Slashdot Mirror
The Podjacker Threat
Schlemphfer writes "As everyone knows by now, podcasting has taken off in a big way. But over the past week, several tech journals and The Daily Source Code have reported on the threat of 'podjacking,' the creation of an alternate RSS feed without the consent of the podcast's owner. I'm the host of a podcast, which has the dubious distinction of being the first widely-publicized victim of a podjacking. To teach others from my experiences I have posted an article entitled Preventing and Surviving a Podjacking (also available in PDF). So far this story has attracted widespread but generally
inept media and blogger
coverage. This article sets the record straight on what really happened, and shows the simple steps every podcaster should take to protect their shows from podjacking."
Do we HAVE to invent new contorted words for every variation of everything these days? Podjacking? Webinar? Blogosphere, podosphere? Vlog? Moblogging? I'm in pain here!
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Podcasting was bad enough, maybe not as bad as blog, blogger, and blogging, but annoying nonetheless. Podjacking now? Gah.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Why not just let the podcast be distributed, and announce the name of your website at various intervals?
Not only will this allow the wider distribution of your ramblings, but also help save on bandwidth.
uh, uh, uh, uh, ooooh baby....
er.... sorry, you caught me at a bad time, I was podjacking...
-everphilski-
Apple has nothing to do with this story, so I don't see why it's filed in the Apple category. Apple did not invent podcasting; they were even late adopters of it.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
MY. OWN.
MY data. My precioussssss....
His RSS feed was no longer the unique source of downloaders, that's all. The guy had and has many listeners who found access to his podcast through non-sanctioned mirrors of his RSS feed. He thought he controlled the access to his podcast via his RSS feed, but the Internet has lots of redundancy -- without his realising so. Someone else found his material via other means, for which he isn't able to track site visitors, and this upset him. I'm not really sympathetic.
Perhaps there is mileage in protecting one aggregator of news on the web, but you hardly see Taco complaining that ArsTechnica and Digg find ways to present the same news resources to their readers.
Please, for the love of God, stop making up these stupid blog/pod mashup words for insignificant events. Someone made a metadata file that points to your content. This is the same as hotlinking (where someone makes an HTML file that points to your content). Who cares?
sounds a lot like you used someone else's service when you discovered it increased your listenedship but then decided to not pay him.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"I could see at a glance the danger posed by this incorrect listing"
Yes, imagine the danger of people listening to the wrong inconsequential ramblings of somebody with no life.
The consequences are beyond words!
Slashdot has been overrun by old people. They know nothing about podcasting, and are so against learning about it, they rile against the word even being considered for a dictionary. Slashdot is now officially overrun by 80 year olds.
I'm almost part of this group of old people since I'm in my mid-20s, and have never downloaded a podcast via an RSS feed. I don't think I even have an RSS feed reader on my computer, unless Firefox counts some how. I thought it was like live bookmarks for a long time, but I guess that's not it?
I don't think many people understand what a podjacking is. Does it mean someone else distributes an identical podcast file as their own, or does it mean they make their own podcast and pretent is comes from another source?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Step 2: podcast in a distinctive Howard Cosell voice that cannot be duplicated. This with authenticate your podcasts such that any hijacking will immediately be obvious and detected.
Step 3: there is no Step 3.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
So, basically someone lied about where a link on their webpage went. OH NOES! MY INTERNETS!!!!111oneoneelven
Let this be a lesson to the podcastees: Meat is the greatest thing ever.
http://vegan.com.nyud.net:8090/issues/2005/podjac
Great article, without it I'd never know about the Kobe Beef Show
We've hired 3 bloggers to start a podcast, and I've looked into the control mechanism to protect our feeds technically. I don't support copyright protection laws so I have to allow others redistribution capability. The author seems to have received many more users from the "hijack" I think I'd support others helping me.
Just protect your profits by reminding users to visit your website regularly, and take the technical precautions the author recommends. Copyright won't help you has "hijackers" will just move to 3rd world countries that don't support the laws.
From TFA the problem was similar to search engine content hijacking, which I have experienced. I have never directly subscribed to a feed in this way. I have always navigated to the home page first and then clicked on the RSS/ATOM/XML link to add to my feed.
Which is my way of saying that search engines are good, but
<dons jounalism professor hat>
you have to check your sources.
