But what if this 'unfair' criticisms turn away your potential customers from you. If you are running a big company, it probably doesn't affect you that much. But for startups, there is much to lose by losing even a few customers to these 'unfair' criticisms.
We do have some clues on who he represents but realized that finger-pointing is not going to help. I hope whoever was behind this got the message and stops messing from now onwards.
One of Beevolve's well-wishers (@mikerbrt) has already approached the troll to see if he wants to reveal his real identity. He is yet to get any answer.
I work at Beevolve. One of the lessons this incident has showed us is safeguarding privacy in an increasingly open world has its own disadvantages. This kind of troll attacks will only increase as stakes get higher.
I tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot. Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize something like this.
Most of the Indian hackers (and they are few) prefer to work for the multinationals like Google, Yahoo etc. So only mediocre guys are working as security experts for Indian Defence. No wonder, every tom, dick and harry is able to hack into the NSA at will and get confidential information out.
Pretty useful if you want to do run classification on huge data sets. I didn't know there was a project (Apache Hama) that could do parallel (MapReduce) matrix computations - this would make it easy to do PageRank kind of calculation.
I would recommend hosted crawling/scrapping solutions where you don't need to dedicate your own hardware resources. Also monitoring and maintaining the scrappers/harvesters can be a pain.
Shameless Plug: I work @ beevolve (www.beevolve.com) and we provide hosted crawling and scrapping solutions. PM me if you are interested.