Go inside
com to spur business. October 27, 2006 mdash;A digital music downloading service geared toward college students has come under fire for allegedly using the popular social networking site Facebook.com to acquire the eMail addresses of thousands of unsuspecting students and using them to drum up business with universities.
The company--Herndon, Va.-based Ruckus Network--reportedly set up an account on Facebook for an imaginary student. The hugely popular web site, built as an online meeting place for college-age students, enables users to create "groups," where internet-savvy students can congregate to discuss shared interests and connect with friends.
By creating its own group on Facebook, the company's critics contend, Ruckus was able to obtain the eMail addresses of almost every student who joined this group. Later, the company allegedly used those same addresses to connect with students, encouraging them to sign up for its online music download service and misleading them into thinking the service was affiliated with their respective universities. On Sept.
5, a person named "Brody Ruckus" activated an account on Facebook by using a Georgia Tech eMail address. Georgia Tech had recently entered into an agreement with Ruckus for students to use its service on campus. Georgia Tech officials declined to comment.
Within minutes of creating this profile, the company had started a group called "If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome," in which it revealed that "Ruckus" and his girlfriend "Holly" would have a sexual encounter with a third person if more than 100,000 people joined a group devoted to it. In one day, more than 1,000 Facebook users had joined the group. By Sept.
8, just three days after the group was created, more than 100,000 users had joined. Soon after, "Brody Ruckus" promised to post pictures of his sexual encounter to the internet if 300,000 people joined. Finally, after membership in the group had ballooned to more than 400,000, "Brody Ruckus" wrote that if the group were to become the largest on Facebook, a video of his m e nage trois would be broadcast on the web.
The phenomenon soon came to an abrupt halt when Facebook deleted the account of Brody Ruckus, taking along with it the group--as well as the hopes of hundreds of thousands of college students eager to live out their fantasy through Ruckus. Word soon spread, however, that "Brody Ruckus" was not a student at Georgia Tech. Instead, it was discovered that the "red-blooded college student" who had convinced more than 400,000 people to join was, in fact, a fictional internet character invented by Ruckus Network as a means of drumming up support for its Ruckus music program, an online service targeted to college-age students.
Only days after the Facebook profile of Brody Ruckus was deleted, students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) began receiving messages from Ruckus via Facebook. The messages read: "Beginning this week, UW has become a partner school with the online music service called Ruckus through our shared connection to the Internet2 network." The message went on to say that everyone at the school was eligible for free unlimited downloads from Ruckus' digital music library.
Students at the school already had an account, the message said. All they needed to do was activate it. But, according to UW officials, Ruckus never established any such partnership with the school to provide free music to students.
"Students didn't know that," says Brian Rust, senior administrative program specialist at UW's Department of Information Technology. "They assumed it was true without knowing what, if any, arrangement there was." Rust said that within 24 hours, 1,100 UW students had signed up with Ruckus and were downloading music.
Because the school had no agreement with the company, additional bandwidth was not dedicated to support the spike in network traffic, he said. As a result, the university's network slowed to a crawl. To resolve the problem, Rust said, UW had to "rate-shape," or limit the amount of traffic stemming from students' use of the online music service.
According to Robert Hayden, the school's IT operations manager for housing, university officials returned to work the following Monday to find eMail messages from students asking them to partner with Ruckus.
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