TOKYO (MacHouse) – The Internet became a dangerous place a long time ago partly because of its anonymous nature. And some people seem to be willing to go all the way because they think their identity is sealed.

One such example is a Mac user who goes by the name of MACTECHHEAD at MacUpdate. MACTECHHEAD posted a negative review on Little Disc+, our No.1 selling Mac software title, at MacUpdate back in August. This Mac user mentioned some keywords such as






lame
bloated
GUI
REALBasic
DropDMG






Let’s remember them. At the same time, we found the exactly same negative review on the same product at VersionTracker. It’s posted by a person who calls himself/herself Born Yesterday.  

The truth is that we have never sold anything to MACTECHHEAD. It’s certainly none of his or her business as to whether we distribute Little Disc+ as a freeware title or a commercial software title as this person’s contribution is 0. And we don’t work for MACTECHHEAD, and thus we don’t require his or her permission. So we don’t know what he or she is complaining about in the first place.

In the meantime, we asked VersionTracker to remove the negative review. VersionTracker did not just deny our request. They have never bothered to reply. That’s how VersionTracker is, you know? As for MacUpdate, a website administrator named Misha did comply with our request promptly. But when we asked him to deal with MACTECHHEAD’s account, he wrote






If this guy continues to be disruptive at MU we’ll take further action. For now, I deleted his post and he hasn’t posted it again so I’m assuming he’s learned that we don’t tolerate that sort of stuff at MU.






That sounded fair enough though we believed MACTECHHEAD would strike us back again.

Yesterday, then, we found new negative reviews on Little Disc+. The first one was posted by a person named SHOTGUNWEDDINGS, followed by JAKE THE SNAKE and then MACTECHHEAD. When you read JAKE THE SNAKE’s comment, you might notice some same keywords that were mentioned earlier like REALBasic, GUI, bloated and DropDMG. So who is this guy?

We asked MacUpdate to moderate these negative comments. And another website administrator from MacUpdate gave us an interesting screenshot. It shows that SHOTGUNWEDDINGS, JAKE THE SNAKE and MACTECHHEAD share the same IP address. Whoa… What a cheesy play, huh!? What are chances that they are different people and that they share the same house or apartment? Chances are probably very slim because the way JAKE THE SNAKE wrote is pretty much the same as how MACTECHHEAD did back in August 12th.

Source: MacUpdate






So, again, who is MACTECHHEAD? He or she uses the IP address of 99.243.214.171, which is traced to a nameserver in Etobicoke (a suburb of Toronto), Canada.

Source: Google






Hopefully, MacUpdate doesn’t condone cyber-bullying just as VersionTracker does. We asked them by e-mail to deal with those accounts. For now, we haven’t heard from them. In the meantime, we are truly disappointed with MacUpdate. Why in the world do they allow one person using three accounts that share the same IP address to post harassment comments on the same page? We hope that MacUpdate will take a more effective moderation measure as we must have generated tens of thousands of ad impressions since April for them. Or they probably don’t care because losing us wouldn’t affect their overall traffic?