Same. I remember friends who owned a small restaurant early in the Yelp days who were constantly harassed and extorted. They survived but the threat to their business was palpable.
Yes I have a small business and I did the stupid thing of listing my business on Yelp. They will try manipulate you into getting into their ads and they ended up charging me $900 for one customer that I got.
Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews.
Yelp is releasing a new index that tracks every U.S establishment it’s ever caught engaging in “suspicious” activity to influence its reviews.
Yelp places temporary alerts on businesses’ pages when it discovers fake reviews, and regularly releases transparency reports detailing its moderation efforts.
“We’d love to get to a place where this new index develops into a regular resource for others, whether it’s FTC, consumers, regulators or other sites,” Malik tells Engadget.
But she’s also quick to point out that the index is also meant to help Yelp users make “educated decisions” about where to spend their money.
While you may not think much about visiting a coffee shop with a history of paying people to leave positive Yelp reviews, your feelings may be very different if you’re looking for a contractor to remodel your home, or for a daycare or moving company (all of which appear in the index).
The original article contains 412 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yelp has made this wall of shame incredibly hard to browse. It’s not sorted in any clear way, and there’s no way to sort or filter it. You have to keep clicking “load more” to get 15 at a time. They really do not want to help you find which businesses to avoid in your area.
Because it’s not about normal people browsing it, it’s about them saying "we put you on our wall of shame “pay us instead of those fake reviewers!” And then removing the business from their tidy, alphabatized, excel spreadsheet that the esoteric algorithm the “wall of shame” randomly pulls from.
There is seriously a mental health pandemic going on and it’s scary. Everyone here who has messages or upvotes messages about bringing out the guillotine or killing billionaires really needs to seek help.
Well then, do what you tell people who condemn rapists and pedophiles to do: learn some empathy.
People who hold different opinions and worldviews than you aren’t fucking mentally ill. You are by insinuating such. You are not the center of the universe and your opinions are not automatically facts just because you hold them.
Americans actually do still have a constitutional right to advocate overthrowing their government if they want; the whole fucking point of the first and second amendments is to enable the people to do just that.
I’m tired of people like you and your vile bullshit. Don’t like it, get out of the thread. But don’t come in here with your holier-than-thou act thinking you’re going to bully or guilt trip or emotionally blackmail anybody into sitting down or submitting to your opinion like you’ve been doing to the American people for decades now.
I’m sorry I don’t condone the murder and enslavement of millions around the world by a small dominant group of people who have no one’s best interests at heart but their own.
I’m sorry I don’t condone the perpetuation of a broken system that purposefully subjugates billions of people.
I’m sorry you’re butthurt I and a bunch of other people on the internet won’t validate your massively unjustified sense of superiority and self-importance.
You grow the fuck up.
Grow. Up. And stop protecting and defending evil people. Stop hurting society and stop hurting us.
“I don’t condone the killing of people simply because they make more than I do.”
to
“[condoning] the murder and enslavement of millions around the world by a small dominant group of people who have no one’s best interests at heart but their own.”?
What I found out is the outcomes of events like the French Revolution and the rule of the Khmer Rouge i.e. vastly different dependent on the circumstances of the place and time.
Well, what the rest of us found out is the outcome of almost every other revolution in modern history including the American Revolution, which kickstarted modern democracy and led to the liberation of 60 other countries from enslavement, colonization and oppression.
In other words, you are just biased and here with an agenda just like you shitlords were when you inundated the Danny Masterson thread and the other news threads where you hounded on anybody who dared oppose your vile little sacred cow.
Take your political agenda out of our lives and respect our right to make up our own fucking minds. You are hurting us by acting this way: you enable and defend evil, you help the ruling class continue to subjugate the working class, and you do it all because you yourself benefit from the status quo and don’t want to miss out on McDonald’s and 7-11 because of the workers getting riled up.
you enable and defend evil, you help the ruling class continue to subjugate the working class, and you do it all because you yourself benefit from the status quo and don’t want to miss out on McDonald’s and 7-11 because of the workers getting riled up.
Seems to me like you’re far more butthurt judging by this comment thread lol.
You’ve put a lot of words in my mouth that I’ve never said.
I almost guarantee you and I have more in common than you may realize unfortunately you’re so blinded by hate you’re unable to think clearly.
Mark my words we are working towards WW3 and it scares the living hell out of me because people like you are so built up in your echo chambers and you’re frothing at the mouth. There’s no difference between your attitude and those of an average Trump supporter. It’s blind rage. Looking for simple solutions to a complex world.
I seriously worry for my children. The anger is so unfocused or focused on the wrong area.
We can change the system but we have to want to. The problem is people increasingly on the left and right just want to burn it down.