<doffs jounalism professor hat>
Have you Meta Moderated t
Seriously... It seems that stupid people decided on stupid terms so that they could express their stupid selves online even though they could have done it before. That's a lot of stupidity. And stupidity is an odd thing: It never gets used up. Maybe its like entropy, is always increasing...
I may be wrong but you're downright ugly!
This is more of the same.
about this story that I could find it certainly seems that no podjacking occurred. It seems more like podkeyword is a bad service for people interested in the stats about their audience, but it seems that they did nothing wrong. It seems the creator of the podcast did not understand all the workings of the process and created a great deal of confusion about how his feed was disseminated and then expected others to fix it for him. Perhaps podkeyword could be more clear that they are not publishing your url, but rather assuming control of traffic going to your url. (I have not been to podkeyword so maybe they are clear about what they are doing and the author clicked through something without reading it?) It seems the author could have kept control, initially with the right info, but I would also think that he has no right to make demands because of his mistakes.
Sorry, but it has to be said:
Save a cow...Eat a Vegan!
-/Karma burning calories
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Enough.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Cant this PODJACKING make sense? how about like CAR JACKING, when someone jacks your car...how about when someone jacks your POD it is called podjacking....and when someone jacks your podcast its PODCASTJACKING
What we have here is a user who is clueless about the entire idea that feeds can be reassembled and redistributed and had such shoddy marketing that one such redistrubution - a fully automated one which he signed up for himself - got the top rankings everywhere. And then the threw a hissy fit which caused him to use most of his listeners, and was surprised that the automatic service wouldn't reinstate his feed.
I guess next time he should choose to "podcast" (meh, still a horrid word) using Atom, which is the id element to always point to the original location of the feed. That won't stop anyone malicious, but at least it would prevent him from shooting himself in the foot like that.
My proposed solution is to include "authorized" RSS URLs as meta-info on the MP3 file itself in an ID3 tag. Podcasting clients would then need to look for this tag (call it "authorized-feeds" or somesuch) and, if present, alert the user in some fashion (custom icon?) that the feed is not the official feed and is unathorized to boot. Maybe even refuse to automatically download the enclosures without special prompting from the user.
This could be a variation of the "Law of Unintended Consequences."
Invent something new. There will be at least one person, each, who:
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
you insensitive clod!
-everphilski-
This is the silliest complaint I've heard since "someone is framing in my site!" Once again the open nature of the internet has befuddled those trying to turn a profit. So someone else is feeding into your RSS, so what? This wouldn't be any problem at all if you were producing content freely and openly. Just as http traffic is open, so is RSS. I think the fundamental problem here is one of design. The internet is designed for open sharing of information. Once you post something online you're bound to lose a great degree of control. You can always put up copyright notices, but the truth of the matter is that once you post the information to be FREELY requested by any machine connected to the internet you're pretty much giving it away.
1) Register evilpodjackingdomain.com.
2) Find somebody else's podcast.
3) Mirror that podcast's XML file at evilpodjackingdomain.dom/pwn3d.xml
4) Get evilpodjackingdomain.dom/pwn3d.xml listed in as many podcast directories as possible.
5) Wait.
6) Blackmail original podcaster with threats of modifying / removing your local mirror; all subscribers through evilpodjackingdomain.dom/pwn3d.xml would get whatever you want them to get regardless of what the podcaster wants.
7) Profit.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Its all a form of "Jacking" and about as valuable to society.
"Spew into the ether" is my new favorite quote.
Father:*knock* *knock* Son, I need to use the RSStroom.
Slashdotter: **long pause** Go away. I'm busy!
Father: Open this door right now! You better not be podjacking in there!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Podjacking added to the US English Dictionary!
Bringing you tomorrows news--today!
C17H21NO4
So, as I understand this, more people were listening to the podcast, because some aggregator site picked up his feed. Whats the problem here? Read your damn URI at the start and end of the show and be glad you are getting heard.
If you want absolute control over the content you are creating, start a regular radio station and pay the FCC for a monopoly on your slice of the air. Better hire some IP lawyers and invest heavily in DRM, too.
Solution: Add a "copyright" tag to the official RSS feed that can be copied by anyone
Someone else found his material via other means, for which he isn't able to track site visitors, and this upset him.
You're right on here, but read a little further in the article and you realize he asked for the listings directly from the "Podjacker"! After he admits this, he says that they didn't do it how he assumed they would have done it. Then he goes on to still label them a "Podjacker".
