But, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

David Heath
Wednesday, 11 June 2008 08:59

Your IT - Home IT

Indeed, who will watch the watchers? When a legitimate business, which happens to use BitTorrent to distribute legitimate content, is attacked by a representative company of the media organisations, the resulting train-wreck is food for the vultures.

A couple of weeks ago (I know, sometimes new travels slowly to Australia), Revision3, the US- based distributor of a variety of web-based media content was suddenly thrown off the web by a classic denial-of-service (DOS) attack. As Jim Louderback, Revision3’s CEO described it the site was receiving 8000 packets per second saying ‘Hi,’ and the sender wasn’t listening for a reply.

Oddly enough, there wasn’t room for legitimate traffic and Revision3 was essentially off the air for the Memorial Day (last Monday in May) long weekend.

Fortunately for Louderback and Revision3, the perpetrators weren’t particularly shy - there was no attempt to disguise the sending address. It was a company called Media Defender – an organisation with very clear links to MPAA and others. Their recent claim to fame being a fake media upload site called MiiVi.

Seems that Revision3’s website had automatically rejected the ‘advances’ of the Media Defender servers, so those very same servers, acting on autopilot, decided to aim their 9GB/sec channel directly at Revsion3. Surprisingly, Revision3 departs the Internet! Shucks off its mortal coil and all that.

Eventually, after the long weekend, sanity prevails and the attack dogs are (finally) kennelled. So, what comes of this? For whatever reason the Rottweiler of video content decides that a legitimate vendor should be removed from the Internet. Never mind that the vendor ONLY distributes their own lawful content. Worse, never mind that the same vendor’s servers rejected attempts by the Rottweilers to host unlawful content; how dare they! So, what happened next?

After some interesting telephone conversations between Revision3’s Lauderback and Dimitri Villard interim CEO of ArtistDirect (owner of Media Defender) and Ben Grodsky, Vice President of Operations at Media Defender, the error of the ways was realised and the denial-of-service attack called off.