This week’s attack by Hollywood hired gun MediaDefender against Revision3, an ad-supported online video site, brings to mind thoughts of the William Gibson cyberspace novel, Neuromancer. In the book, a guy is sucked into a giant information conspiracy when he’s recruited as a hacker to figure out a mystery. What he discovers is that an artificial intelligence called Wintermute trying to take over, yup, the world.
The more information warfare is employed by industry, the more I wonder how long it will take for industrial espionage and sabotage to turn into all-out war a la Neuromancer. When will media copyright holders turn to artificial intelligence to nab would-be pirates, and how many more legitimate information businesses will suffer when Hollywood’s volleys against anti-piracy go out of bounds?
The Denial of Service attack launched against Revision3 targeted the trackers it operates to distribute its own content. The trick here is that those trackers (which provide BitTorrent clients with the locations of downloadable file chunks) also contained references to Hollywood property–and that’s the devil in the details.
