defend

The 404 110: Where it's not a virus, it's a worm

Mess with the best, die like the rest! We don't hack the planet, but we do spout off about the MediaDefender's hack (code name: IRONY), pedagogical foursomes, John Wayne as a weapon, and Korean child star Ju-On's surprise appearance in Denver. We also bust out the old squawk box for some much needed Disney sing-alongs. EPISODE 110 Download today's podcast

Collateral damage in the war on piracy

MediaDefender is rightly taking its lumps in the court of public opinion after being fingered as the culprit behind the Memorial Day weekend denial-of-service outage at Revision3. But this is just a sideshow in the bigger battle waged by big copyright holders against illegal digital file sharing.

And as we're learning, things are getting out of hand.

Revision3 happened to use a BitTorrent tracker for perfectly legitimate content distribution. But BitTorrent has also figured in unauthorized sharing of copyrighted movies, TV shows, and music. So MediaDefender went on a fishing expedition. (Read Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback's full description here.) … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 734: Rev3 gets P2P poisoned

Revision3 goes down under a massive DDOS attack that apparently originated with a company that the entertainment industry hires to poison P2P wells. Nice. Good tactic, guys. Also, we have a good geeky little time talking about itty-bitty little flash devices and chips. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 734

Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/ inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3

Mozilla "Download Day" - Are you in or out? Mozilla "Download Day" - Are you in or out? http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1965 http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/05/29/0312233.shtml… Read more

The most crazy tech story since the HP pretexting scandal

This is one of the more bizarre stories to hit the tech world since the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal.

Check out the post from Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback detailing the inside story of the denial-of-service attack which crippled his company's servers over the Memorial Day weekend.

Revision3 tracked the attack back to an Internet address belonging to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender. And it admitted as much when confronted with the evidence. I'll let Jim take it from here:

So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. … Read more

Software Explorer keeps unneeded apps from auto-starting

A lot of programs you don't need to start with Windows do anyway, or try to. And many that you try to prevent from auto-starting just re-enable themselves. Yesterday I described how to remove recalcitrant apps from Windows XP's auto-start list via the System Configuration utility, or Msconfig. Vista's new Software Explorer makes it easier to get rid of the unnecessary auto-starters on your PC.

(As I mentioned yesterday, the $30 WinPatrol, the free CCleaner, and many other Windows utilities can be used to prevent applications from starting with Windows. Here I'm focusing on the tools … Read more

Web Sheriff doing it different than MediaDefender

The names of some of the top antipiracy companies--MediaDefender, Web Sheriff and MediaSentry--evoke the images of muscle-bound, caped crusaders who swoop in to rescue copyright content from masked Internet bandits.

It appears now that the kryptonite for some of these companies is hackers. Just more than a week ago, someone swiped 6,000 of MediaDefender's e-mails and published them on the Web.

In what has turned out to be an embarrassing revelation for the company, the correspondence shows that the firm employs controversial methods to fight piracy, such as honeypots, decoys and denial-of-service attacks.

But John Giacobbi, president of … Read more

ZoneAlarm ForceField arrives in beta

Check Point has released a beta of yet another sandbox for your Internet browser. Called ZoneAlarm ForceField, the idea is simple: What happens in Firefox, stays in Firefox. Or Internet Explorer, for that matter. Any downloads or collateral material you collect during your browsing experience is destroyed once you close the browser. If beta testing goes well, Check Point plans to release ZoneAlarm ForceField in the first quarter of 2008 as a retail product.

If ZoneAlarm ForceField sounds like Google's recent purchase, GreenBorder, it is--kind of. ZoneAlarm ForceField goes beyond GreenBorder by offering antispyware and antiphishing--both drawing from ZoneAlarm'… Read more

CyberDefender raffles off 'Aqua Teen' LED

Last Wednesday, the execs in charge of the latest Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign got a bit more publicity than they expected when the city of Boston called in bomb squads and shut down bridges after police mistakenly took the LED advertisements to be hazardous materials.

Six days and one $2 million fine for parent company Turner Broadcasting later, the Web is still captivated by the Mooninites who nearly shut down the city of Boston.

At this week's RSA Conference in San Francisco, the software company CyberDefender is giving away one of the infamous signs of Ignignokt (Err … Read more