https://www.dist.cloud/ offers private Maven and Docker repositories and may be a good fit for Bintray users privately sharing and distributing artifacts/images. Our primary goals are simplicity, reliability, and performance.
However (recognising that this is what a lot of folks use Bintray for), we don't offer any free plan, nor public repositories. This is a deliberate decision as we are bootstrapped and our end-goal is a sustainable business focused on private distribution.
Full disclosure: I am a founder of Dist, happy to take any feedback and questions.
I'll second the removal of karma points, at least publicly.
There are some aspects of reputation systems which are useful for identifying misbehaving participants but I don't see any evidence of such use cases on HN. Yet the karma system encourages karma whoring which IMHO significantly reduces the SnR of contributions (both articles posted, and velocity and content of comments).
Maybe as a starting point the karma scores can be hidden from public view?
I can't agree more. The site is also incredibly irritating. Why split an otherwise average length article over 4 short pages and stuff each with pointless images? We really shouldn't be linking to such crappy sites.
I find most of my investments through 2 methods: general news as an indicator of future growth prospects, and through industry stalking. I am primarily interested in high capital growth and mostly invest in an industry peripherally related to my own work which I can keep tabs on through industry contacts (i.e. who's hot, who's not).
In both cases those methods yield potential investments which I then look at financials as a basic check - does this company's balance sheet and P&L indicate anything obviously dodgy? More importantly, do their accounts offer any insight as to how their business is actually going; in many cases I find this is not the case as through sufficient accounting manipulation little reflection of reality is left in the reported figures.
In terms of your service what I would like to see is some sort of graph of executive management & directors and their histories. I have a personal blacklist of individuals based on their ability to ruin companies, and I also have a few folks that I basically would invest in anything they do. This is largely industry specific though not always the case as there are folks from finance & legal backgrounds who end up being chairmen or directors across a wide variety of industries; this can be good for finding investments in new industries.
Another thing is the company's history, particularly (but not limited to) the balance sheet. In some cases future prospects look great but the company has burnt existing investors through heavily dilutive raisings (as an example). These holders will suppress any rise in price so for me that is a reason to stay clear despite everything else.
You asked about "before" but on-going is also important. For the small (speculative) companies that I invest in I try to stalk most of their staff; in particular I want to know if key members of staff leave (not necessarily executives); or if there is unusually high turnover. Tools like LinkedIn and Twitter have made this a lot easier but it would be great if it could be automated.
Or even something simpler - call the account holder's phone and play a simple recorded message that says "hey, its Rackspace, we need you to deal with an urgent issue, please check your email ASAP". Cheap for Rackspace, gives the customer fair warning, and if there's no response within some reasonable time frame then shutdown the machines in question.
Well I didn't agree or disagree with one hour, I said "some reasonable time frame" explicitly because the expected response time needs to consider what the real risks are.
I keep my phone permanently on vibrate (so I don't have to remember to silence it when in class, etc.), and besides, it'd take a hell of a lot more to wake me up than a ringing phone.
Post is lacking information on whether the site was actually a phishing site and who (or which entity) submitted a complaint.
I think verification of the legitimacy of a complaint should be a critical step before disabling a site, otherwise you're prone to DoS.
It would also be good to know what steps the complainant took. Did s/he try to contact Pandaform, or immediately go to Rackspace as the owner of the IP?
Without knowing whether the complaint was legitimate, and what steps Rackspace took to verify this (or not) its tough to say whether their actions were appropriate.
The majority of commentors here assume guilty until proven innocent.
In fact, the author of the article has still been unable to identify the "phishing" form. Was there even really a phishing form?
With all this anti-phishing technology built into modern browsers, why is it Rackspace's responsibility to "protect" users from "alleged" phishing sites?
For copyright, we have the DMCA (for better or worse). Perhaps we need some similar sort of due process for hosting providers or cloud providers.
Most appalling is Rackspace's lack of transparency in handling this.
Pandaform was never contacted by the complainant. The complainant only contacted Rackspace. Rackspace assumed, without investigation, the complaint was legitimate and gave the guy notice via email.
Also, the real rub, is the fact the Rackspace would terminate his account if he got a second complaint.
So, it is not necessary to have an actual phishing form on his site to have his Rackspace hosting terminated. Someone simply needs to allege this to Rackspace, and his account and data will be gone forever.
That is fanatical? Again, I cannot recommend Rackspace.
However (recognising that this is what a lot of folks use Bintray for), we don't offer any free plan, nor public repositories. This is a deliberate decision as we are bootstrapped and our end-goal is a sustainable business focused on private distribution.
Full disclosure: I am a founder of Dist, happy to take any feedback and questions.