Secure web gateways also rely on reputation to quickly identify sources of malware and block access to URLs that are known to contain malware.

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The Democratic National Committee is also taking on John McCain in a Web video calling into question his reputation as a campaign finance reformer and a maverick who stands outside the inner circles of political dealings in the nation's capital.

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Michael Fertik owns ReputationDefender, a start-up company that helps individuals and companies manage their online reputation--essentially a Web-centric crisis PR firm.

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It has a thousand engineers overhauling routers to better discriminate between "good" behavior and "bad" behavior based on constantly changing reputation rankings of computers on the Web, though others say making this work will be all but impossible.

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Last month, workers at Agency.com, a hot Web design shop in New York with a reputation for coddling the help, got a mass e-mail from the office of boss Chan Suh that was supposed to list unused vacation time.

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Google thrives in part because of its reputation for being the best source of information on the Web.

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The search giant, which declined to comment on Reputation Defender's service, spends significant resources trying to prevent Web site owners from pushing up their ranking artificially.

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But Reputation Defender recently began offering users a subtler approach: hiding unwanted Web comments with a barrage of positive, Google-friendly content, either created by the company or dredged up from elsewhere on the Web and optimized to appear at the top of search-engine results.

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