CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Funny: Suspect's manifesto, crash-inspired Web game pop up online  Sat Feb 20, 2010 6:36 am | |
| On Friday, as investigators continued to piece together the past of the man accused of crashing a plane into the Echelon I building in Northwest Austin, some on the Web went about the business of owning a piece of the incident for themselves.
Several Web sites reposted the Web manifesto of Andrew Joseph Stack III. One site, thejoestacksuicidenote.com , replicated the look of the original Web posting (taken down Thursday by New Jersey Web company T35 Hosting, which said the removal was at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation). The site has Google ads embedded between sections of the anti-IRS manifesto.
"Owe over 15K to the IRS?" one ad read. Another touted the virtues of TurboTax software.
The Google AdSense program allows Web publishers to put ads on their site that are connected to the site's content. The site owner then makes money based on the number of times the page is viewed and the ads are clicked on. Because the note contains words such as "Austin," "tax" and "IRS," ads for local tax-related businesses were placed on the page by Google's program.
One of them was Austin-based Escobar & Associates. Sam Turner, owner and lawyer at the tax consultancy firm, said he was unaware of the ads and that his company began using the Google service recently as part of a larger revamping of its aging Web site.
"We definitely didn't pay for an ad endorsing this guy. That's news to me," Turner said. "We started playing with (Google ad services) over the holidays. It just happened to come out as this sad and unintended consequence.
"It seems like a disgusting little bit of profit sharing," Turner said. The domain name thejoestack
suicidenote.com was registered to a company that shields private information about a registrar.
An e-mail to the American-Statesman from "Austin Suicide Pilot Update" promoting thejoestacksuicidenote.com included an Austin street address.
That address was for a UPS Store on South Lamar Boulevard that houses mailboxes.
Efforts to track down the owner of the site were unsuccessful, as were attempts to contact the owner of a similarly named site, joestacksuicidenote.com. That site carries no ads. The text of the manifesto is pasted into a WordPress blog format. A note on the site reads, "This website has not been created in any form other than one of neutrality and information bearing."
The domain name josephstack.com was registered on Thursday, but it contains only a placeholder site.
On a Web site called Newgrounds.com that features user-generated games, a user named Falcon posted a game called "Tax Time!" at 5:48 p.m. Thursday.
In the game, players use a gas can to set fire to a house, get on a plane and crash into a building. "Justice is served!" the game announces when the plane hits the building.
A request for an interview with Falcon was not answered in time for this publication of this article, but on the Web site, the game's creator says he is 24 and lives in Austin. He previously created a game called "Balloon Boy Adventure."
As of this writing, "Tax Time!" had been viewed 82,988 times and was rated 4.29 on a scale of 5 by players of the game.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/suspect-s-manifesto-crash-inspired-web-game-pop-258071.html |
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