Strawmanning and attacking #EatTheRich memebros actually is equivalent to enabling actual violence by condemning anyone who opposes nonviolence, actually, and it’s why you all are finally, finally being downvoted and rejected by everyone else. Ackshually
And it couldn’t possibly be that you’re just wrong.
Wanna know how I know? Because I actually think and don’t resort to blatant bandwagon fallacies like you do. Actually recent polls have even shown the number of Americans who agree with sentiments like #EatTheRich or who accept political violence is rising, and it’s more Democrats doing it than Republicans, so you’re doubly wrong.
Take your status-quo-or-die bullshit elsewhere. We’ve had enough of it. No one has to agree with you on the issue. No one has to agree with you on nonviolence or political violence or any sort of -ence. People have the right to feel the way they want to feel and as someone with a vested stake in a liberal democracy that pretends to care about such things, by extension you have to respect that.
Thanks for the link. Some of those results were interesting. Question. Your link says that 84% disagree with the statement that “political violence against those I disagree with is acceptable”. How have you concluded this is “rising”? What is your base of comparrison?
I’m assuming you read this elsewhere because your source does not have a comparrison number. So at present, there is nothing to indicate the number is rising. For all we know the number of people who agree with that type of violence could have been sitting at 16% for many years.
It isn’t realistic to expect the number to be zero. There will always be radicals. Always. Even if we somehow create a perfect utopia, there will always be a handful of malcontents.
You literally could have just Googled it instead of trying to bad-faith your way to the position you want to believe, but whatever, I Googled it for you, there you go. The one poll I posted is not the only one that shows the trend. Civil war’s a-brewing, fren.
I also didn’t say zero, I said close to zero. Jesus Christ, if you’re going to speak in bad faith you could at least try to be subtle about it. At least the assholes in the other threads would have the decency to use a motte-and-bailey. You’re just lazily throwing out strawmen and obvious garbage.
Wow. You’re an angry person. I had no ill intent. Just curiosity. Hope your day goes better.
Edit: also, your provided sources are in conflict. You say it’s on the rise, but your second link is from Jan 2021 which states 33% - 36% of people “feel somewhat justified in using varying levels of violence to achieve their political goals”. However, your first link is from Sept 2022 states only 17% feel using political violence against those they disagree with is acceptable. By your own sources, it would seem to be decreasing.
I wonder if this is a good decision - you have to be very afraid of the publication of this data to pay millions to blackmailers without being sure that they won’t be at your door again soon.
It’s becoming the standard to just pay the ransom. Many large companies have a cybersecurity insurance policy anyways. Plus on the hackers side, they have a reputation to maintain. If word gets out that a specific group isn’t decrypting after payment, they will be less likely to get paid in the future.
This isn’t a crypto locker hack though where you can verify pretty immediately if they’re going to keep their word by them decrypting your data.
In this case the hackers actually physically have the data and are threatening to make it public if you don’t pay.
There’s no way to verify that they will never release it once you pay them. They could just sit on it for years after getting paid and then come back and say pay up again or they’ll release it.
I work in the casino industry, our databases are full of ssns, addresses, emails, telephone numbers, birthdates, food/liquor/tobacco/vacation/entertainment preferences, players with lines of credit through us, people cash checks or get cash advances through their credit cards through us so we have that info, through our play history data you can infer habits of where someone is or isn’t at certain times, some casino companies are now offering “cashless/chip less” play which is an app on your phone hooked up to a bank account we set up for you and tie to Experian, etc etc etc
Casinos are essentially banks now, we have fuckloads of secure information and the casino industry hires the cheapest fucktards it can find on purpose to keep profits high. It’s no wonder we’re being targeted, we’re damn juicy targets. Even if IT tries our hardest, we’re handcuffed by cheap management and flat stupid users that fail phishing tests left and right and write down passwords on notepads or excel sheets
We can’t offer player points (that can be used on free play or free food or free hotel stays) without them being online and tracking the level of play on your card
It does if that user has rights to access those databases, that would be a non-zero number of marketing analysis, p&a, data scientists, IT staff who maintain that infrastructure, etc. The most dangerous one is a compromised IT admin account and from the looks of it that happened to MGM this week
Sadly this will probably not change unless attacks become so frequent that paying the ransom is more expensive than hiring competent people and teaching them proper opsec.
It’s bound to happen at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sadly we’ll never be able to reach proper IPsec to all staff, Kyle in marketing is ALWAYS going to fuck it up because he thinks he’s a big shot who makes great business moves by buying cheap casserole dishes to give to players as gifts. That numbnuts is going to click the obvious scam link every time thinking he just found a new deal
Much of that we do need to satisfy our regulatory requirements or offer products/services to players. You don’t get to be a big casino company by throwing a bunch of standalone slot machines in a building and having no reward/points program.
