The defense of the well regarded Statsaholic (previously Alexaholic), currently on the receiving end of law suit from Amazon for the crime of daring to use Amazon’s open API’s and render Alexa data better than Amazon was, has just hit the mother of all spanners, according to TechCrunch, Statsaholic’s owner, Ron Hornbaker, is a convicted extortionist.
But wait, it gets better, because as well as serving jail time for extortion, Hornbaker wasn’t just your garden variety, every day extortionist, he was an internet extortionist as well, frequenting AOL Chat rooms trying to extort money from wayward husbands. Yep, he’s 1996’s version of Michael Crook.
Knowing this, a lot of people have got egg on their faces, including yours truly, for going in to bat for a chap who well…just doesn’t play cricket, if you know what I mean. Time to remove my name from the online petition against the legal action as well, and apologize to Amazon. Sorry Amazon, I’ll do some digging before acting against you in the future.
Originally posted on April 22, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
Duncan, I tend to believe the past is past, it should not have anything to do with the current case. Who’s driving a smear campaign now is another question, and I have my doubts…
Duncan, you are committing the same mistake once again. This time by bashing Ron Hornbaker without digging into or trying to comprehend Amazon’s PR smear campaign.
They have dugged the past to make it look as if they guy is blackmailing them just like he did in the past. Something that may or may not be true. It could really be Amazon doing the blackmailing this time.