from the and-this-week's-winner-of-the-Streisand-Effect-Award-is.... dept.
There's an interesting story developing over at Techdirt involving Roca labs, which has Lawyers demanding retractions of articles involving Roca Labs, and a response put together by Jamie Willliams of the EFF (pdf) (TL;DR version: No).
Roca Labs is a manufacturer of dietary supplements, which they claim as an effective weight loss method and promote their product as an alternative to Gastric Band surgery. However one of the terms of the agreement under which Roca Labs sell their products is that:
You agree that regardless of your outcome, you will not disparage RLN and/or any of our employees, products or services. This means that you will not speak, publish, cause to be published, print, tweet, review, blog or write negatively about RLN, or our products or employees in any way.
As a result Roca Labs have been pursuing legal action against former customers, as well as Consumer Opinion Corp., the company that owns the site PissedConsumer.com, and this legal quagmire has now expanded to involve Techdirt, and even (bizarrely) 'TV Celebrity' Alfonso Ribeiro from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
There's a collection of all the Roca articles on Techdirt, and some additional coverage at Adam Steinbaugh's blog, detailing an investigation into the history of one of Roca's independent medical consultants.
(Score: 5, Informative) by archfeld on Saturday October 11 2014, @07:31PM
A recent court ruling in California has rendered all agreements that have clauses preventing negative reviews of businesses invalid, while still preserving the other clauses of contracts. Specifically mentioned were hotels and yelp reviews but it was designed for all businesses. I'd imagine we've not heard the last nor do I know how this will affect other states, but given the precedence other states will hopefully follow soon. While there are some real nut-jobs here every now and then someone gets something right.
http://time.com/money/3326937/law-protects-customers-negative-online-reviews/ [time.com]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Saturday October 11 2014, @09:39PM
The summary is a little unclear, but whilst the actual customers and pissedconsumer.com are being sued over the contract, Techdirt is not.
The threat to Techdirt was simply under defamation law, for reporting about the lawsuits, not about the product, and since that is essentially reporting that "A is suing B about X and B said Y in court" it is all factual and defamation doesn't apply.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:13AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Sunday October 12 2014, @06:56AM
Time magazine is not a good looking site I agree with that, but an 'atrocious imitation of a web page ??'
You sort of lost me there.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday October 12 2014, @01:30PM
The entire text of the article occupies 8 of those lines.
What are the rest of them for? I am not enough of a masochist to trace it all out but it appears to be mostly spyware/adware. As my signature might suggest, I screen out all the javascript automatically, which usually is sufficient to fix a page like this, but in this case? Nah.
In addition to javascript, they are heavily abusing CSS as well. Again, I am not enough of a masochist to take the time and figure out exaclty how, but they appear to have somehow disabled scrollbars using CSS. So when I load the page, I get the graphics and the first few words of the story, which runs right off the bottom of the page, and there is no way to follow it down. I have to additionally disable CSS to make it readable.
That's not a webpage. That's a trojan horse.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Sunday October 12 2014, @11:45PM
Are referring to the link in the original topic or the time.com link I posted ?
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday October 13 2014, @12:44AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Monday October 13 2014, @03:56AM
Not sure what you are seeing, but that is the official Time Magazine web site, I frequent it quite often. The links all work and everything, but hey to each his own, G'Day.
http://time.com/ [time.com]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 14 2014, @03:37PM
Ad money built today's Internet.
This is an unfortunate symptom of it.
Web pages with a few kilobytes of meaningful content surrounded by dozens of kilobytes of CSS statements, CPU-taxing javascript routines, clickbait and ads in the page's HTML source file.
If the site wants to really 'rub it in', they 'smear' an article across two or more pages when there is no real need to do so!
The chief offender I immediately think of is cracked.com They have good (list-driven) content there but it is needlessly spread across several pages to generate more clicks.... :P
That's why I finally switched from Internet Explorer to FireFox with the Ad Block Edge, Ghostery, Noscript, ImageBlock, and QuickJava plugins. Surfing the Internet is faster, cheaper (I'm on a pay-as-you go internet connection with limited bandwidth available), and less demanding on my PC.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 11 2014, @08:12PM
Spread the word about this fraudulent outfit, no matter how the dispute develops. This company is toast if FDA/FTC gets interested.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday October 11 2014, @09:00PM
Roca labs will probably feel the impact of the Streisand effect and loose in court. While suffer the effects of a shitstorm of negative comments.
Any claim that dietary supplements is an effective effective weight reduction method is likely to suffer scientific proof of being being completely false. In fact, it tend to be plain fraud that perhaps is hard to convict in court.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 12 2014, @10:30AM
lern2english
loose =\= lose
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose [wiktionary.org]
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose [wiktionary.org]
kthxbai
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday October 12 2014, @07:21PM
Has any real medicine ever had a disclaimer like this quack stuff does?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday October 12 2014, @08:04PM
If it works, they soon will. Much "officially approved" medicine is less effective than a comparable placebo, while producing worse side effects. This is especially true in certain sub-genres, such as psychological treatment medicines. If you actually read the disclosure pamphlet that comes with most prescription medicine, you will often see that potential side effects are the very things that you are taking the medicine to treat. And much of the "test studies" are done by the vendor, with often only a small fraction of them ever seeing the light of day. Sometimes this is for good reason, but often it's just because they show the proposed drug to be either dangerous, ineffective, or both.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.