I responded to an email somebody sent me about podkeyword.com, and I gave the site a visit and submitted my URL for a few listings. When I launched my show in October of 2004 I went everywhere I could to post its URL, and I quickly forgot all about my five minute visit to podkeyword.
I guess the only remaining comment I have on this topic is that I'd like the 5 minutes I spent reading the article back. Total waste of time - there literally is nothing to see here.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Seems like embedding the official URL in the mp3 metadata would be a good first step in establishing control.
"Geeks of All Nations, Compile!"
"We are Null Pointer of Borg: Dereference is futile!"
I noticed several sites were ripping off my content from my RSS feeds. Some of them are ad sites that, no doubt, gather like-minded blog posts, publish them on their site, and shit ads all over them. Others seem to be attempting to do some sort of service. What with Google punishing duplicate content posts, I don't want my content redistributed without my permission. So, I implemented a system with mod_rewrite and PHP on my site that checks the user agent before allowing access to any page. If the user agent is unknown, it shows a page saying that I don't know who they are but I'll see about allowing them access to my site. I then enter their user agent in a database, after doing some research, and decide whether to allow them or not. Eventually, I'm going to tie this into my robots.txt file so that it denies robots there (if they bother to look) in addition to showing the robot a access denied page.
It isn't the easiest solution (takes a lot of time to manage) and won't always work (e.g. they set their UA to one that looks like a valid browser or some other UA that I allow), but it clears most of the riffraff, i think.
I thought /. was against people getting lawyers involved because they didnt understand the purpose of URLs
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Why not just verify the referring URL before sending out the Podcast archive? This is how most sites avoid people deep-linking into theirs, or loading high-bandwidth content such as videos or even images from their web servers. This can be done by making your RSS feed dynamically generated by a CGI script, or even just using a htaccess file for the directory containing your podcast.
Nice article. It's a disturbing scenario. He offers good advise on how to avoid it. I feel like I learned a bit about the technical underpinnings of podcasting too.
I am hoping that podcasting will put a dent in the mostly monopolized radio and TV markets by offering fresh content from independent sources who don't need to have mucho dinero to start distributing their content. Eventually this freer market will hopefully let the better programming rise to the top...putting pressure on the TV and radio monopolists to get with it! I can't wait for the first show to be migrated from podcast to radio. That would be a newsworthy event.
I like his reference to the Creative Commons and how useful it is in such a situation.
Perhaps, perhaps not. On one hand, I think it's a great way to get in touch with people who have more specialized interests that you're not going to find in regular news or information sources.
On the other hand, people take this stuff too seriously. It's brain candy, the narcotic of the microculture. Once you find people who think like you do and share your ideas, you want to connect with them more and more. And podcasters are all too happy to oblige. Apparently some people have too much time on their hands.
Podjacking... spew... Hehehehe ;)
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Podcasting: It's snob for "streaming audio."
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
And I figured this was a case of armed thugs coming up and stealing your shiny new 60gb iPod video with every episode of Fantasy Island loaded on it...
Um, could we call it PodPhishing or PodPharming? I really like the 'ph' thing we had going for all the 'security issues' that an ounce of "paying attention" would avoid/fix...
* ducks *
What a waste of my time.
No one "jacked" anything, this guy submitted the site to this URl forwarder himself The site that "podjacked" him is no different than cjb.net or tinyurl.com or any other redriector service.
It is anyone's fault this guy is a complete tool and does not realize what he is doing.
...suddenly get "Pod" attached to it?
MP3 players were around for a long time before the iPod. Granted Apple made it idi...err...user-friendly, but can we PLEASE stop with the pod crap? It's almost as bad as the "i" that's been shoved in front over every word known to man since the debut of the iMac. Couldn't we just once stop being consumer whores long enough to pick a brand-neutral name for something?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
My understanding is that ID3 tags are at the end of the file. Oh, and they're the stupidest metadata format evar. Up Ogg!
While I am not calling Erik Marcus a liar, his story is full of opinion and unsubstantiated claims. It seems to me like he subscribed to a listing that would help him publish his podcast, and claims that there was never any notice that his listings would help generate revenue for the listing service. He freely admits that he wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing while he signed up with this service, and so his claim that he wasn't told about advertising becomes a little more difficult to believe.
To me, I guess I just don't quite see how he was taken advantage, as he claims. This podkeyword.com site was providing him a service, which was free to him, and only added some advertising space to his feed. From his own blog on this, it seems like these advertisements had been going for over a year, and he never even noticed. No one had complained. He would still be unaware if some technical glitch hadn't disrupted things.
