Comments on Riverbend today:
The real Iraqi blogger wrote today on her blog a couple of things I wanted to comment on:
I wrote to Blogger, telling them about the site and how the person was pretending to be me, they said that if I wanted to make an official complaint, I had to mail in (by snail-mail) a letter complaining that someone was stealing the contents of my site.
Now that seems a bit rich. Why snail mail? She's in Iraq for God's sake. Never mind that the blogspot TOS say things like:
You agree to not use the Service to:
(a) upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful... harassing or otherwise objectionable;
[...]
(c) impersonate any person or entity, including, but not limited to, a Pyra official, forum leader, guide or host, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;
[...]
(d) post ... any Content that you do not have a right to transmit under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships...
[..]
(e) post ... any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party
[..]
(i) "stalk" or otherwise harass another;
(d) and (e) are unarguable. The rest are definitely debateable. That's at least 2 breaches of the blogger TOS that the faker riverSbend commits daily, and yet for some reason blogger will only take action if the faker is directly stealing from Riverbend's site. He is doing that too of course, but as she points out to a degree relatively minor compared to the rest of his breaches.
But I'm sorry what kind of sense does this make? What's the point of having Terms of Service if you refuse to enforce them. Come on blogger this is not good enough at all.
Further down it says:
9. TERMINATION
You agree that Pyra, in its sole discretion, may terminate your password, BlogSpot Site, use of the Service or use of any other Pyra service, and remove and discard any Content within the Service, for any reason, including, without limitation, for lack of use or if Pyra believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of the TOS.
Would anyone with any knowledge of the situation dare to suggest that the riverSbend smear site (the author of which by the way once said of Riverbend ""Even a bitch on the rag can change when exposed to a better way of life than what Saddam provided for the Iraqi. ") is not in violation of the spirit of the TOS, by setting up a site intended to contaminate her right to free speech?
Has the world gone mad?
I suggest maybe if anyone reading this site feels as agrieved as I do about this situation to contact Pyra/blogger at this link. Alternatively, and I haven't really thought this through so if it's a terrible idea please let me know - would anyone consider setting up a YankRiverSbendFaker (or similar) mailing list to garner pressure by having a lot of people sign up. I would do it myself but while, as is plainly evident, I have a lot of time on my hands, it is not quite as unlimited as sometimes I might make it appear. Please email me any comments on that or other constructive anti-riverSbend ideas you may have. Obviously feel free to contact Riverbend before me with such ideas, I only suggest contacting me as obviously her time is better spent on writing her blog, as opposed to having to defend it from lone nutcases like "Diego".
On another point Riverbend says:
Brian over at suzerainty.blogspot.com has several more.
Just to clarify I have about 40 email addresses that "Diego" has used on Usenet over the last few years, but I don't know how many, if indeed any at all are currently active. He frequently changes them in a matter of days. I would imagine he may do this to avoid killfiles, or simply to avoid being traced. Given the lack of success he has with the second of those objectives I'm going to assume it's the first.
Persistent killfile evasion in order to atack another Usenet poster could also be a breach of an ISP's TOS. Perhaps anyone who has any regular contact with "Diego" on usenet and who finds he changes his handle to avoid their killfile could get in touch. Just a thought.
