Meg and Jim's live ustream.tv chat about Revision 3, how they use BitTorrent, MediaDefender's attack that crashed their site, US politics, video aggregation, twittering, internet video and life in general. Moral message: "The Internet is where the passionate, authentic, real people live!"

Apparently MediaDefenders anti-piracy tatic is to infiltrate bittorrent servers with fake files - any bittorrent website - when their fake files are removed, MediaDefender take this as an attack to remove fake files inorder to keep the non-fake pirated movies, software and music available. So MediaDefender attack Revision3 which is in tow ethically wrong to do and illegal in some cases.

Revision3 seem to have taken the decision to not take legal action against MediaDefender, in which if they did they'll win because the attack caused the Revision3 server network to collapse and fall over which costed Revision3 to lose about $100,000 in advertising revenue.

I think if MediaDefender continue their pro-attack stance on piracy, any kind of piracy even and complete lack of understanding of how the internet works now, even though they use it effectively enough to attack the copyright holders of the copyright their indirectly paid by to protect the copyright, how effective will MediaDefender be in a few years.

MediaDefender will continue to be on the attack unless they have been stopped, I expect that they will lose ALL support and alienate it self from legitimate Media organisations who embrace newer technologies like P2P & BitTorrent services to distribute themselves and they have to deal with companies like MediaDefender who are constantly paranoid to the point that they cant think about legitimate media ever being distributed via P2P networks because traditionally P2P networks were never used for such a type of use.

MediaDefender will die, not because of the business becoming obsolete by newer anti-piracy technologies but because the Media Industry themselves will pull ALL support for them and the cash flow will die!

Ouça o último Twit!

Revision3 gets a denial of service attack, Comcast gets hacked, a lot of people aren't ready for the digital tv switch, an idiot robs a store with a duct tape mask, thong robbers, and watch for scorpions in your watermelon!

Episode 23

Coleman

So my results came out, and they were actually pretty normal. They weren't spectacular or anything, but they weren't horrible too. Acceptable, I think, is the word for it.

What I'll Do

Here's what I'll do for my next semester. I'll drop a module or two off of the recommended reading schedule, then I'll take up one or two Arts modules. And I'll also try to see how else I can get involved in the scene. And we'll see what happens from there.

Impressions

I watched the Muse DVD HAARP yesterday, and it was quite spectacular. Someone once told me that they're one of the best acts to catch live, and this provides pretty substantial evidence. I think it's a nice buy, and I'm sort of regretting not going for their concert at Fort Canning that time.

In any case, I really liked a few songs, including Knights Of Cydonia and Time Is Running Out. Rocking stuff.

Weekend Work

This weekend, I must... finish MGS3 and write a couple of thousand words or so. Which means, it's time to stop blogging and start cracking.

Random

Enzyme may hold key to improved targeting of cancer-fighting drugs. [via PhysOrg]

Revision3 sends the FBI after MediaDefender. [via Ars Technica]

Valve announces Steamcloud, which sounds very cool. [via Kotaku]

This happens to me, and everyone else too, I suspect. [via xkcd]

The sad state of American particle physics facilities. [via Wired Science]

Here's a 15-minute demonstration of Red Alert 3. [via YouTube]

Personally, with StarCraft II looming, this is sort of on the back-burner for me, but I'm rather impressed by the naval warfare features.

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The story seems to be straight out from a Scifi movie. An interesting read, but what's more interesting are the tactics used by MediaDefender to achieve their goal. The tactics used could well be described as Guerrilla Warfare.

One of their primary tactics is to contaminate the P2P networks with fake and broken files. They create multiple sources for these decoy files and rate them high, so that they show up at the top of a search result, in a P2P client. Other commonly used method is Denial Of Service (DoS) attack.

Apart from this, MediaDefender has been accused of creating multimedia sharing websites to lure people into uploading copyrighted content. MiiVi is(was?) one such website. MiiVi was advertised as a place where you could get full length movies for downloads. MediaDefender, initially denied its involvement with MiiVi, but a major E-Mail leak found MediaDefender guilty. Wikipedia entry for MediaDefender provides more evidence (facts/stories), linking MiiVi to the MediaDefender company.

As the ars technica news entry points out, P2P is also being heavily used for legitimate file sharing. To give an example many of the Linux Distros are available for download over bit-torrent. I once used P2P to transfer (to my project mate) big documents and source-code and related-files of my college project, when you could only send like 1~2 MB of files as e-mail attachment.

Apart from this, what happened to Revision3 could happened to any other business. So where are we heading towards? A supposedly legitimate business is attacking other legitimate business. Crackers/Terror outfits are already using MediaDefender like tactics to attack governments/organisations across the globe. Virtual warfare is gaining momentum. Interesting!

