211–220 of 493 posts
A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it. When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already pa…
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Oh damn, I didn't know this! I've used their services for ages and even got to briefly meet the founders once in Wellington who gave a talk on Erlang. Ah well, while it sucks that the good times may be over, I'm glad the founders got their exit :)
> I'm glad the founders got their exit I'm not. I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing a business to an exit is not going well for society as a whole (at least the exits that are in my areas of interest, so I assume it extrapolates to all exits). Every single business that gets bought out gets instantly enshittified in one way or another, always to the detriment of the customer. Depending on how entr…
Brand Shield and other AI slopware needs to be sued to death for all the damage they cause, including their customer's reputation and bottom line
Even if the suit is 100% justified (which it is in this case), and you can show damages, the problem will usually be of jurisdiction. Funko Pop is an American Company. BrandShield, the "Brand Protection Software" they used, is based out of Israel. iwantmyname, the registrar, is from New Zealand. They got bought out by Team Internet, which is British. And who knows where all of them are actually registered. They are a…
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud…
Godspeed!
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud…
It's surprising that this happened at all. Isn't it in most business's best interests to be aware of their most high-profile customers? If this was an automatic process, it's pretty disappointing that it even occurred. If I was running a SaaS, I'd probably want to mark my important accounts so an actual human has to investigate any raised alerts instead of being dealt with by a cron.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm glad the founders got their exit I'm not. I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing a business to an exit is not going well for society as a whole (at least the exits that are in my areas of interest, so I assume it extrapolates to all exits). Every single business that gets bought out gets instantly enshittified in one way or another, always to the detriment of the customer. Depending on how entr…
Sell it to the employees? It won't be lucrative to selling it to someone with more cash than sense, but it may be more likely to preserve the value. There's no guarantee of course, and there's so little experience societal wide in running an employee co-op.
The registrar in question is iwantmyname, so I guess you can add them to your "do not use" list.
I feel like it's better to have a "do use" list for something as important as a domain name registrar. - Namecheap - Cloudflare - Route 53 (if on AWS) Any others?
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It's possible they were using LLMs (or even just traditional ML algorithms) to choose if a certain webpage was fraud/phishing instead of mere trademark infringement, though. In this case it makes sense that one would be angry that a sapient being didn't first check if the report was accurate before sending it off.
More than the hypothetical risk of Earth being consumed by a paperclip-making machine, I believe the real and present danger in the use of ML and AI technology lies in humans making irresponsible decisions about where and how to apply these technologies. For example, in my country, we are still dealing with the fallout from a decision made over a decade ago by the Tax Department. They used a poorly designed ML algori…
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud…
A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it. When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already pa…