Significant moments in Internet history
Sep 28, 2008 News
The internet has been around from quite a while now, ArpaNet being it’s predecessor. It grew greatly during the 1990’s and has become a nexus of information offering up news, images, videos and connecting people and businesses all over the world.
CNET UK has put together a list of The 50 most significant moments of Internet history. It’s a really interesting read. I didn’t realize some of the sites I use so frequently are that young, or in some cases that old.
Some of the significant moments include:
- Flash 1.0 - December 1996 [almost 12 years old, wow!]
- the First Spam - May 1978
- IRC - August 1988 [I definitely did not know IRC was this old. I figured 10-12 years tops!]
- MP3 Patented - April 1989 [19 years of MP3s, if only the RIAA had known what this patent would bring about]
- YouTube switched on - February 2005 [Only 3 years? WOW! YouTube has become such a "staple" of the online experience]
Apart from the main list, they also have a few Notable Mentions for you to check out. Which ones surprised you the most?
All fair in the war on piracy?
May 30, 2008 News
During the American long weekend, Revision3.com, a site which hosts web-only shows had its servers brought down by a DoS attack. The online community is quite pissed-off, not only because the shows weren’t available but because it seems the attack was perpetrated by MediaDefender. There are write ups about the attack on ArsTechnica, Popular Science and on the Revision3 blog by CEO, Jim Louderback, to name just a few.
Revision3 uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute its shows in an economical way. BitTorrent allows users who have already downloaded the content to share it, thus reducing the load on the original distributor’s servers. Of course, torrents are also used for pirating software, music, movies and other forms of media. MediaDefender is a company contracted by among many organizations, the RIAA in their fight against piracy. The problem here is that Revision3 distributes its own content which is a completely legal and legitimate business use of the torrent protocol.
According to Jim Louderback’s blog entry, it seems MediaDefender’s practice of injecting fake torrents isn’t the only shady part of their MO. Revision3 had discovered that someone had been using their tracker to distribute non-Revision3 torrents so they shut that down. Once MediaDefender’s servers realized they couldn’t play at will any more, they began flooding Revision3 with SYN packets and brought them down, a practice ArsTechnica has written about before.
I urge you to read the articles and see how shady the practices of this alleged law-defender are.
- Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3
- Revision3 CEO: Blackout caused by MediaDefender attack
- Anatomy of a Hack
Tags: DenialOfService, internet, piracy, Revision3.com