Tag Archives: Jason Fortuny

Jason Fortuny for hopefully the last time

It’s not surprising to find that while Jason Fortuny can dish out people’s private information, he isn’t as happy when his public information is publicized.

While he continues to bluster about not being scared of the people he lied to and embarrassed, I note that he has removed his address and phone number from his whois entry.

When someone posted a summary of his criminal record on his journal, he deleted the posting. When they re-posted it elsewhere, someone got their account yanked. (Hmm, I wonder who?)

Of course, it’s all public information these days, so LiveJournal are just being stupid as usual. You can go to the Washington State courts web site, enter his name in their name search, and up comes his case history.

I’m not sure what you have to do to end up in court in a criminal traffic case, but he’s been there 5 times. More interesting is the civil commercial case which resulted in a judgement against him. Perhaps someone with nothing better to do will request a copy of the document and post the details on their web site. Me, I’m hoping he fades into obscurity.

Clinically shown to induce distrust

There’s a new service out there called PayPerPost. Basically, you get paid for posting ads in your online journal.

So far, so ho-hum. One thing that makes this one a bit different is that the ads aren’t separated into their own section alongside your postings, like Google AdWords; rather, the postings themselves are the ads. Furthermore, buyers get to dictate the wording of the links.

In addition, the question of disclosure is left entirely open. Maybe all your postings are ads; maybe some of them are. Maybe you tell people, maybe you don’t. It’s up to you.

I decided to take a look at what the result was like. In the forums I found some people who were pimping their web sites; here are some URLs.

Reading the above is an interesting experience. Sometimes it’s blatantly apparent where the ad is. (In these quotes, underlining shows where the links were in the originals.)

I really need a Caribbean vacation. It’s time to stop dreaming of going somewhere like this and just start to plan and save for it. [...] Warm Islands.com is a perfect place to read about all the things I can do when I get there.

I just know a friend of mine needs to reduce cholesterol in his diet. I think this is the reason he gets sick so often, and feels winded so easily. I’m going to have him try Vasacor an all natural cholesterol supplement.

Another thing that I used to be big into a couple of years ago, but kind of let go by the wayside is taking women’s vitamins. [...] Osteo Essentials is clinically shown to support bone protection – which to me means will help strengthen them. I want to promote and develop strong bones now before it’s too late.

I don’t think any human being ever uses the phrase “…is clinically shown to…” in conversation. Sometimes it’s not so clear, though:

After lugging my laptop bag around all day for three days and seeing other people with their wheeled laptop cases, I’m starting to think I need one. My new laptop is lighter than my previous one, but it’s still damn heavy, especially when walking through the enormous hotel here from my room to the business areas.

Check out Tumi at Luggage Online. Isn’t that bag sweet? It’s got room for everything: laptop plus all my paperwork in really nice organized compartments. I want it!

On the one hand, the author had already said she was attending a show in Las Vegas. On the other hand…

Here’s a quote from a posting which, to me, demonstrates the problem with the whole thing:

This time last year…we were caribbean bound! I had already been on one cruise, and was about to embark on another. In September 2005, we went on an adults online cruise with a few other couples, my sisters, a brother-in-law, and an adult nephew. [...]

During our day in Jamaica, we visited a beatiful garden at the top of a hill overlooking the city of Ocho Rios. After that, we headed to Dunn’s River Falls – a must see! You can literally climb up the side of the mountain by walking up the falls. [...]

I think the best way to visit the Caribbean is by cruise ship – and if you need help choosing the right cruise for you, look no further than these cruise ship reviews. Our 7 night cruise was with Carnival, on one of their newest ships, the Carnival Victory.

I started out reading it as reminiscence, triggered by her noticing that it was a year since her last cruise vacation. It starts to sound kinda interesting, approaching a travelogue. But then suddenly, you hit what looks like blatant paid linkage. Does she really think cruise ships are the best way to visit the Carribean, or is she just being paid to say so? Maybe the whole September 2005 cruise is fictitious, planted at the request of the advertiser in order to seed the idea of taking larger family groups on cruises. Are the sisters, brother-in-law and nephew real? If so, why don’t they have names?

The thing about trust is that once you lose it, it’s hard to get back. Once you realize someone has lied to you, you tend to view everything else they say with suspicion. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to read a personal web site where you had good reason to believe the author was lying a large proportion of the time. Then again, even Jason Fortuny has fans.

Jason Fortuny update

Ironic quote:

You are sending me direct contact information that is sensitive. I protect your privacy in the following ways: (1) I will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever; (2) I will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides e-mail in the regular course of business; and (3) Your information is stored behind network address translation and a software firewall.

That’s Jason Fortuny’s privacy policy, as stated on his web site before his prank.

At least one marriage has been ruined by the prank. I’m not going to name or link to the victim, for obvious reasons. Again, if you really want to know, read Fortuny’s web pages; he seems delighted, as it turns out it was someone who had thrown him out of an online community for previous anti-social behavior.

Lots of people seem to be focusing on a few of the victims who were married and cheating on their wives, like that justifies humiliating all the others.

Meanwhile, Fortuny has started scrubbing his contact details from his web site, removing references to past clients and employers, and deleting his résumé from the web. Perhaps he’s worked out that a reputation for hoaxing people and posting private e-mail to the web isn’t the best career move for a system administrator.

It also seems to me that Fortuny’s posting of sexually explicit photographs on the web places him squarely under 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements. Clearly he hasn’t complied with the law and obtained 100+ model release forms, and that could result in up to 5 years of jail time if the authorities choose to make an example of him.

I’ll end with another nice quote from his LiveJournal:

“I’m just going to quickly and quietly say that the refugees in New Orleans are human trash who don’t deserve to live.”

—Jason Fortuny

It’s nice to know the TrollJournal abuse team are so relaxed about the whole thing. Publishing public information may be grounds for dismissal, but linking to illegally published private information from your journal is just fine, apparently. If only I’d known, eh?

The asshole bar is raised again

A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.

The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.

Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.

You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.

There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.

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