Podcaster Erik Marcus has become the latest target of an age-old crime. His RSS feed has been redirected by a “cyber-squatter” who’s demanding payment as a condition for releasing the hijacked feed.
Marcus who runs the Vegan.com site and produced the Erik’s Diner podcasts is seeking legal redress for this new form of extortion, eWeek reports. The issue came to light after Marcus noticed that downloads of his podcast has suddenly slipped after steadily building up an audience of 1,500. Marcus discovered that Yahoo! has an RSS listing for the podcast on its beta site, podcasts.yahoo.com, pointed to podkeyword.com instead of vegan.com. Yahoo! has thus far failed to correct the listing and the problem was compounded after Apple’s iTunes service also linked the Podkeyword URL with Erik’s Diner podcasts.
Frustrated in dealing with Yahoo! and Apple, Marcus contacted podkeyword to request a workaround at its end. Podkeyword responded it would only make listing changes if Marcus made an “unspecified payment or agreed permanently to its terms”, eWeek reports.
What responsibility have Yahoo and Apple to maintain ethical practices on their turf?
Does anybody know the nation of origin for “podkeyword”? And it should be the responsability of any listing site to only accept authenticated changes. This shows that Yahoo and Apple are cutting dangerous corners. Microsoft cut the corners that led to the global computer virus epidemic. It would be a shame if Apple and Yahoo make listing sites impossible to use.
Yahoo and Apple maintaining ethical practices on their turf? ROFL
http://unsignedpodcast.blogspot.com/2005/12/was-this-case-of-rss-hijacking.html
There seems to be a whole lot more to this story than what the major press indicates. The “other side of the story” sounds a whole lot more plausible than what vegan.com is peddling. However, it’s far less tasty when it comes to selling sensationalism, so most likely the hyped-up version will never come to light to mainstream media.
Maybe the vegan guy’s brain’s malnourished.
read new eWeek article….
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1896434,00.asp
According to George Lambert, creator of the Podkey redirection service that allegedly hijacked a Podcast and held it for ransom, the alleged victim registered with his service to begin with and the “ransom” simply represents fees that would be required to do the custom coding the Podcaster has demanded.
Podcaster David Lawrence claims that Marcus, in fact, told him in a phone conversation that he couldn’t remember whether he or his Webmaster had registered with Podkey—a lapse of memory that often afflicts Podcasters, Lambert said
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1896434,00.asp