About the MediaDefender leaked emails
Most people probably already read the news on TorrentFreak or another website: yesterday, someone published a torrent consisting of roughly 6.6 thousand leaked internal emails from MediaDefender.
For those who don't know MediaDefender, it's part of the company ARTISTdirect (OTC: ARTD) and their sole purpose is to disrupt P2P traffic. They try to achieve this 'noble' goal by creating fake (decoy) torrent files and spreading these on BitTorrent websites. Their server farm consists of thousands of servers they use to seed and track these fake files. These guys like to refer to their work as "content protection".
Now that these internal MediaDefender mails are leaked, I want to share my thoughts on the whole thing. What's interesting to see is that Mininova is more than once referred to as a difficult site to post fake files. Let's see some quotes:
NEGATIVES: Attempted to upload to Mininova using 15 different IPs across various ranges. Was banned on every single attempt.-- Benny Mao, on uploading fakes to Mininova
These are very disappointing results given that people were here over the weekend. I understand that Mininova is moderating heavily, ...-- Ben Ebert, on attempts to upload fake "Fantastic 4" torrents
And I know Mininova is our toughest site to get onto.but we gotta think of something.-- Ben Ebert, on failing attempts to upload fakes
Somewhere in between collecting real torrents and posting decoys, post comments for these files on Piratebay, Mininova and Torrentspy.-- Pedro Cortez, in meeting notes
REMINDER: Next Fox High Priority project - Release July 27th: "The Simpson’s Movie" Try to post to Mininova and Torrentspy by any means possible.-- Pedro Cortez, in other meeting notes We can only be grateful for the many nice words from our friends at MediaDefender :) All thanks go to our great moderating team, who did (and do) great work. Oh, and one last quote:
It's slow. I would say on average 15-20 seconds to load a page.-- Benny Mao, on Mininova load time. We took this remark very serious and decided to take immediate action and added a new slave database server. Graphs of the new setup can be seen at our statistics page. Stay tuned for updates!