p2pnet news | RIAA News:- One of the world’s most hated and despised organisations —- the dispensers of ‘tough love‘ and ‘cool new legal services‘—- was hacked on Sunday.

Through their RIAA and similar hit orgs around the world, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG have dirtied not only themselves, but everybody and everything associated with them.

It’s no big surprise to find hackers penetrated the RIAA website yesterday, bringing it crashing down. (We added the text to the pic on the right.)

Then slowly, it started to come back online.

At 1:00 pm Pacific yesterday, “Not Found,” was what you got when you tried to access the RIAA.com news section.

“The requested URL /news_room.php was not found on this server.”

By 4:00 Sunday the RIAA ‘news’ page was back.

“One of our goals at the RIAA is to provide timely and accurate information on the issues affecting the recording industry and creative artists we represent that are of interest to the public and the media,” says the so-called trade organisation.”

Clearly, being hacked doesn’t fall into that category and there was no mention of the fact the site had been taken down. Nor is it alluded to today.

A ‘bit bothersome’

“Interesting to note that RIAA uses an open and free language (PHP) for its web application (and very likely, MySQL as well),” said a Reddit post.

“Perhaps having to pay for all those pesky proprietary sotware licenses was becoming a bit bothersome?

“EDIT: Heh, a quick check of the response headers reveals that they’re running on Apache and RedHat as well.”

Later, “WE HAVE A WINNER, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!”

And then, “I guess that’s the kind of thing you get when you hire more lawyers than programmers.”

Hacked again.

Watching the RIAA site go up and down used to be a popular pass-time. It was hacked regularly and maybe 2008 will be the year we see the RIAA spending as much time trying to keep online as it does trying to sue its masters’ customers.

But that could be the least of his worries.

Tech alert

The people they’re attacking are not only their own customers, but also the sysops, admins and techs who keep the wheels of the corporate music industry turning —- the people who not only know the Net inside out and backwards, but also developed much of the technology that keeps it going.

This time it was ‘outside’ hackers.

But what the RIAA, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG need to understand is: this time around, it was only the website.

It could have been worse —- a lot worse —- and next time, it might be closer to home with ‘insiders’ on the offensive.

Because like every other enterprise in the world, the RIAA, CRIA, ARIA, BPI, IFPI, and so on, all depend on computers and the techs who service them to keep things running smoothly and the money rolling in.

The men and women who look after the hardware and software enjoy music just as much as anyone else and just as important, they have mothers, brothers aunts and uncles.

How many of their relatives are victims, or could become victims, of the RIAA, BPI, etc?

Fear isn’t what makes things happen. Conviction is.

And every day, the conviction is growing on more and more people that the Big 4 and their RIAAs stand for everything that’s bad, and nothing that’s good.

We don’t need them, but they need us.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

(Thanks for the call, YKW)

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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