I dropped a mail to GoDaddy regarding this. Here's the response from their side:

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Our Office of the President has responded to your request, details of which are described below:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for taking the time to express your opinion about Mr. Parsons' recent trip to Zimbabwe.

As you may be aware Mr. Parsons has also made several comments regarding this on his Vlog at BobParsons.me which you may wish to review. We hope this information will be of assistance to you in making any final determination about your relationship with GoDaddy.com.

We thank you again for your time and feedback.

Regards,

The Office of the President

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Can't believe this thing. I bought a domain name just 5 minutes back, and now I am feeling disgust.

I have around 60 domains with godaddy, and after watching this I don't think I will go for any more. Let the unimportant ones expire this year, and I'll transfer the rest to somewhere else.

Can someone suggest me a good registrar?

Now Networkworld and Mr. Hassan should answer why they made such a baseless allegations?

Someone working in Security firm (NetSec Consulting) should have idea of they are saying.

Assuming things are as they appear to be from the Samsung response (as, IMO, seems very likely), one of the things that strikes me here was that the "research" that a security "expert" conducted seems incredibly sloppy.

Did he actually look in the Windows/SL directory? Did he compare the contents to those that StarLogger actually installs (a trial version is available for download)? This seems like pretty basic stuff. Did he ask Microsoft what a Windows/SL directory might be?

This situation reminds me of the HBGary incident. This guy is actually paid to know what he's talking about, and he has no clue what he's talking about. And this isn't cake-making, it's security! Preposterous.

And the potential for damage to Samsung is significant. The story was front page of The Age's web site (major Melbourne publication). Even an updated headline akin to "Samsung denies shipping laptops with secret spyware" is potentially damaging.

The Age article does note:

"Network World said it contacted three public relations officers at Samsung for comment and gave them a week to send back their comments. 'No one from the company replied,' it said."

My guess is that Mr Hassan is an independent consultant, and NetSec Consulting is his contracting vehicle.

To be fair to him, Samsung did turn around and say, "Yeah we're keylogging, problem?" or words to that effect. If he's not a technical security consultant then that might be enough for him to go to the press (especially if he felt stiffed by Samsung).

Not all security roles are technical, not all consultants are either, it's entirely possible that he's a policy or risk kind of guy.

'To be fair to him, Samsung did turn around and say, "Yeah we're keylogging, problem?" or words to that effect.'

May I observe that the only reason we think that Samsung confirmed this is from the words of a source that is now appearing not to be trustworthy in the first place? If this "security consultant" couldn't verify the actual existence of a key logger in the first place, why do we trust him to accurately relay a conversation with support? I don't really accept it as fact that Samsung confirmed anything in particular at any point; the possibility that this guy heard what he wanted to hear is too significant to ignore.

The most straight forward way to find out what the Samsung created SL directory does is to ask Samsung. Which apparently he did.

I would suggest that wading through a corporate customer service call center's escalation process is reasonable evidence of due diligence. And I find it somewhat more likely that a call center employee affirmed the SL directory was for keylogging to clear the case than that Mr. Hassan fabricated a story about the call and Samsung's confirmation.

Hassan's allegation has all the marks of a mistake due to inexperience rather than fabrication because it is just too easy to disprove.

I was curious, so I Googled their website.

http://www.nesecc.com/

Not impressed.

Thats his web site? OMG.

Best thing about that site: he charges $60 flat rate for virus removal.

http://www.nesecc.com/Flyer.htm

Damaging his reputation, that of his friend the writer, and of NetworkWorld: free.

Not only that, but the guy continues to use the same install of windows after discovering the issue. He then has more issues with the laptop and returns it for ANOTHER Samsung.

First off, if I even remotely sense that there is malware on my machine it gets an immediate format. Second, why in Thor's name would you buy from Samsung again? I get the impression he's a guy with a little knowledge that thinks he has this whole computer thing figured out. If you are going to make these types of allegations and publish them, you have to approach it scientifically and verify your results.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm going to tend towards "guy becomes very unhappy with samsung for unknown reason, guy lies about keylogger".

