RIAA Website Gets Nuked by Hackers
The website of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been subjected to a series of attacks by a group of hackers who eventually ‘hosed’ the website clean. Not content with quickly wiping the SQL database, the hackers decided to ‘play’ with the RIAA website first. Several ‘amusements’ were featured on the website, including a link to the Pirate Bay (one of the main illegal P2P file sharing sites) and this interesting image.
According to reports, the RIAA used an un-patched content management system that had vulnerabilities. The hackers used SQL-injection attacks that eventually resulted in the RIAA website going south.
The ‘granny suing’ RIAA hasn’t been the most popular of organizations in the last 10 years and probably won’t get a whole lot of sympathy for this one – will they?
Comments
Haha! You get what you deserve. Whoever I share my legally bought Cd’s with and vice versa is my own business!
That pic’s from xkcd.com!
GREEDY EVIL CREEPS! HAHAHA
Ya, but imagine you release a record, and get a quarter of the expected income because only ten people bought the album and gave two hundred people all the songs for free. It totally kills the profit. Then you guys have to complain about an artist not making any more albums, but that’s becasue they now don’t have enough money to produce the next one.
There’s excess on both ends. The RIAA (and others) are over zealous, and way to broad handed in their persecution, and bootleggers are making it harder for artists to make money. There needs to be a middle ground.
Hold up; is the xkcd comic an actual hack? Look at the URL bar, it looks like a client-side modification to me.
Yet, also, it’s not like some “artists” need to make money to make a living, they can lean against daddy’s 4 million house on a beach with over 70 million in stocks.
I have no sympathy for the RIAA, this should be their year of total destruction, and maybe we can get back to having good music, and grandma can rest again !!!
Say I buy a painting from an art store and then hang it in my home. Then I have friends over and I show it to them. Should I be sued because I showed it to my friends, all of whom love works by that artist? I suppose I should tell my friends,”No – you can’t see it. Go buy your own painting. I could get sued” Guess I’d better hang that painting in a closet so that only I can see it! Yet it seems to me that art is made to be seen, and music is made to be heard. So what really is at the heart of all this – GREED? Profits? And what about the royalties paid to record companies by radio stations who broadcast music to thousands of listeners? How can one know how many listeners have actually tuned in? And of those, how many have recorded the material off the air? How can one come up with a fair average price for this; there could be only 1 listener or 97,000! Seems to me if I’m smart enough to find, buy or build and use technology to “tune in” a broadcast, I then have every right to tune it in, listen to and record it for later enjoyment. And by the same reasoning, if I have the smarts and ability to use technology to find material on the internet and download it, I should have every right to listen and store it. And I should have every right to offer it to my friends just as I claim the right to show my painting to my friends. Hell, a couple of them may even want to take a Polaroid of it while they’re at it! Don’t forget that possession is 9/10ths of the law. Ergo, instead of suing people for finding, providing and downloading art forms that may (or may not) be copyrighted, why not use your millions of dollars from all your profits to prevent the copying and distribution of the art in the first place? Save yourself millions in legal fees. And if you do NOT have the intelligence to design such technology, then leave the rest of us alone. Never EVER forget that if it weren’t for us and our MONEY buying your art forms, you wouldn’t be in business in the first place.
RE “… imagine you release a record, and get a quarter of the expected income because only ten people bought the album and gave two hundred people all the songs for free.”
You are implying that all or many of those 200 would have purchased the songs if they hadn’t received them for free. There is no evidence that those who received the songs for free would have purchased the songs if they hadn’t received them for free. In fact, many of the recipients may have never even heard of the artist before receiving the ‘gift’. If they like the gift they just might be inclined to purchase that artist’s work in the future.