. > A lot of this is not really "crime" as in kidnapping people or shooting people dead in some alley. Yes, obstruction of justice is a different crime than murder or kidnapping. It's just as real of a crime. > Is having shell companies a crime ? No, but using them fraudulently can be a crime and/or a civil wrong, and which has been involved in both civil liability already established against the firm and CEO in question and which is seems to be a key part of the mechanism of the fraud involved in the 20-count federal criminal indictment against them. [0] [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-shines-light-on-webs-dark-corners-11581944400 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraud-case-in-charleston-s-c-sh...

Spooky23 7y ago

Fraud. You didn’t miss it. Everything after that first question were excuses for why it’s ok to break the law.

Karishma1234fff 7y ago
Which law is being broken? Also (in my personal opinion) criminality should be obvious to a general person, some kind of complex technical illegality may not make the whole company a "criminal organization". A lot of reputed companies like Google get fined on regular basis world over does not make them criminal organizations. A lot of companies would also willingly break the law depending on the risk tolerance they have, many of those laws result into civil penalties and not jail time for CEO so that also matters. I was genuinely hoping OP worked from some underground enterprise that provided hitmans to rich people or something. La John Wick style. But thats just the romantic in me.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Misrepresentation when money or other tangible things are at stake is fraud. There are civil frauds and criminal frauds. Say you needed to have a room added to your home. You approach a contractor, who talks about his past experience, and offers up several customer and trade references to corroborate this experience. You sign a contract, pay the 50% deposit, and the person disappears and doesn’t respond to your inquiries, nor those of the police. You later find out that the customers were family members of the contractor, the trade reference was a Delaware corporation owned by the same Nevada corporation that cashed your check. In other words, the entire enterprise was a criminal enterprise constructed to defraud customers, not deliver. That contrived example is an obvious series of frauds that is obviously a criminal enterprise. It’s easy to understand because the money was stolen. A case like this is a little different because the fraud was basically a scheme to get a constrained resource by lying about material facts to commit the fraud. IANAL, but my guess is the deliberate construction of these legal entities with no meaningful purpose elevated the matter.
- wpietri 7y ago
  > criminality should be obvious to a general person This standard would work for about 5 minutes before a criminal complicated things enough that their crime was no longer obviously wrong.

rblatz 7y ago

I read a few other posts on the authors blog and I think overthinking is a common issue for them. The strangest one was they flew in for an interview the night before, got settled in at 11pm and decided not to sleep because they had to check out at 9am.

normalnorm 7y ago

Am I the only one getting depressed with all the excuses and rationalizations in this thread? It's the same with "adtech" and the like... "Hey, I'm not killing anyone, what's the harm?" Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans. A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market! Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it. But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something. Fuck all this.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
You're not the only one. And don't even get me started on adtech. I share your sentiment 100%. See [0]. -- [0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.
- normalnorm 7y ago
  Excellent blog post. You mention several things that we are so used to, that we don't even notice the abuse, such as the polluting of culture by association of works of art with commercial brands through relentless advertising. To this day, I associate Carmina Burana with cheap male cologne. Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> I know a ton of bay area "startups" than engage in these sort of tricks to maximize the brand damage. (...) Half the companies with "explosive" growth were using mass mailing techniques than involved spamming. Many used foreign companies to skirt US law related to spamming. Yes, I think we all know some. And it's true, skirting the law and abusing the commons gives one a competitive advantage. But that doesn't make it OK. The market isn't the arbiter of ethics. It only means that not enough is done to stop that behavior, that the border between legal and illegal is too low, or too misaligned with what's actually happening. That people still underestimate the extent to which money trumps ethics in everyday decision making.

speedplane 7y ago
> skirting the law and abusing the commons gives one a competitive advantage. But that doesn't make it OK. The market isn't the arbiter of ethics. Sadly, this is a bit naive, market have become the arbiters of ethics, namely: if it successful, it's good. This isn't a traditional moral code from, e.g., Kant, Bentham, or Locke. Rather, it's an ethics based on capitalism. Sure, wonky economics professors justify capitalism by saying it's the most efficient or provides the most utility, arguably grounded in traditional Bentham morality. But capitalism has never simply been an economic policy, there has always been an ideological component to it (see for example, Ayn Rand). Maximizing returns on investment isn't just "efficient", it's "right".