Because I agree - if you were going to tend to make a big fuss about this (as I would) and I had determined it looked like Samsung installed the first one (as he claimed) in no way would I ever get samsung laptop #2. Not to mention, not even checking the contents of the directory before reporting it widely.

Pretty decent approach to tarnish their reputation too, if it happened that way. To get an estimate of reach, the HN story "Samsung installs keyloggers" currently has 477 votes - it seems quite unlikely the retraction will get that much exposure.

The security industry is full of quacks like this. In fact, I'd say the number of frauds and snake oil salesmen FAR outweigh the number of legitimate and intelligent security folks.

"Scare 'em and snare 'em."

I am trying to find "Mohamed Hassan" on Internet. Now there is a doubt in my mind that he is even a real person?

There should be some verification/filter. Lot of users will enter just anything to see the idea.

Registration/Login will discourage users to use the site, so I recommend better filter out the ideas in backend. i.e. do not put them in the swap list unless verified.

If you think logically, why they would even do that? What can they get out of logged data. Can you give me the answer?

I think you are exaggerating this thing too much.

Let me pull on a conspiracy theorists hat here, and give one possible reason:

When you purchase a laptop, at least in my experience, it records the serial number of the laptop purchased. Now, generally you don't purchase a laptop in cash (At least in the states, but that really has to do with overzealous cops who think anything over a hundred dollars is drug money), you use a credit/check card. What this means is at checkout they have an address, and name (From the card) and a serial number.

You go home, and type away, log in to Facebook, do whatever you normally do, all the while keylogger is running away in the background. NSA walks over to Samsung and says "Hey, can we get those keylogger results? Great, here's your million dollars", takes those, then sees that John Doe is searching for poison on Google. They run off, and arrest him.

Basically, that information would be NSA's wetdream.

Is this true? Probably not, but it's one possible motive.

The thing that annoys me most about FB is its built to keep people engaged and spend too much time on it. Its interface and updates are kinda built around being "addicted". Why can't they provide it in simpler way, to keep people connected and let them do the things which matter more.

What if google built the FB? (oh yeah, they tried that with Orkut, but I guess it lost the game because of interface). Mark Zuckerberg talk about social graph all the time, but I don't think anyone on facebook have a true graph.

People will project themselves the way they want to on FB. Funny, Clever, Kind whatever they want to. Its more of a marketing tool for me. Kinda personal branding tool.

Thanks. Really helpful suggestions.

The whole idea of hacker news is to keep things simple. I enjoying spending time on this community. I find tags creating clutter. One person will tag "C" other "C programming" and someone else "Programming in C".

That's an interesting objection.

But it might be at least partially solvable by offering the user a choice between existing tags before allowing him to type in his own phrasing.

Or, once the user has typed in his own phrasing, a search could be done on existing tags and the user could be presented with a list of matching tags to pick from.

won't it make things way too complicated considering the simplicity HN right now. You can't be 100% correct with it all the time.

Even if there's an occasional tagging mistake, I don't think it could be worse than it is now. After all, you'd still have the option of looking at articles with every tag, or doing a regular google search for any word or phrase in the body of the article or its title.

Thanks. Its invite only?

Yes, but it only took a day or two for me to get an invite to the Beta after signing up. And I think if you sign up and refer 2 people you get in immediately (although they might have removed this by now).

It might be stupid to ask, but isn't there any limits on usage?

No, you are just limited to one app and instance at a time. But this should be more than enough to host your average website that gets a couple thousand hits a week.

From the FAQ (not sure if you can access it without being logged in though):

"Will you offer a free version of hosting?

Yes. You get one free application with one instance for 6 months. If you have one app that is using the free instance, you can delete it and you'll be able to create another free one to replace it."