So, why shouldn't podkeyword.com use unobtrusive advertising space to break even, given that they didn't charge Mr. Marcus a dime?
For podkeyword.com's blog, check it here.
/dev/random
While most of my viewpoint was already iterated by this comment, I have one more thing to add.
This is what happens when a very new technology that is highly experimental becomes widespread too fast. People who doen't have a goddamned clue how the web actually works start submitting things to sites left and right, without understanding the consequences of what they are doing. My personal guess is that this bozo did not even know what a URL redirector *was* when he signed up for this service.
Anyway, I personally stand 100% beside podkeyword.com on this, this guy is a complete tool. He may know stuff about vegan food, but he certainly does not know much about the web or technology, and he should leave the management of his podcast site up to someone who has two clues about what is going on.
What a freak. I can't believe how much media coverage this has gotten, it is really a shame because podkeyword.com provided a nice service (not unlike tinyurl.com, actually nearly identical) and now their name will be tarnished beyond repair.
It seems like this problem could have been avoided if he was as good at affecting podcast search results as podkeyword.com was. He openly admits to not completely understanding how iTunes gets its search results, but then blames the problem on podkeyword.com. Hmmm...
Who moved my sig?
I think it's worse than a non-issue. The complainant seems to almost be in the wrong, not to mention misguided.
Marcus [the podcaster] contacted Lambert to ask that his listing be removed. Lambert did so. This, however, caused Marcus' listenership to crash by some 75 percent, he claimed. Marcus then asked that his listing temporarily be reinstated on Podkeyword
and regarding "extortion"...
"He wanted me to make sure no other directory services got the information from me, but I can't tell who are directory services, because we're not submitting anything," Lambert said. "People are coming to look at our list. I have a choice: I remove it from anywhere or I [don't] remove it. You can't restrict who comes to look at your Podcast. So his request wasn't technically practical.
Podjacking is a very misleading term. Podjacking suggests that a user expecting to hear Marcus' podcast would be redirected to some other address. Doesn't seem to be the case. With regards to the "extortion": Marcus wanted Lambert to reinstate the feed, but in a way that wasn't supported and which would require custom code. Lambert agreed to do it but said it would cost a fee, which is a perfectly reasonable position. The article also seems to suggest that the free service was responsible for 75% of Marcus' traffic. How is this even remotely related to hijacking?
Actually, it is more like if Yahoo themselves went and registered a redirect to their own site.
The guy signed up for this *himself*. Then he complained about it when he later realized everyone was using the redirector instead of his "front door" url (wtf???)
It is like going to tinyurl.com and making a tinyurl for your site, then complaining later on when people use it to access your site instead of the real URL.
The guy is a fruitcake and shouldn't even be allowed to podcast until he takes a few courses on how the internet works.
Heh heh - - I'm with you, Dood. We need to start a Wiki (WikIPod?), too, if we're going to do this right.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
As a matter of fact a lot of people do!
...Pod help me, I can't stop!
Since podcasting got really podular, us podestrians have more than enough to worry about podside, what with podvertisments, podspam and press scare stories about podophiles without having to worry about our favourite podcasts being podjacked too.
This seems identical to the deep linking debate that the web world went through five years ago (or more):
Is it legal/ethical for someone else to link to your content without your permission?
An RSS feed is nothing but a collection of hyperlinks (URLs), so "podjacking" is just the deep linking problem in a slightly different form.
It seems to me that the concensus at the time was that deep linking isn't the nicest thing in the world, but it isn't evil and certainly not illegal. Same goes for "podjacking", I think.
If the podjacker had hosted this guy's copyrighted content on his own server, then he'd have a legitimate beef. As it is, I think he needs to tone down the rhetoric a bit.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I am actually really suprised that there is no way to edit the RSS for an entry in the iTMS podcast directory. I ran into this problem through a far less worriesome way. When I initially started my indie rock podcast the setup was less than optimal so after two shows my friend who runs the tech side of our website re-worked the entire site (much for the better) but that meant that my podcast listing in the iTMS was broken. After some emails to Apple I have found that there is no way to effectively take care of this. I cannot edit the broken XML so my only recourse is to delete and relist or recreate a folder that no longer exists in order to host an RSS file that redirects people to my new RSS but all the subscribers would remain pointed to the wrong RSS feed. Luckily I don't have anyone subscribed that way because it was my first two shows. One would think that apple would have thought of this and I could just log in under the account I posted it as in order change the RSS feed...
