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Comment by arcastroe | Hacker News Reader

Curious, how were the executives caught? How was it proven that the harassment came from the executives?

Ah, answering my own question in case others are interested. Seems the bloggers were being followed by a van at one point and they were able to get the plates, which ultimately linked back to ebay.

I keep being impressed by ai's ability to perform research for you. "Found" the answer here:

https://www.phind.com/search?cache=xzz0am8o9ruxo4wztcc4v7xp

First time I hear of "phind", nice that it shows the sources on one side, and the summary/answer on the other.

I wonder if the sources it lists are completely authoritative to its answer (i.e. the answer adds no new/hallucinated stuff that's not in the sources), or whether the sources are just "relevant".

I wouldn’t say the sources are 100% authoritative but in my experience the answers are basically what the sources say - haven’t experienced hallucinations on phind after months of daily use. Depending on the case it is still good to confirm with the source.

I love that it gives you a good summary of the source and links to it. It’s my replacement for trad search engines now.

It’s also outlined in the civil complaint starting at page 36. If your AI happens to be making stuff up, this might be a better place to start.

eBay cooperated fully with the investigation and had no interest in protecting the ones who were caught. Maybe none of them, iunno the eBay office culture at all.

"Baugh's lawyers said he faced pressure from former eBay CEO Devin Wenig to reign in the Steiners over their coverage of the company."

If true, I wonder what else eBay's CEO was hoping for.

I think it's highly more likely that eBay executives had an agreed upon story and fall guy. The other option is they are so phenomenally stupid that they hired a group of people who thought it was OK to fly across the country to stalk people.

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