Ranting to /dev/null

MediaDefender is evil

Very evil, in fact. MediaDefender is a company dedicated to "p2p mitigation", i.e. spreading bad uploads and torrents on filesharing networks in an attempt to make getting actual content harder to do. Last week, a 700MB batch of emails was leaked as a torrent which confirms earlier allegations that they were in fact developing their own download service which one can only imagine is to be used as a honeypot, i.e. record all the IPs of people who download from the site and sue the bejeezus out of 'em. Can we say "entrapment"?

But the email leaks also reveal that the company is providing remote access to law enforcement, the purposes for which are not entirely clear. Thus far, analysis of the emails suggests that they're going after people downloading illegal pr0n, but any time you're turning IPs over to an AG's office is enough to make most of the Internet freak the hell out.

How did this leak occur? A MediaDefender employee forwarded all of his emails to a gmail account, the password for which was cracked, which is kind of apropos of this article, reporting that employees are more of a threat to electronic security than virii.

I'm thinking the appropriate response to outfits like MediaDefender--and competitors like MediaSentry--is simply "Rot in hell."

Posted by ryan at September 17, 2007 01:07 PM | TrackBack