Podsnatching
( P ) Pronunciation Key ( pd - sntch )
v. podsnatch, podsnatching, podsnatches
v. tr.
1. To suddenly take someone's iPod from another's possession: There is a lot of podsnatching on the subway.
2. To damage an iPod's internal software: Sony's latest rootkit really upset me podsnatching me the way it did.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Let's continue:
Podkeyword did not carry a notice on their front page, nor on the page where URLs were submitted, that they intended to republish submitted RSS feeds under feeds controlled by podkeyword. Remember, an RSS feed is the front door to your show. You would think that it would be basic human decency to ask permission before creating an alternate RSS feed URL for an existing RSS feed. But not only did podkeyword.com fail to ask permission, the site went right ahead and created these alternate feeds and then didn't even bother to tell me!
So what PODJACKERS are doing is copying the work of others without permission or ATTRIBUTION and then redistributing that work to make a profit on, ads, etc.
Maybe that's A-OK in your little world.
I think it stinks.
But hey, I voted Republican, [MOD DOWN ALERT] so maybe I just have too much of a concern about right vs wrong.
No, he *thought* he submitted a listing, too bad he didn't read the goddamned description of what the site was.
Podkeyword.com provides keywords for podcatss in URL redirectors. Hell, I can tell this from *the goddamned url*, let alone the signup process, where you even pick the keyword you want for your redirect.
If you read the article I get the distinct impression this guy had no clue what hew as doing when he signed up for podkeyword.com.
Anyways, the truth is, this guy is an idiot, signed up fomr something he didn't understand, then got all pissed off when search engines started indexing the redirect instead of the real URl. Why he got so pissed off, I still don't know. LIke, for some reason he thinks that podkeyword.com could all of a sudden redirect his podcast to somewhere else? He doesn't think his listeners would notice that? Man vegans are even more weird than I initially thought.
This story seems to inadvertently prove that production and marketing are two different skills. The author was good at creating content, but so miserably poor at marketing that he didn't even realize where his audience was coming from. The "podjacker", on the other hand, created nothing, but apparently did an excellent job of marketing the author's content.
You might argue that the world would be better off without middle men such as marketers, publishers, etc. (I think the catchy phrase for this is "disintermediation".) But this story provides evidence that these people actually do add value in some cases.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
lol no its not its a podjacking
What he is complaining about may not be interesting, but the flaw in iTunes he brings up can be a pain. Why won't Apple let users alter the URLs of the podcasts?
I used iTunes for a while until some of the URLs were corrupted for my podcast feeds. You literally cannot fix these yourself -- you have to resubscribe to the feed, but without a way to consolidate the old listing with the new listing. So you end up having two listings for the same podcast.
Why won't Apple let you edit the URLs? You can edit bookmark URLs in every browser, so why not on iTunes?
Xcott
"Web 2.0!" say the bloggers. "Podcast!" say the bloggers. "RSS/ATOM!" say
the bloggers. "Down with oppressive media! Democratize publishing!" say the
bloggers. And now that things are finally becoming standardized, and
XML-based, and easilly parsable and reusable, it turns out they don't LIKE
it when someone reuses *their* stuff in a way they didn't envision.
WHERE IS YOUR PRECIOUS "REMIX CULTURE" NOW?
Assholes.
Posted with Mozilla
Parent post:
I like his reference to the Creative Commons and how useful it is in such a situation.
FTFA:
One thing I'll be doing shortly to further protect my show is to acquire a Creative Commons license. This will allow me to secure rights sufficient to fend off podjackers, without scaring people away from making use of my show in a fair and legitimate way. To learn more about this kind of license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/.
Sounds like Mr Podjacked should be the one learning more about Creative Commons, if he thinks that acquiring such a license will help secure his rights and "further protect" his show. Last I heard, CC is about offering additional rights above and beyond the norm, not somehow validating or restricting those rights defined by law.
podcasting.com should have extended itself more to assist vegan.com's demands. A full discloser of their services or temporarily reinstating vegan.com's feed for free instead of demanding money would have done.
/. compared podcasting.com to tinyurl however that's not completely accurate. At least tinyurl.com provides a valuable service. podcasting.com has little value and offeres a service that is already readily available. Because postcasting.com's service is only moderately useful, the site should bend over backwards to make their customers happy.