Are they a national group? A competitor? Another casino?
Or
A foreign government or a foreign entity … which begs the question … if it came to light that it was a hostile government … would it be classified as an act of provocation or even war?
For hacking a casino? A private business unrelated to any US domestic or foreign interests?
Not a chance in hell it would be an act of war. Businesses get hacked by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all the time. Hell, China hacked the US Office of Personnel Management and stole the security clearance records for 22 million people in 2015 and even that wasn’t declared an act of war.
If an adversarial government hacking the US military and stealing security clearance records isn’t an act of war, a bunch of rich mobsters having their casinos hacked sure as shit ain’t.
No one is going to war over a casino breach, now if they got Boeing or Lockheed or Raytheon and it’s proven to be the Russian state doing it then there’s a possibility but that would still be unprecedented to start a war over a cyber attack
I do feel sorry for them. Death threats are not ok in this scenario, boycotts and protests are. Death threats makes them a victim, and this shifts away the discussion from the victims they’ve created. The people making death threats as well as those who do not condemn them are helping support Unity indirectly.
When you call for violent threats you give ammo to the very groups that you wish to inflict harm upon for the masses to side with them
Accountability for CEO actions needs to be done financially. It needs to first and foremost affect shareholders - because that’s the only point for a public company to exist - and then after that it needs to personally penalize CEOs.
If you just target the figurehead of a company the owners won’t really be affected. You need to get them where it REALLY hurts - in the wallet. Only then will the dynamic change.
We can see clearly that that’s not happening. No one has any actual sympathy for Unity and even the most highly upvoted comments in this thread are of people justifying it.
No one in the masses sides with them. People are not that stupid.
You only have a fuckload of sympathy for them because you either have a political agenda or they’re lining your pocketbook. Either way, your opinion is irrelevant.
You’re acting insane. And vile, and despicable. The proper response to people saying #EatTheRich is to leave them the hell alone. If people agree with the dumb death threats and stupidity, that’s their right. Not everyone has to think like you to be good or valid people. You’re deeply problematic for thinking otherwise.
I’d say being dead really hurts them. Seriously though I get what you’re saying but it isn’t the reality and we know it. The rich take advantage of us, write the laws and just win overall.
I don’t see it as wrong for us to be violent toward these people
okay the pricing changes were stupid as fuck and should be discussed and criticised, but death threats are on a completely other level and not acceptable. So calm the fuck down whoever is posting them and I really hope those dipshits will get caught and be dealt with in a proper way…
Not even, it was a single employee (probably for reasons not even related to this change) and CEO used that as an excuse to close for the day and probably to make people feel pity for him and therefore more likely to give him a pass for these awful decisions.
I’m not one of the maniacs making threats of any kind, but honestly it really seems like death threats are the only thing that gets any attention anymore, so I can understand why it’s done…
Is “eat the rich” not a death threat in its own right?
There is no meaningful difference between a threat and a warning. I’ve never understood why we see that retort so often when someone asks “is that a threat?!”. It’s the same damn thing.
It is, and here’s the thing: All of society, laws, and legal recourses ultimately just boil down to “might makes right, but with extra steps.” We all love to act like this isn’t the case in a civilized society, but it is. That might usually rests with the police, the military, some governmental organization, or some megacorporation. Violence both literal and metaphorical is inflicted on the common person continually by those at the top. Who are the police after all? Just guys with guns. Who are judges and politicians? Just guys with access to the police. Who are megacorporations? Just guys with access to judges and politicians, and so on down the line. So when someone says they have the law on their side, and you don’t, what they’re really implying is that they can call the guys with guns, who if you don’t do what they say (no matter how ridiculous) can literally kill you. And we treat this as normal and proper and reasonable, because we’re stupid.
These motherfuckers want to act like their only their violence or threat of violence is justified, and that’s it’s a one way street.
Well, it ain’t. Nobody’s invulnerable.
Maybe it’s “just” video games. (Or “just” a cell phone app, or “just” a predatory subscription, or “just” an apartment with exorbitant rent, or whatever.) But big corporations are fucking with people’s livelihoods, here. There’s a reason we colloquially call such a thing “a living.” These are assholes taking food off of someone’s table, just for greed, just because they can, because they think they’ve above reproach. Because the whole teetering facade is lopsided. It doesn’t matter who the fuck they are at that point.
Call me whatever you want but Im happy the people who make these bad decisions from their insulated lots in life have to face at least some kind of consequences now, because the law is explicitly set up so that they typically never have to. Sucks that it comes to this but its behavior analysis 101, if you dont introduce consequences for undesirable behaviors, you’d be an idiot to expect change.
