Mar 7, 2008 : MobiTV Trying to Shut Down Forum

📅 March 7, 2008 - According to reports from a variety of online sources, including this article at mobile and wireless news site The Unwired, mobile TV provider MobiTV (mobitv.com) has set its sites on shutting down mobile phone discussion forum HowardForums (howardforums.com) after posters discovered some supposedly secret information on the MobiTV website.


Posters on the forums discovered that links to the MobiTV service's video feeds were stored in an ASCII text file that could be accessed simply by typing the URL into any browser - no password protection or encryption - connected to the Internet. Using the appropriate mobile device to access the file could even give a user access to the company's video content, a process the company considered "hacking."

MobiTV charges a monthly fee of $9.95 for access to its video feeds, and is the provider of Sprint's mobile TV service, which also requires a monthly fee.

In a separate post to the forums, operator Howard Chui says he was contacted by the legal team of MobiTV with a takedown notice, requesting that he remove the message threads containing the offending information.

Chui refused, arguing that the information posted on the forum was merely a link to MobiTV's site, and that he had no control over the information available on the company's site, nor was he responsible for the company failing to secure is intellectual property with anything more than a URL it doesn't make public.

In updates to the post, Chui says the company contacted his Web host, Global Net Access (gnax.com) with a separate takedown notice.

As of press time, the company does not appear to have acted on the notice, as the HowardForums site remains accessible.

Chui is urging supporters to help his cause by promoting stories about the situation on Digg here and here.

Though MobiTV appears to have updated the security on the file in question (an attempt to open it triggered a "forbidden" message), the company appears to be bringing unwanted attention to its security gaffe via its legal actions.

The story is unmistakably reminiscent of an incident from several weeks ago, in which a Swiss bank attempted to have the whistleblower site Wikileaks.org shut down based on files that had been posted to the site. The action succeeded in having the site's .org domain suspended, but the injunction was reversed two weeks after the initial ruling.