It's amazing how can people decide what is right and wrong in the absence of law. Now podkeyword.com will always carry around this bad press. Having the technical right to do something does not mean you should and in this case podcasting.com upset one of their customers. Their business is built on inviting people to list their podcast and here they are upsetting a customer. Not smart and nor a good way to run a business. Surely a competitor to podcasting.com can learn from this and do a better job to support their customers instead of turn them away.
One person on
True story. Used to be an RA and one of the rooms had a image outside with a kitten running in a field with the quote "Whenever you masterbate, God kills a kitten". Below the sign was a tally of the number of kittens killed that week...
-everphilski-
Wouldn't it be fairly easy to make a mod_rewrite rule, that would block the redirects or forward them to a sod-off.html page?
I've made a few rewrite rules to avoid hotlinking of my images, and this seems possible to me.
TC - My Photos..
Why is any mention of podcasting immediatly associated with Apple? Editors, learn the language. Podcasting does not imply an Apple subject - quit categorizing it as such.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Now come on, really. I'm not native English, still, I got to puke from the laughingly many of such and similar new "word" creations. Why do some people have to name everything with some new crazy hybrid abomination. Podjacking... right, let's call it podjerking, since some seem to jerk off on these "new" "words" and they probably need their daily dose of them so they create one every day.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
It sounds like the problem you are having is fairly simple. You are creating audio content, but you have lost control of your distribution! I suggest you get together with other likeminded content producers and form an association to help control your distribution.
I suggest something like The Podcaster Industry Association of America. As a member of The Podcaster Industry Association of America, or PIAA, you could pool resources and even lobby state and federal legislature to assist you in recovery of your content. Perhaps someday, in the not so distant future, you might even successfully prosecute individuals who did not obtain your content via your distribution network. What a glorious day that will be for the PIAA!
... and yet we still are overrun with cats. I don't get it.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
A significant portion of the posts are ones that insinuate that the term "podjacking" is related to gratifying oneself sexually. Seems to be hovering around the 4% mark.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Someone will add an "ff" in there, and coin one of the more deadly accurate buzzwords in the English language. Oh, wait, I just did. :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The technological solution to this:
The guy at http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss changes that URL with some rewriting commands. If the host retrieving it is at evil.pirate's IP or IP block, then instead of sending him feed.rss, we send him GetOurListenersBack.rss.
GetOurListenersBack.rss contains text and a small MP3 file designed to tell the podcast listener that evil.pirate has cruely tricked the podcast listener, and details steps for the podcast listener to change his feed URL to the correct http://myrealsystem.dm/podcast/feed.rss, at which point the podcast listener will get his feed back.
For giggles, it also ask said podcast listener to assist the podcast producer in finding the owner of the evil.pirate website and punching him in the mouth. If myrealsystem.dm has a dedicated enough user base, then the evil.pirate will find himself being punched in the mouth repeatedly in no time.
Problem solved.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you piece the two stories together, they're actually totally consistent on what happened:
That's the chronology, as both sides put it. Who's right? Who's wrong? Who gives a damn? This is not a technical conflict at its core, it's a personality conflict.
I think there's a good case to be made that RSS "feed hijacking" could happen as described: somebody mirrors your content without permission and becomes more popular than your original feed, then extorts you for your own readers/listeners. However, there's no evidence that it's ever actually happened. You'd have to be really failing to pay attention for it to succeed.
It's certainly not what happened here. The Vegan guy deliberately signed on for a questionable service, got pissed off when the service fragmented his audience, and then both sides started hitting each other with their dicks.
That's the whole story. And I do wish they'd shut up.
ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I read the story and the impression I got was.
User asked podkeyword to link to their podcast, and they did.
User got a lot of listeners from podkeywords linking.
Podkeyword provided this link for free.
User didn't like podkeyword linking asked to be removed
Podkeyword removed them.
User changes their mind and asks to be reconnected.
Podkeyword doesn't want to link/relink at the whim of the user. Requests payment and an agreement that they'll stop changing their mind all the time.
User somehow thinks this is unreasonable.
We old fogeys would like to officially welcome you to the Internet, now that you've experienced how easily your idealistic usage of a free medium can be hampered by individuals and corporations alike seeking profits in the noise.
:D
Now you can join the ranks of regular Internet users, who put up with assholes like ** *Beatles*Beatles that use every trick in the book to make Google's PageRank increasingly useless. You can be one of the many who put up with bots that harvest your email from random webpages, sell it to thousands of spammers so they can use their own bots to send you endless offers to enlarge your toes. You can be one of the lucky horde who dodge invasive rootkits on a daily basis that threaten to recruit your PC into their growing army of zombies.
