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HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr Steps Down
- bane 16y agoAt this point they're going to just have to change the name of the company.
- jtdowney 16y agoKind of like the division of Diebold that made voting machines became Premier Election Solutions
- bane 16y agoRight, or Blackwater -> XE
- m0nastic 16y agoOr ValuJet, or Ryder truck getting rid of the yellow trucks...
- smhinsey 16y agoI never made the connection with Ryder trucks, that's an interesting one. It's sort of a reverse Q-tip effect, where instead of your brand being generically associated with your product, it's associated with the worst possible thing it could be used for. Few products have been so spectacularly misused as to warrant such treatment. Anyway, my personal favorite has always been Philip Morris turning into Altria Group. I can just imagine the meeting where they came up with that one: "you know what, fuck it, let's just make up a nice sounding word."
- megablast 16y agoSome people get paid a lot of money to come up with names like Altria.
- getsat 16y agoI mentally associate Altria with altruism when I come across it, which is probably the intent.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- smhinsey 16y agoOh definitely. I am sure they laughed all the way to Tahiti after they cashed their well-earned bonus check after that one.
- pnathan 16y agoNow that's a job I'd want. Me and my n-gram generator. =)
- shareme 16y agoWeHuntedAnonymousButLost?
- jaredmck 16y agoAaron Barr might want to change his name as well...
- wmf 16y agoMaybe it's a common enough name that he can just say "no, I'm the other Aaron Barr".
- stcredzero 16y agoChange the last a to u.
- bvi 16y agoOr replace the "a" with an "i": Ironn Barr. It will be a unique enough name that anyone's first impression will be "That's a pretty kickass name" as opposed to "You the HBGary guy?".
- stcredzero 16y agoThe idea that launched a thousand cheesy pickup lines.
- shareme 16y agoWESuckAtSecurityButThriveOnIllegalSpying
- jonknee 16y agoIt's stupid/frustrating in this day and age that changing the company's name after a big fuck up actually works.
- jacques_chester 16y agoIt has always worked. Tallyrand, Napoleon's Foreign Minister, observed that one of the functions of a government is to rename institutions which have, under the old name, become odious.
- jonknee 16y agoMy point wasn't that it didn't use to work, but that it shouldn't work anymore now that everyone has access to history instantly...
- stcredzero 16y agoToo bad so many lack the attention span to utilize it.
- tzs 16y agoOn the other hand, it is great for companies that are falsely accused, and the false accusation sticks. I've seen people make the most ridiculous false claims on forums, then others find these when Googling and repeat them any time the company gets mentioned. Several years later, someone will mention that company in passing, and then someone pops up saying they plant child porn on your computer or steal your credit card. It's nice when going into a new line of business to be able to do it under a new name and not have to deal with that crap.
- Nate75Sanders 16y agoWe need websites that track _individuals_ for their reputation instead of just businesses. I recently had a moving company move my car across the country. I picked the #1 rated broker in the United States the last 2 years running. They're just the broker, though. They pick an actual trucking company to move your car. I found out that the individuals involved in the company moving my car had opened 3 other companies in the past 4 years and closed them all. I dug more and found that they had absolutely horrible ratings on the biggest rating site for car-hauling companies and also horrible ratings on the BBB site. Luckily, I got my car without incident, but we need a good way to track scum. If you tried hard and played by the rules in business and didn't do shady things and failed, then I can understand trying again without serious stigma, but if you're forming new companies all the time, you should be informally punished through lots of information/transparency. It's easy to say "don't go with a company that hasn't been around for X years", but that's really unfair to legit startups trying to innovate. We need a better answer to this problem.
- drinian 16y agoAre you familiar with Whuffie, which was a fictional reputational currency? I'm pretty sure that with the advent of decentralized currencies like BitCoin, we could probably implement Whuffie now. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Whuffie https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Whuffie
- nickolai 16y agoSomething like this -> http://xkcd.com/796/ http://xkcd.com/796/ ?
- georgieporgie 16y agoThis is wildly irrelevant, but I have to ask: does anyone else experience profound irritation at the name "HBGary"? Every time I read the name, my reading flow stops and I stare at the name. HBWhat? Does that stand for something? Are they initials? Who is Gary? Are they from Indiana? It triggers this bizarre, deep-down irritation like nothing else I've ever seen.
- michaelcampbell 16y agoI don't have quite the same reaction, but my gut instinct thinks the company name is something my 10 year old son would have come up with. If his name was Gary, anyway. It's right on par with naming your company "ImSo$#@!Awesome Inc." or something.
- edkennedy 16y agoIn pick up artist lingo, HB stands for "Hot Babe" to keep their names anonymous. So for example you meet a girl with a hotrod you would call her HBHotrod. Had to chuckle when I saw the name HBGary.
- GHFigs 16y agoLikewise for GoDaddy, hhgregg, and scores of startup names. It's like my brain is looking for a meaningful word and halts briefly when it can't find one. Textual basilisks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Langford#Basilisks
- Groxx 16y agoGoDaddy just always makes me think porn before DNS. I can't imagine what thoughts were going through their heads when they thought "GoDaddy. Yeah. That makes me think 'major DNS server'. Lets go with that." To make matters worse, they've got women wearing shirts that say "GoDaddy" on their front page. Gotta wonder what their target audience is, with that featuring so prominently.
