Xupiter author orders critics to cease and desist

“A culture is made – or destroyed – by its articulate voices” – Ayn Rand

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” – Thucydides

Some of you know by now that I run a blog with my best friend where we investigate various malware outbreaks. The blog (www.webdefenders.net) is in essence a research arm of Jay Loden’s AIMFix project. We try our best to publicly shame the people responsible for damage-inflicting scourges on the Interweb.

A few days ago we recieved a cease and desist order from a lawfirm retained by Dan Yomtobian, the man responsible for Xupiter. I wont get into a lengthy diatribe about what Xupiter is here. It’s been written about at length by the press since 2003. In simplest terms, Xupiter was a piece of software alleged by thousands of people to arrive on a PC without consent and unleash torrents of unwanted advertising. At one time, Xupiter was responsible for a then record-breaking help thread on SpywareInfo.com. It was even bundled with Grokster during Wayne Rosso’s tenure there, until the distribution suddenly came to a halt. Suprise?

After the fall of Xupiter, nobody heard much from Yomtobian until he published a series of business oriented websites promiting his services. None of these sites addressed his past endeavors, so my partner and I published a tell-all article about the depth of our findings over the past few years. The article draws its support from corporate documents, WHOIS records, even direct quotes from Microsoft’s Help Center and Wired.com articles.

Evidently, the fact that a Google query for “Dan Yomtobian” returns our article as the second result on the first page is damaging to its subject’s reputation. So on 09JUN06, we recieved a cease and desist order alleging that we’d made “false and defamatory statements” and demanding that we take it down immediately. No evidence was given that anything we said was provably false. Just a threat that Yomtobian had authorized the firm to pursue all legal remedies if we failed to compy with the order.

So why hasn’t Yomtobian targeted Wired or Microsoft? The answer is obvious. They have (besides the truth) enough money to deflect things like this. Organizations of their stature would laugh at a lawsuit alleging that Xupiter was innocuous. By contrast, Chris and I are full-time college students. It’s easier to make an example of us than Microsoft. So, after much thought I have decided to comply with the order.

Simply put, it is to my selfish benefit to comply right now. I’m working extremely hard in school to hopefully attend Quinnipiac’s law program once I graduate. I’m training to play a college sport. In our spare time, Chris and I are putting together a new Internet startup. So unlike the kid who abandons his ambition, stops cutting his hair, and goes on to live in his parents’ basement once he realizes that justice is evasive, I will pursue the absolute height of my productive capacity and mount a proper legal defense once I have the resources to do so.

I’m 19 years old. Like so many my age, I don’t have my life all mapped out yet. But if nothing else, I’m confident that at no point in my life will I need to send cease and desist letters to bloggers writing about how I spent my 20’s. That’s more than I can say for some people.

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