Here is a true story that illustrates several familiar RISKS.
My sister-in-law Karen Rakow was quite surprised recently to discover that
according to a web site called slatkinfraud.com, she and her husband Robert
had pocketed more than $5 million from a Ponzi scheme in which they were
involved. All of this was false -- including the part about having a
husband named Robert. The accusation on the web site hyperlinked to Karen's
business and to her list of clients, and it even named one of her clients,
so this was a big problem for her.
A little research revealed what had probably happened: a person named Karen
Rakow was named in some court papers, and an Internet search for "Karen
Rakow" had turned up a link to a person with that name, who the
slatkinfraud.com people proceeded to accuse. [RISK #1: Accusing person of a
crime based only on similarity of their name to that of a real suspect.]
[RISK #2: Trusting Internet searches to give semantically correct (and not
merely textually similar) results.]
So Karen asked the slatkinfraud.com people to remove the references to her,
her business, and her clients from their web site. They replied by saying
they had done so, but in fact they had only removed some of the references.
Karen complained again, and they replied that "Our assistant webmaster has
made another search and believes that all references to you and your company
have now been removed from the site.
But we have 60 megabytes of material at slatkinfraud.com, so manual searches
are not the most efficient way of doing this." [RISK #3: Using technology
to build artifacts that are too large for you to manage.] [RISK #4: Making
unverified modifications that you cannot easily undo.] Eventually all of
the offending references were found and removed (we think).
Here is the really interesting part: the webmaster of slatkinfraud.com is a
well-known computer scientist who definitely should have known better.
[RISK #5: Thinking that RISKS only apply to newbies.] ["Edward W. Felten" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 90]
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