- m_myers 16y ago
- m0nastic 16y agoThis is the first positive thing I've read to come out of this fiasco (and I don't say that lightly, as I am particularly sensitive to companies suffering security breaches; but they've handled this about as poor as one could).
- iuguy 16y agoWithout Barr, it's likely that Federal is over (that is assuming that it isn't already over regardless), which is probably not a bad thing for HBGary but will be for anyone who invested in federal. I think the lesson for everyone here is not to fund a company sharing your brand name without some degree of control over what they're doing and the ability to immediately fire the guy in charge if they endanger the parent.
- Aetius 16y agoThe lesson is to screen for and not hire giant egotistical douchebags who will write checks that they can't cash.
- motters 16y agoThe internet amplifies reputational risk. My guess is that if HBGary has any future they will at the very minimum have to change their company name. Reading some of the leaked emails provides (at least for me) a shocking insight into the dark side of the internet and how social networks can be abused for sinister purposes. Assuming HBGary isn't the only company involved in these sorts of machinations it raises some really big and serious questions about the future of democracy and the ability of governments to create fake consensus using "persona management software".
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThe power of publicity (both negative and positive) is now in the hands of everyone not just the hands of powerful institutions such as the traditional press or the government. Wikileaks and anonymous' hijinx are just one example of the brave new world we're entering, it'll be fascinating to see how it will play out.
- stcredzero 16y agoMy hunch is that this very social network and its close cousin reddit are being manipulated by groups following discordian ideologies. In short, it's being manipulated for fun and "profit." ("Profit" in the form of media-manipulation capability.) In other words, it's being manipulated for the LULZ. (By people who don't know how to analyze what they read and argue cogently.) The flavor of logic and discourse on this site has taken a definite turn for the worse. Nonsensical and somewhat juvenile reactions to my comments occur with frightening regularity. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270002 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270002
- khafra 16y agoBy "Discordian," I'm thinking you mean the TAZ-theory and other stuff from RAW's other work, not so much the carefree pranksterism of the Principia Discordia, right? Either way, it's a model for which I hold such a low prior probability that it would take a lot of evidence to convince me, but the latter seems to have more internal consistency. As for your link, people thought you were talking about the overreaching of the Tolkien estate; you were talking about what appeared to be a button taking sides in an imaginary cultural divide. Simple miscommunication.
- learner4life 16y agoThe most disturbing thing about this episode is that DOJ referred BoA to HBGary. It is truly scary when government is in the business of targeting its own individuals. One has to wonder how it is different from Ben Ali or Gaddafi targeting their own people. Sure the scale is different, but the principle is the same.
- Vivtek 16y agoActually, DOJ recommended the law firm that ended up talking to HBGary and Palantir and ... whoever the third one was. Not that it isn't egregious for the DOJ to recommend reputation fixup to Bank of America because BoA is presumably about to get hammered by Wikileaks disclosure.
- defroost 16y agoWho didn't see that coming after the embarrassing fiasco with Anonymous? I've been following this story pretty closely via Salon.com and the excellent series at Ars Technica and it seemed to be only a matter of time for Barr to make an exit.
- tscrib 16y agoIndeed. Ars Technica has been covering it in excellent depth. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier. From the onset, especially HBGary's reaction, it seemed the only way out was that Barr would be canned or step down.
- da5e 16y agoStieg Larsson's new book would be, The Boy Who Stuck His Penis in a Hornet's Nest.
- adrianwaj 16y agoPwned from the outside and then barred from within. Nice. Anon's comments under that article really rub it in. No mercy at all.
- mistermann 16y agoSome of the stuff he was doing was pretty clever, and he'll have no shortage of customers if he continues down that path. Taking on Anonymous for advertising purposes however has turned out to be not too bright. His former clients are distancing themselves as fast as possible, but next time they'll just make sure their payments can't be traced to them. "Oh, we didn't know he was doing such things". Bullshit....most companies don't care about ethics, and the US government certainly doesn't at a fundamental level either. He'll do just fine.
- tscrib 16y agoThe government and large defence companies certainly do care about ethics. It's just a different 'kind' of ethics than you would normally envision. Its more about your appearance to the general public, and your market than anything else. If the general public perceives your action an unethical, then it is, and it is detrimental to your company. I've worked for several defence contractors, and each one is crazy about ethical training. Monthly online ethics training courses are mandatory. Any perception of wrongdoing is incredibly harmful when dealing with the federal government. Billion dollar contracts are won and lost based on those perceptions.
- mistermann 16y agoBut they don't care about ethics for ethical reasons, they care about them for PR reasons...but maybe thats what you said. My point was, many customers,the government included, would love to have some of this information, and access to social botnets. The background of the seller is irrelevant. Of course your ethical training at work is top notch. I've done work at similar companies, and I have to pass ethical tests on a regular basis, yet, we have incidents that set records, in a bad way. If you think taking tests at work means your company is taking something seriously, you haven't been working long enough. :)