So somebody tried to blackmail you out of your listeners. Boo-Hoo.
Welcome to the Internet. Maybe next time you'll register your RSS feed first, and maybe even propogate the hate by doing the same thing to somebody else
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This is like complaining about anyone on the web linking to you because you don't control what their referring page says/does.
I thought podcasters were web nerds and geeky enough to know:
And I really hate this asshole for this, but damn it, I'll say it. Sometimes marketing/branding is a good idea.
SAY THE NAME OF YOUR SHOW, URL AND WEBSITE IN YOUR DAMNED AUDIO FILE, YOU FUCKTARD.
I can't believe I actually had to say something positive about marketing. Screw this idiot and his podcast. He's dumb enough that they should be listening to someone else anyway.
He should fire his webmaster too. That moron is almost worse for not realizing how to address the problem from a technical standpoint just on their own server w/o contacting the referring domain owner(s).
Apparently there should be a license for people that want to get on the internet as a content provider. You must be at least this smart in order to ride this ride. If not, sit down, shut up and let the moderately intelligent do the work.
P.O.D. is a shitty band and they deserve to be jacked.
Ok, so forget that you don't need an ipod to DOWNLOAD the mp3 that is being PODCAST, or that the link does not HAVE to be an rss feed. The reality is that if they were linking to files that were apple's prorietary format THEN AND ONLY THEN could they call it PODCASTING. Of course they would lose 80% of their followers because not everyone that listens to PODCASTS owns a phucking iPod.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
it would be a story about mobile porn for the ipod video or somethink like that.
but doooh. The story is a stupid nonissue.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So what PODJACKERS are doing is copying the work of others without permission or ATTRIBUTION and then redistributing that work to make a profit on, ads, etc.
I'm not sure which is worse - the fact that you don't really seem to grasp what really happened or that you're so militant about your misconception. Either way, your comment was hilarious. Please maintain your current caffeine intake level. If I had mod points under a different account I'd mod you +5 Funny.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I guess it must be. You're the only one to even mention visiting it, and I haven't had a single sale.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
All this wordjacking is making me sick.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh thank whoever modded my comment redundant--I laughed my ass off. Never saw a mod that I would rank "Funny" before.
State the preferred URL to your RSS feed at the beginning of your mp3...er, podcast. People are listening to you speak, you can alert them to the problem. Do this for two or three podcasts *before* you tell the 'jacker to stop 'jacking you off, so listeners will still be able to find you. More proof that a vegan diet interferes with logical thought processes.
"I have spent the last week in the press.
I have been called a HIJACKER - PodJacker - RSS Hijacker - Extortionist - and more.
All (every word untrue) The issue has to do with a GIANT MISUNDERSTANDING!
But since it got slashdotted today... it will get worse.
The idiot podcaster - signed up for my free search engine that I did last year.
He admits - showing up - and signing up!
( a fact omitted in the original news )
He asked to be removed - and was removed without question!
he lost 1000 of 1500 visitors because he asked me too.
He asked me to put them back I told him that he could do it himself, but that I would not change the code without negociating fees.
Erik took this as extortion and took it to a lawyer and the press.
The articles started flying... and I have been all over the press since.
I have been on national us radio programs - podcasts news articles in europe - former USSR - china - australia and more.
Unreal....
gets worse actually - but could use some ideas...
Need to get the story straight...
but the flood of articles may be too much for me to personally keep up with."
