businessweek.com — In March of 2004, a computer programmer blackmailed Google for $150K with a program called "Google Clique", which could generate millions of fake clicks to Google's ads. Google had police in the next room. However, a few days ago the U.S. Attorney quietly dropped the case because Google was unwilling to cooperate with prosecutors. Why?
Dec 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 4, 2006
The vanishing comments for the rigged article case...
haggieDec 4, 2006
The computer programmer is probably making $150K/year as a Google employee working in their anti-clickfraud group...
reederDec 4, 2006
I'm just surprised the Business Week article about the web didn't suck. Their track record reporting Internet shenanigans are usually a year behind everyone else.Maybe they hired someone under 40, finally.
Closed AccountDec 5, 2006
It's because it brings to question the validity of "all the other clicks". It's not because googles' algorithms are super duper top secret - this is the ad portion not the search engine - so it'd go something like this "select top 4 bits of crap from ads where some keywords match the spam page presenting the ads order by bid desc".
volatilewhimsyDec 5, 2006
Innocent before proven guilty....
dubledDec 5, 2006
It says they were making $30k a month with the program, wtf? why did'nt they just keep it a secret and continue to cash in. In 5 months they would have had the $150k
gd007Dec 5, 2006
google shd come forward with truth. why is all the secrecy?
flameboyDec 5, 2006
I agree, thats an interesting question.Why risk going to the google office in person to demand what you could earn in 5 months anyway? There must have been some time limit on it, or he thought it would eventually be detected and fixed.