DoS attacks are illegal. If this were some kid in his basement, the FBI would have long since busted down his door and hauled him off to juvie.

What's with the double standard?

It's more complex than that. I don't know the details of this instance (Link is down), but the bittorrent protocol is pretty bad - you can just add any IPs you wish into a swarm and say they are sharing particular files. So launching DDOS attacks is pretty simple. There is also no easy way to trace back who injected those IP addresses into the system.

Try reporting a DoS attack to the FBI or any other US law enforcement and see how far you get. They generally don't do jack, even when you hand them the entire case.

The FBI will do absolutely nothing in this case with Revision3 and it's not because the perpetrator has a minuscule semblance of legitimacy. They're just not setup to handle this kind of crime.

Nice. Have infrastructure that can launch SYN floods without a human triggering it, and then don't have any data centre staff on call during the weekend. I hope they get into deep trouble for this.

Ditto, I've been following the media defender debacle since September of last year (when the e-mails were leaked) and it's never ceased to sicken me. Altho their business model of 'fighting fire with fire' is the only way I can think of to properly combat many of the existing issues it's still shady to profit off of blatantly illegal activities.

At least what tpb provides is legal in Sweden.

He makes the point that what if this happened to a hospital or other critical server. While that point is valid, they seem to only be going after Bittorrent ports, so you would think no important servers would accidently be targeted. However, many colleges nationwide are BT trackers for Linux and other open source projects. How embarrassing would it be if MediaSentry illegally took down one of the colleges it said was not enforcing the law.

Posting info about what I assume is a DOS attack, on the domain being attacked, seems a little silly. (Link isn't loading for me).

It's on the front page of slashdot now.

Ah thanks for that.

Now that the article is up they sort of address that. It mentions how MediaDefender has used their same DoS techniques to bring down sites which disagree with them.

Even if it they attack R3 for pointing out it was them, the information is out there and can now be syndicated.

disgraceful, pitiful even. at a time when content publishers should be competing on quality or service, and building strong, happy brands, instead they risk everything employing black hat companies to destroy everything that disagrees with their existing business model. I synpathise with labels whose content is being stolen, honestly, I do - but nothing good can come of the private sector using destructive activity to try and protect its position

This page half loads then Firefox (3 beta) switches to its typical error page, but saying "The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression." Anyone else seeing that?

It's interesting that there is a market for illegal hackers and only the Media companies seem to be hiring them.

Or the other actors manage to hire competent crackers and do not get caught.

What's Revision3?

They want to be the Internet's TV providing a wide range of podcasts that appeal to the tech community.