Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
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Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
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Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#2The full quote from Rick Ross is "I am grateful that Ben Newman and Albert Sheu of Quora have identified a (now fixed) XSS vulnerability in our test site, but I am surprised that Quora policy permits developers to engage so openly in vandalizing other people's websites." which is slightly nicer than that article makes it sound.
Personally, I think the Quora engineers involved made some poor decisions. Anyone who looks for security vulnerabilities on websites they don't own or control is on shaky legal footing (there are exceptions: Google, Mozilla, Facebook, and a few other companies provide systems for the responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities). However, publicly disclosing vulnerabilities on a competitor's website (and making your proof of concept mildly malicious) is never going to work out well for anyone: it makes your company look like a bully and exposes you to potential legal ramifications.
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#3Original Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-Quora-clone-attempt-or-a-simi...
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#4I've had a couple of my comments on Quora vandalized by engineers there as well, marking a few of them "unhelpful" even!
:P
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#5I certainly don't think the Quora Engineers were right to vandalize the clones website in this case.
I'm all about people making Q/A websites and releasing products that are clones of other products. Ideally this kind of competition can make the original product better.
That being said, I find making a clone of someones product and then releasing said product at least in this sense, distasteful. Seeing that it has such similarity to the original that if you weren't familiar with the original you probably couldn't tell the difference.
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#6From the comment thread:
"So Qato was caught plagiarizing and now they're complaining about supposed "vandalism"? Reminds of those newspaper headlines where the robber hurts himself breaking into a home and tries to sue the family."
I have to agree. This is basic javascript injection. Can you say, "blown out of proportion"?
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#7Don't condone it, but understand their motivation. Knockoff's are kinda out of hand of late.
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#8Original Quora thread: http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-Quora-clone-attempt-or-a-simi...
Make sure to read the comments.
Re: Quora engineers accused of vandalizing a clone’s website
#9[edit: Troll answers have been deleted, but you can still read the trolling comment thread: http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-serious-Quora-clone-attempt/a... and http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-serious-Quora-clone-attempt/a... ]
On the Quora thread, http://www.quora.com/Is-Qato-a-Quora-clone-attempt-or-a-simi... there are some answers by trolls pretending to represent Qato.
"Sameul Codsaw" writes: 'Also, we are using Ruby on Rails, so we expect to have less trouble scaling and finding devs than Quora has.'
Rick Ross, president of DZone (developers of OSQA and Qato), replies in the comments: 'This imposter has no connection with Qato and does a disservice to both Quora and DZone by posting this nonsense.'
"Kevin McDougal" answers and comments, also trying to make DZone look bad. ("Rick, our plan to sabotage the Quora community is working. Did Hernani create the 100 fake Quora accounts yet?" ... "Hold on. Was that message private or public?") It's pretty juvenile and makes me question the quality of the Quora moderation system.
Why are there all these sock puppet accounts (http://www.quora.com/Kevin-McDougal and http://www.quora.com/Samuel-Codsaw) popping up and pretending to represent Qato? They have only one answer on the entire site, and its on this thread.
Are Quora engineers behind these trolls, or who? Regardless of who is behind it, the trolling reflects poorly on Quora, not Qato.
The comments by Ben Newman (Quora dev) honestly are quite juvenile, and do a disservice to Quora, regardless of any ethical considerations on the part of Quora or Qato. I would prefer to see him take the moral high road.