So there you have it. The guy belongs to the same organization as I do. Before someone criticises me for that, we are a group of IT enthusiasts and nothing to do with script kiddies as shown by our mission statement.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
mashpodwhining: whining on slashdot about mashed up words that relate only tangentially to ipods
(not that he'll read/understand this, but it makes me feel better. I was directed here when I found that my fave podcast finding site was down.) Just so you realize, your article in regards to what http://www.podkey.com/ is a bit on the slanderous side. The tone of your article is as though the owner had done something malicious. You state that he had "jacked" your podcast when in fact in the next breath you state that "the listener experience was no different than if Yahoo's entry carried my show's official RSS feed URL" As a publisher on the web, you are also probably *very* aware of the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a prominent position on a search engine. Podkey, when it was in it's previous incarnation (which due to your misguided activism is now down for the time being) was a very useful PodCast search engine that I regularly used in conjunction with my iTunes to update my favorite feeds. I just read your rant which pointed out that a) his site was reputable and well-used enough to have a high listing on the Yahoo search engine and b) that people who searched for your podcast got your podcast. What blows my mind is that you then got angry and incensed about a world of "could be's" You state that "He could easily, for instance, attach advertising clips to accompany my show -- keeping any revenue he generated from these ads. In such a situation, my listeners might not even know these ads were not a legitimate part of the programming. Alternately, the podkeyword.com guy might at some point demand payment from me to keep his URL pointing to my show. With two minutes work, he could easily point his feed to the "Kobe Beef Show" (yes, there is such a thing),and all my Yahoo listeners would be lost." Seriously...that's like blasting Google for the potential to send people to the wrong place or for saying "TAKE THE COPS GUNS AWAY! THEIR BULLETS COULD KILL ME!" It's a podcast search engine. It gets people like me (well, like me until you fucked it up) to the podcasts that they want to hear. Just as Google gets you to the sites you search for his podcast search/index engine gets you to the podcast search/index engine gets you to the podcasts you want. What about this helpful service is so nefarious? It's a search engine, not a communist plot. Reconsider what this is, retract your alarmist statements, apologize, let that guy(s?) continue to send you an audience (remember what happened when iTunes pulled your feed listing? you did this one voluntarily!! what the fuck are you thinking?) and most of all, let my most useful non-agenda podcast search engine get back to searching podcasts instead of spending money on lawyers and litigation and public statements simply because you don't get that they perform a valuable public service. Sincerely podcastless
I didn't even catch this story until I read a post from George Lambert (owner of PodKey). I've read exactly what went on (http://www.unsignedpodcast.blogspot.com/): Erik Marcus signed up for a service. The service is a podcast feed keyword. Basically, you choose the keywords for your podcast, and someone can type them in and get podcasts for that keyword. Then, Erik goes apeshit: OMFG, d00d, vegan.com pwns mah rss copyright!!!1!
... errr... uh... BEING A MEAT EATER!
Little does this idiot realize at the time... he was the one that signed up for this service, which authorized PodKey to do exactly what it did, help him out: "I went to their website with the understanding that it was one of a large number of sites containing directories of podcasts. If podkeyword.com boosted my traffic, fantastic. ( http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.htm )"
But, George goes ahead an honors his request, and removes the guys podcast. Then, Erik goes apeshit again: OMMFG WTF, not k00l, I lost 75% of my peeps cause j00 delisted meh! YOU HAVE TO FIX THIS! Put it all back, but on top of that, you can't let anyone else but Yahoo and iTunes look at the feed! Then, I'll make them change to my feed, and you have to again drop your lists! YOU MUST DO THIS BECAUSE... uh... YOU OWE ME FOR
George replies simply: You can re-register yourself like you did the first time. You will get the same service. If you want terms other than what I'm willing to offer, I'll have to recode my website. I will not do that without compensation. If you aren't willing to do that, then you have the two choices of any podcaster: list with my free service and I'll ensure you are easily found by those looking for your type of podcast, or... don't.
Erik goes apeshit one last time: OMFG, d00d, I'm getting a lawyer, and a reporter, and Jesse Jackson, and a legion of bloggers and podcasters that will ignore the facts for me, and we're going to sue and slander your ass all over the net for this unjustificationation of podjacking!
So, it's all relatively simple. Erik wants his RSS feed copyrighted against, who? *!suprise!* His own actions! While at the same time, wanting the benefits and popularity of PodKey, while demanding that PodKey (a free service) bow to his personal demands... but only for as long as it takes him to ditch the PodKey service. He isn't getting his way, so he's making a big PR thing out of it.
Or, to summarize. Erik (aka the author of this article, Schlemphfer) is being a dick (an all veggie one, of course*), and a rather childish one at that. George, on the other hand, is a programmer just trying to run VOLUNTARY service to benefit podcasters. God forbid he doesn't let every disgruntled podcaster tell him how to rewrite his website code.
I've got a new word for all of you. SlashdotJacking - Passing off the jerking off of your own egotistic sob story as a legitimate Slashdot Story.
* Erik would never be a meaty dick, not being the author of Meat Market - "Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money is a quick read, but a valuable one. I can't remember the last time I read an animal rights book that excited me so much." -- Herbivore Magazine. Yes, rivveting!
I8-D