Jim Louderback made a blog post telling of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack that crippled their servers over the Memorial Day weekend. It's a long read, but he goes into a lot of detail and explains technical terms associated with the attack, which makes it very-easily understood. Apparently, the culprit was MediaDefender, who, if you ask me, seemed to have been engaging in some very shady activity for a company that is supposed to be big on anti-piracy.

I will not go into much more detail because the blog post does this better. Check it out for yourself.

After tracking the attack to MediaDefender, Louderback said he got ahold of the company's executives, who admitted their involvement. It doesn't seem that MediaDefender was trying to take Revision3 down, but rather had noticed the vulnerable configuration of the BitTorrent server and were plugging it in the name of anti-piracy (though Rev3's uses were distinctly non-piratic). When Revision3 noticed someone using the server, they tried to block access, prompting MediaDefender's apparent response (though they didn't admit to this) of hitting Rev3's server with upwards of 8,000 packets a second. That was enough to take down the company's entire Internet infrastructure, including its corporate email server.

Not everything having to do with BitTorrent is illegal -- using it to save on bandwidth costs to distribute your own shows certainly isn't -- but it's a gray enough area that companies like MediaDefender are able to play a guilty-till-proven-innocent game. Rev3 says it has brought in the FBI to investigate. Louderback didn't say for sure whether or not he would be taking legal action, but starts to lay out his case in the post, noting that Rev3 "suffered measurable harm" through the lost business and lost holiday weekends of his staff, and adding that denial-of-service attacks are illegal in the U.S.

Disclosure: Revision3 produces The GigaOM Show (which is currently on hiatus).

The torrent client we all know, Oink, has always offered a degree of protection not afforded by most other torrent providers by keeping a tight circle of peers, requiring invitations, proper upload/download ratios equating to allowing 2 downloads to every song you upload.  Because the quality of every download was checked, it kept things like mediadefender out as well as their trackers.  If an invited user abused the system, Oink would not only expel that user, but also the user who invited that person.

Most importantly, Oink was THEsite for prereleased leaked albums, having leaked at least 60 albums prerelease this year alone (I suspect that number to be way low). 

Today, Cleveland police arrested the operator, and the site's Dutch servers were shut down, with a message that now just reads "For reasons please visit news channels on google or related."

Oink has millions of peers sharing on the network, and in light of the TorrentSpy decision, users of Oink could be in real trouble.  Oink logs all activity of its users because it needs that information to determine that user's ratio and their privileges as possibly a power user.  Could they be forced to turn it over?

The story is developing here.
The initial report by BBC was here.

 See a screenshot of the homepage Here (in case it keeps changing).

UPDATE:

BBC has a video of the raid:

Also, the Oink Administrator has been released from custody.

Il nuovo datacenter implementa migliori protezioni contro gli attacchi DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) e gli spam-nets utilizzati dalle organizzazioni anti-pirateria.

E’ in corso però la progettazione di un nuovo tipo di tracker, capace anche di bloccare e loggare sistemi come MediaDefender, BayTSP, MediaSentry e EZ2net. Il nuovo tracker permetterà una migliore protezione per gli utenti ed una maggiore efficienza che si tradurrà in un maggior numero di peer e in un minore consumo di banda.

Το πρώτο είναι το dataset της Enron.

[Technorati on Media Defender]

You have got to be kidding me???

I'm sorry but I'm with the corporates on this one.

Feigning innocence is one thing.

Feigning outrage is just stupid.

Schön, dass sich endlich jemand gegen die Filesharing-Spammer stellt. Während das BitTorrent-Netz noch halbwegs sauber ist, kann man den Muli vor lauter Fakes mit angeblichen 4000 Quellen nicht mehr vernünftig benutzen...

A blog post on the site by administrator brokep states that they have been going through the emails from the recent MediaDefender leak, and have obtained proof, from them, that they are being targeted by several companies. Ten companies in total have been reported to the police, the post goes on to say, for charges of infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming.

“We’ve been tracing spam back to them for at least over a year, ” said Pirate Bay Administrator brokep. “We’ve tried talking to MD for quite a while. Finally they called back yesterday but was not willing to talk about us having to report their clients to the police for breaking the laws they’ve broken. Now we see no other alternative but to report these incidents, as they don’t seem to stop and as they are really serious crimes they commit.”

He also gives a nod to the huge community of fan out there, “we’ve had help from irc’ers going through all the emails from MD.” It seems that the Pirate Bay, should be called the ‘Hydra Bay’, as each time it takes a hit, it comes back stronger than before. The ten companies reported to the police, are:

* Atari Nordic AB
* Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
* Emi Music Sweden AB
* Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
* Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB
* Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
* Ubisoft Sweden AB
* Universal Music Group Sweden AB
* Universal Pictures Nordic AB

Just more ongoing revelations that have resulted from what we quite rightly called “The biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak”…

Original URL: http://torrentfreak.com/piratebay-fires-a-broadside-of-complaints-to-police/