This weekend Revision3 was hit hard by a DoS that deprived me and countless others from enjoying Veronica Belmont, Patrick Norton, and the Digg Crew's awesome and FREE as in Beer HD content. The culprits turned out to be a pretty shady vigilante group called Media Defender whose past customers have hired these web mercenaries to shut down Bit Torrent servers with illegal DoS attacks. Attacks that are designed to prevent a web server from distributing any content. Unfortunately, Media Defender never bothered to check what the content that Revision3 was serving up was. As it turns out that like most start-ups Revision3 is ingeniusly using BitTorrent technology to reduce the cost of the distributing it's own HD Video content, much in the same way that Linux distros like UBUNTU use it to ease the load of serving up 700Mb ISO files to it's user base.
When will the people who give the green light to launch these attacks learn enough about the technology they are trying so hard to squash. First so that they stop accusing of the technology itself of stealing it's copyrighted material. This is as insane as a DA trying to prosecute actual physical guns rather than the yobs pulling the triggers. Secondly, I would appreciate it if these idiots would stop trying to police the Internet by themselves, especially since they really have no idea what they are doing nor the legal power to do so.
It’s as if McGruff the Crime Dog snuck into our basement, enlisted an army of cellar rats to eat up all of our cheese, and then burned the house down when we finally locked him out – instead of just knocking on the front door to tell us the window was open.The worst part is that all of this took place inside the USA so both parties are subject the following law.
Denial of service attacks are illegal in the US under 12 different statutes, including the Economic Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3, also lets us know on his blog that the FBI are now involved. I have no idea if anything will ever come out of the investigation or even if Revision3 will have to pour any of it's venture capital into an insane US court case to get back some of it's lost revenue from the long weekend. All that I do know is that the idiots on Parliament Hill and in Washington D.C. do not have the faintest clue of what the Internet is. And the worst part is that these are the same fools that are quickly and erroneously led into backing companies like Media Defender. Which, by their previous actions and past customer list, do more to harm the creation of rich new media and innovation of technologies like BitTorrent than any pirate uploading old episodes on the ScreenSavers.
