The history of the internet is chock-full of stories of piracy, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and viruses. Most of them are interesting, lots of them are hilarious, some are unthinkably frustrating. Our selection of five reflects some of the more recent examples.
Just 15 years old, Mike "MafiaBoy" Calce launched a crippling DDoS attack in 2000, hitting 11 super-massive Web companies, including CNN, Dell, eBay, Amazon and Yahoo, collectively costing them, according to analyst estimates, close to a billion pounds as a result. Armed with an internet connection, even a teenage script kiddie can inflict cataclysmic devastation.
In our favourite case of the RIAA being a blood-sucking leech on the jugular vein of the music community, it was reported that the organisation filed a lawsuit against 83-year-old computer-hating Gertrude Walton, accusing her of sharing 700 songs on the internet. That would be sleazy enough on its own, but matters were made worse when it came to light that dear old Mrs Walton — who didn't even own a computer, according to her daughter — had died the previous year. Tactfully, the RIAA dropped the case.
Imprisoned for a decade for allegedly divulging state secrets, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was arrested after Yahoo co-operated with the Chinese authorities by handing over personal information that linked him to the crime. The text he was convicted for sending to foreign websites reported the authorities' concerns surrounding the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
In 2006, Swedish police raided PRQ — host of the enormous Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker — confiscating its servers, resulting in mass protests. Only a few servers contained Pirate Bay files, leading to 10 affected sites suing the Swedish government. Over 100 sites were wrongfully forced offline and the Bay was relocated, restored from backups and back online after three days, with huge numbers of new users thanks to all the media coverage.
Digg's enormous and usually devoted users revolted en masse on May Day 2007. The site's staff tried to take the reigns of the community-driven news site, by taking down digg submissions that were linking to a hexadecimal code used for circumventing copy protection on HD DVDs — and banning its users — in response to a cease-and-desist demand from the MPAA. Users bombarded the site with duplicate posts in protest, utterly dominating the site's home page, and digg eventually gave in.
Finally, before we move on to our list of honourable mentions, we want to take a look at some organisational and technological disasters incurred online over the years. This topic alone could have 50 entries, but we've picked what we think are the most significant five of recent times.
As part of its war on honest customers, Sony BMG in 2005 surreptitiously installed malware on its customers' PCs, when they tried to play certain albums on their computer. It was technology called a rootkit, typically used by experienced hackers to infect unprotected machines. The installation left at least half a million computers vulnerable to malicious attack in over 150 countries.
If you were an AOL user in August 2006, searching for pictures of decapitated people and how to kill your wife, you may have been one of 650,000 AOL customers whose private search data, terms and sites visited, were accidentally made public by AOL, and scoured for personally identifiable information, potentially by millions of Web users.
In one of the most ironic mistakes in history, Apple's contracted iPod manufacturer accidentally shipped video iPods containing a Windows virus. It was a backdoor trojan known as RavMonE, and didn't pose any risk to Mac users. Apple said in a statement that it affected less than 1 per cent of iPods built after 12 September 2006, but it's likely those customers are now making up a large percentage of Microsoft's Zune user base.
Just over a year ago, Viacom issued a DMCA take-down notice to YouTube asking it to remove a clip taken from its VH1 show Web Junk 2.0 — a show that highlights amusing videos on the Web. Problem was, the clip focused on a YouTube video created by the user who uploaded the video Viacom was objecting to. Viacom had not sought permission to use the video in the first place, but still felt it was justified to issue a take-down notice when it was re-uploaded as part of one of its shows. Double standards don't come funnier than this.
In a leaflet delivered to hundreds of locals advising them on the best ways to protect their homes, police in Sussex misspelled their own domain name, pointing interested readers accidentally to a police-themed gay porn website. The link should have read www.sussex.police.uk, but was instead printed as www.sussexpolice.co.uk, which featured everyone's favourite gay police movie, Truncheon Meat. In 2003, CNET UK's sister site ZDNet UK reported another Sussex police tech fail, when their in-house computers were knocked offline by a computer worm.
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So, did you zdnet journos cut your teeth at one of murdoch's tabloids? If Rob McCool developed the Http daemon in the mid-70s then he was a child genius. Simply look him up on wikipedia and you'll see he was born in 1973. Plus, if he did write it in the mid-70s why isn't he the so-called "father of the web" - I', surprised you lot haven't changed history and decided gates invented the internet - muppets!