I don’t love that it’s probably caught up a lot of people who have nothing or little to do with it though, but the guys at the top need consequences or nothing will change, and beggars cant be choosers.
Frankly that doesn’t sound honest. Especially when picture of guillotines are sent by the same crowd. Even more considering that wealthy people are not going to volunteer their wealth through reasonable debate.
Apparently this might have been created recently, even though the phrase goes back at least a few hundred years. Here’s a transcription of the one I was talking about though:
“We are starving. There is no more bread, and we have nothing to eat.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t work for your bread,”
as if he did not snatch away the grain by his own greedy hands and create filling bread for his own overflowing mouth.
The poor cried,
“We are dying. There is no more medicine, and we’re all ill.”
The rich man said,
“Not my problem you don’t take care of yourselves,”
as if he did not buy all the medicine and raise prices so high
Yeah, it’s not like voicing disagreement and concerns amicably is listened to. It’s not like these executives negotiate with the users before making decisions that can ruin their livelihoods. As the avenues for civilized protest close, as people are left powerless towards the decisions of the wealthy, what else can they be expected to do?
It might seem much when it comes to games, but it’s also a matter of worker’s rights. Sometimes it seems like people today are a bit too passive and overly concerned with civility as their rights are undermined. Comes to mind the other news about the Australian CEO saying that he thinks more people should be unemployed and feel pain to be reminded who they work for. What is the appropriate response to that?
Death threats are not OK, but this can destroy years of work for people, and it can threaten their livelihood. I’m guessing this has pushed some people into a sense of desperation. And these threats are acts of desperation, not threats that have a huge chance of being carried out.
John Riccitiello needs to be fired, if he isn’t Unity deserves bankruptcy for this move.
Ever been in a game forum where the players pretty much worship the developers as if they were gods? It’s way too common. Those people can get crazy protective when they make it part of their identity.
Despite that, I doubt gamers are very involved in payment methods of game engines, or even know which game engine their games are running on.
So unless some VERY popular game developers have been out saying expansions for their favorite games will not be released because of this, I don’t see the mechanics for what you claim working at this point.
Actually, they are talking about canceling silk song, and expansion for hollow Knight that has been in development for ages now, simply because they are looking at the possibility that the game will have to be delisted in order to avoid bankrupting the developer
Depending how it’s implemented, gamers are absolutely impacted by it.
Some of the chatter is that even already-released games would be subject to this change, meaning a lot of devs might pull their backlog to avoid going broke on a game they put out years ago and is now free (or heavily reduced). Or games that have always been free, now the dev has to choose if they want to charge for a historically free game or pull it completely.
This is dev hostile, but it’s also consumer hostile.
Maybe you know, but what happens if a dev pulls a game and someone still has the installer and installs the game? Are they going to charge for that still? It makes not sense to me.
Unity clearly didn’t think this part through- probably because they never intended it to do anything but rake in money as the company dies. They never had a real way of precisely tracking downloads, but they want all the info so they can decide how much to charge. So would they charge on a local installer? Almost certainly if they could find out it was used.
There already Indie devs that are talking about delisting their games in order to avoid paying Unity fees they can’t afford.
This contract changes criminal, especially since it punishes the developer for no fault of its own. Sometimes I have to reinstall a game multiple times in order to figure out why it suddenly doesn’t work. I’m not the only one, that’s going to rack up fast.
And if you think review bombing is bad now? I imagine people buying the game not to leave a negative review, but you run a script that continuously reinstalls and uninstall the game.
They could bankrupt any developer they wanted to. Hell, it might not even be the gamers, if a company with a game on Unity doesn’t want to make it epic exclusive, Tim Sweeney has the choice to just continuously reinstall that game in order to sink any company that doesn’t play ball
See my other comments, it was neither. It was a single employee at their company. Not sure how long that’ll stay true though, especially when it comes out that he made it seem like there were death threats being sent to him when it was a single employee making threats. Probably just so he could close the office.
Oh I’m willing to bet that Disney and Nintendo are getting their most expensive lawyers. Keep in mind, there are a lot of Marvel and Star Wars games out there, the mouse doesn’t like to share his cheese.
Unity is actually quite a popular engine for a lot of games both 3D and 2D and on multiple different platforms. It’s very popular among indie developers, though there are actually quite a few games from Big publishers that are released under unity as well.
Which is why he probably used it as an excuse to close the office, when the only known death threat to occur was from one of his employees.
I don’t know who that employee is and I don’t really care point is he’s using that basically to get pity from other people and distract from the bad things that his company is doing right now.
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