Dear Slate, yes there are chocolate bars in China
Lot o' Hotpot: Three Travellers
Interview: Kerry Ann Lee, culture shock = inspiration
Garbage burning protests: The online life of dissent
Coming soon to a police checkpoint near you
Woah, we guess this is a risk you take with any internet start up, but who knew our new favorite VPN would flame out this fast? Less than a month after we interviewed the team behind Freedur, it seems that it's been shut down. And before you get your hackles raised about China and its net police again, this time, it seems like it was an inside job.
Currently on the Freedur site is a rant against one of its employees, Chris Mathews:
Just a week ago Chris Mathews sabotaged the service by redirecting www.freedur.com domain to his personal server and stole our customers database and web site scripts. Becasue Chris worked as accountant for us, he bought domain freedur.com for us, thus it was easy for him to sabotage the service. We have intervened and threatened to him with law suits, thus he restored domain back. We had full trust to Chris, we were considering him as a friend, but today we see who is Chris Mathews, an evil and greedy person trying to steal from and screw up his friends, business partners and customers.Chris Mathews organized an attack to our servers today and destroyed our customers database and web site in an attempt to take over Freedur and run it by himself on his private servers. You can see his attempt to setup Freedur from stolen scripts and database on his server here - http://alnany.com/freedur2/ With help of his friends - Vincent Shen, a Chinese living in Shanghai, and Rick Olson, an American living in
California, Chris is attempting to reverse engineer our Freedur application and use it on his web site.
So, Freedur says, Chris ran off with all the money they earned the past three months and destroyed their database. They say that if you subscribed after August 5, the last date they have customer records for, then they will provide you with service until your subscription ends.
Anyone who subscribed before August 5 will have to take it up with Chris himself. In a fashion remarkably similar to Chinese netizens, they provided all his most recent info and a not so flattering picture. Yikes. We've asked Chris for his side of the story, so we'll see what else can be said about this if and when he responds.
For everyone who enjoyed the service though, Freedur swears it's not quite out for the count. In fact, it hopes to be back in a couple hours. Since we were actually big fans of its service, we hope so too.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
post to facebook
How can you trust a service that allows a disgruntled ex employee to run off with all the customers' data?
Time to change my passwords and terminate my account.
Wow, just wow.
Freedur.com just posted their side of the story. Judge for yourselves.
As a side note, I am a long time friend of Chris Matthews. I vouch for his integrity and stand by his product. Hang in there Freedur.
Freedur is a project of StackFile Corporation. Chris hijacked our freedur.com domain, stole our money, web site scripts, database, destroyed the site and backups. Thus we have published our Press Release on StackFile's web site:
http://freedurblog.stackfile.com/
We are deeply sorry for all trouble caused by Chris Mathews to our customers.
We will be offering our service for free to all damaged customers.
Please dispute to PayPal and your money will be refunded. Use reason "The item I received didn't match original description"
Sincerely,
StackFile Management
web: www.stackfile.com
e-mail: support {at} stackfile (dot) com
Dear customers,
as Freedur (StackFile) is not able to restore all customers accounts instantly, and we don't want our customers to suffer, we have decided to offer our service free of charge to anyone who needs it.
Download the program (if you don't have it already) from StackFile web site:
http://www.stackfile.com/freedur/
and use this login:
login: free
password: surf
Sincerely,
StackFile Management
web: www.stackfile.com
e-mail: support {at} stackfile (dot) com
@Angelos: You're *still* willing to vouch for the integrity of Chris "Mathews" (actually it's LEE...or maybe Li) after all this?? You stand by which product? Freedur or the new reverse engineered ripoff he'll come out with with his accomplices??
And I don't think he was an ex employee, catshanghai. He seemed to be a current dishonest employee that shafted the people that trusted him and RIPPED THEM OFF. STOLE. COMMITTED FRAUD.
Naturally this info came from one side of the story BUT knowing there were China ties in this drama...
@Angelos: You're *still* willing to vouch for the integrity of Chris "Mathews" (actually it's LEE...or maybe Li) after all this?? You stand by which product? Freedur or the new reverse engineered ripoff he'll come out with with his accomplices??
And I don't think he was an ex employee, catshanghai. He seemed to be a current dishonest employee that shafted the people that trusted him and RIPPED THEM OFF. STOLE. COMMITTED FRAUD.
Naturally this info came from one side of the story BUT knowing there were China ties in this drama...
Wow. Outlandish. It seems Chris Mathews doesn't have much of a case, but I'd be curious to know more.
As a side, a business has to be registered under a legal name, but Chris Mathews is just his cool-sounding-non-Chinese name? I never heard of a false last name before.
As a customer of Freedur I'm wondering what the best step is.
we tested some services and recommend witopia: http://www.web2asia.com/2009/07/07/first-twitter-now-facebook-banned-in-china/
What a joke that web2asia site is. "We have tested." Literally. That's all they fucking say. Based on that, they say use Witopia. Oh, there's also a big Witopia banner ad to the left.
Hey I guess it's not just Chris Mathews who's the excellent viral marketing genius!
@lovechinalongtime
Yes, I still do vouch for him. I'm not at liberty to disclose certain things. In the near future, Paul and his associates will understand the real world consequences of slander among other legal infractions. It's easy to throw scurrilous allegations at someone, no less on the internet. Seriously, the irony in Paul's smear campaign is astonishing. A judge will handle this soon enough and Chris will be exonerated.
"Naturally this info came from one side of the story BUT knowing there were China ties in this drama..."
What do you mean by this? If you're implying because of Chris' last name, Chris Matthews is an American citizen, born Lee, then was later adopted by his stepfather.
I just pay for mine and don't deal with hassles. StrongVPN works for me.
OK. I have this to say.
1. Chris Mathews deceived me and others in a LinkedIn thread by promoting Freedur, implied that he isa customer, when in fact he was associated with the project. This happened back at the end of May. Not a big deal, but now that this has happened it puts a big "-" on his side of the argument. Specifically, he wrote this [bold is my addition]:
"It depends on the type of person you are. Free web proxies means it's unstable, often slow, and won't always work as well as you like to. Freedur is fast and reliable and I don't have to deal with annoyance so I'm willing to pay $5/month for it. With most web proxies you have to enter the URL on their website which is super annoying. WIth freedur you just surf as your would normally.
Posted by Chris Mathews"
2. There is another minor inconsistancy about what Freedur / Mr. Mathews says on the site. He says that marketing and design was done in California. But then why was the China development team given access to the "asswords to our Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Blogger, and Friendfeed accounts"
3. Mr. Mathews LinkedIn profile says founder of Stackfile, since October of 2008, but the site says started the Freedur project in April of 2009
I do not say that one side is right or wrong. But there is fishy stuff to go around here.
BTW, I selected WiTopia. But am not very happy with it.
unfortunate about Freedur as alternatives are good. I hadn't tried it, but Witopia has worked well for me versus others or proxies.
For any having speed issues with Witopia, I suggest that using their DNS servers and making sure you use their California servers makes a world of difference. If you don't check that you may be getting bounced to all their different VPN server locations and it will be slow. IMO, they should make this more clear, but their support people were helpful and got me straightened out easily enough.