Revision3 Servers Brought Down By MediaDefender DoS Attack
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
This is a bit outside our typical topical content here on A+E, but I wanted to highlight it anyway, as it’s a disturbing example of an attack on a legit new media company.
Over the recent Memorial Day weekend, Revision3, a company specializing in producing ad-supported video podcasts (including the immensely popular Diggnation, of which we are big fans), fell victim to a denial of service (DoS) attack that knocked their website, RSS feeds, email and much of their content distribution offline for most of the weekend. These type of malicious attacks are not uncommon, particularly against well-known companies.
What makes the story particularly disturbing is that, according to Revision3’s CEO Jim Louderback, the DoS attack was launched by MediaDefender, an anti-piracy group employed in the past by the RIAA, MPAA and other old media companies. The DoS attack was apparently targeted at Rev3’s BitTorrent servers (BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer content distribution protocol, often utilized to disseminate copyrighted material such as music, movies, etc.). Revision3, however, only distributed their own content over the BT protocol, so there was no clear reason why MediaDefender would choose to target them (BTW, such vigilante DoS attacks are illegal).
The story gets murkier as Rev3 has investigated and apparently the FBI is looking into the matter as well. Clearly, Revision3 has done nothing but distribute their own content over a perfectly legitimate content distribution network, so they should in no way have to fear being targeted by such old-media industry “watchdogs”. MediaDefender has clearly overstepped their bounds, targeting a legit small business venture, and one can only hope that they pay a price for that. FBI involvement in the matter is certainly a good first step.
Get the full story direct from Revision3’s CEO Jim Louderback here.
Dreamhost Accidentally Charges Their Entire User Base for Hosting Services That Weren’t Yet Due
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Ouch. Glad I’m not in these guys shoes this morning.
The fine folks at Dreamhost, one of the better known (not always for the right reasons) low-cost shared hosting providers, managed to incorrectly bill all of their users for past-due web hosting services. For most of those users, though, their accounts weren’t past due. The billing happened because an automated billing system and one keystroke error: billing every as if today was 2008-12-31 (they intended to bill accounts that hadn’t paid up as of 2007-12-31).
You can see the fall out on their blog, the main posting for which currently has more than 1,000 comments (most of them none-too-happy).
This is just the latest in a long string of problems folks have experienced with Dreamhost’s shared-hosting services over the past couple years. We used to host our site and mail servers with Dreamhost, but their frequent outages (which always seemed to come at the most inopportune times) finally forced us to move on to our current hosts, MediaTemple (who do a spectacular job, btw!).
Network Solutions Now in the Business of Domain Name Squatting?
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
A number of blogs in recent days have written up a rather disturbing practice implemented by Network Solutions, in which they apparently register domains that you search for (but don’t register) via their website. For instance, if I do a domain search for “ineedanewdomain.com” via the Network Solutions website, but decide not to register it at that time, I’ll no longer be able to purchase rights to that domain anywhere but Network Solutions. Any attempts to do so return a WHOIS search result listing “This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com” as the company name.
The practice is known as “front running”, scanning domain search records to find domains to purchase based on others having searched for them, and Network Solutions is claiming that what they’re doing is specifically designed to “protect customers from frontrunners.” By front running themselves. Of course, it makes perfect sense.
Digg Users Revolt
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
There’s been an incredible user revolt unfolding at Digg.com today. The whole mess started around the issue of a cracked HD-DVD encryption key (which is a necessary component for copying HD-DVDs) which was linked via Digg from a number of websites.
Digg, along with a number of other major sites (including Wikipedia, Google and others) were threatened with a cease and desist order to remove the offending code from their sites. While other social news sites, including Slashdot and Reddit, did not comply, Digg not only began removing posts and comments referencing the encryption key, but also soon began deleting the accounts of users that had posted the code.
For those unfamiliar with Digg, it’s essentially a socially-driven news site, where members submit links to Digg, which are then dugg up (voted for by other users) or dugg down (voted down or rejected by the users). The most popular items make it to the Digg homepage and generate a ton of hits for many websites, if a particular site ends up linked via a story on Digg.
In their own words, “Digg is a digital media democracy. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.”
Unfortunately for Digg, their users have taken their democratic right to protest and, for all intents and purposes, brought down the site tonight (or at least overrun it). Responding with anger, frustration and cries of “censorship” over 1) Digg’s bowing to the pressure of the HD-DVD camp, while other sites did not; 2) deleting user accounts; and 3) evidence that HD-DVD has sponsored Digg’s wildly popular Diggnation podcast, the user base began posting hundreds of stories about the encryption code, with thousands of users digging them until the entire homepage of the site was overtaken. As of this evening, the entire “Top 10 in All Topics” and every newly popular item shown on the Digg homepage was related to the Digg/HD-DVD controversy.
It will be particularly interesting to see how this plays out in the coming days. I’d imagine there will be at least a small minority of voices that say this was really simply a case of ‘cyber-vandalism by a bunch users with nothing better to do’, but they’d be wrong. This was really the first example, at least on this large of a scale, of a truly grass-roots cyber-protest. Chances are, it won’t be the last. When sites such as Digg, which is entirely dependent on user-submitted and user-created content for its very existence, take action that alienates that user base, they may well be in for a ride they weren’t expecting.