Yesterday Revision3 went offline and Veronica Belmont, former CNET producer and current Tekzilla program host reported “Holy DDOS attacks, Batman! Rev3 is under fire!” on Twitter.  After investigating the reason behind the outage, Jim Louderback (CEO of Revision3) stated that Revision3’s servers were hit with a Denial of Service attack. See the picture below of the Revision3 server.

A denial of service attack is when a server sends tons of requests and packets at one time to another server thus causing the receiving server to give up.
Revision3 uses torrent files to distribute their content.  Torrents allows multiple users to share bandwidth for download or streaming content.  And in this case, the one server that was hit with the DoS attack was Revision3’s BitTorrent server.  The DoS attack assailant was intentionally aiming to take down Revision3’s BitTorrent server.

When tracing the IP address of the assailant that attacked Revision3 servers, Louderback found out that it belonged to MediaDefender.  MediaDefender’s service is to:
“Stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the internet and peer-to-peer networks.”

However Revision3 trades legal content.  Revision3 may have been wrongfully accused of setting up BitTorrent servers for illegal purposes.  Sony, Universal, the RIAA, and the MPAA have used MediaDefender in the past to prevent illegal files from being traded.

“[Ben] Grodsky [VP of operations at MediaDefender] admits that his computers sent those SYN packets to Revision3, but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second,” stated Louderback.

Revision3 streams popular web video programs such as The GigaOM Show and Digg Nation.

Information Source & Picture Credit:
[1] Revision3 Blog: Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3 by Jim Louderback

 

Information Source:
[1] 1938 Media: Shel Israel Interviews The Other Guy From Diggnation by Loren Feldman

Other useful information:
[1] Wikipedia bio of Shel Israel

Warning: Graphic language.

Change is good.  I like the new look of Revision3.  The new site has been under development for about 5 months.  Each program has their own page subtitle.  There is a rotating module that highlights featured programming.  The company also worked with BitGravity to improve video performance and increase the size of their standard video player. 

Revision3 also added forums to give more visibility to their user community.  The forums are also intended to engage in discussions revolving around Revision3’s programs.  Users can add avatars.  The new logo stands out more than the old one also.

Lastly, new episodes of Diggnation were only available to paid members.  But since the new design launched, the most Diggnation episode will be accessible to all users as soon as its uploaded.  Revision3 recently added the Digg Reel to the list of video programs.  Not a bad new year’s start for Kevin Rose & team. 

Revision3 has recently unleashed a new show within their network of programming called Digg Reel.  Digg Reel unveils what some of the top video picks popular enough to make it to the homepage within Digg.com.  The TV show launched around 9PM Pacific Time and at the same time, Kevin Rose was hosting a party for his instant messaging and file-sharing software called Pownce.

Digg Reel is hosted by Jessica Corbin and the popular videos are showed within the show’s episode, thus allowing Digg users not having to surf over to the site to watch it themselves.  First the video is shown, Corbin says a few catch-lines, and then displays comments from a few Digg users.

I watched the first episode and some of the videos that were featured included a bunny opening an envelope, Guns and Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine-Indian version, and Jon Stewart reacting to Hillary Clinton’s crying (or lack thereof).

VH1 and Atom Films’ came up with a similar program a couple years, but their program wasn’t backed by a strong community.  I do not think that their show is aired on TV anymore.  MTV bought Atom Films in August 2006.

Revision3 Corporation is a network of tech-related web program shows.  Some of the most notable shows on the site include Diggnation and The GigaOm Show.  The company was started by Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, and David Pranger.  These three had prior experience working at TechTV/4.

[Information Source: ValleyWag]

The reason why I like Revision3[1] is because the company produces the show, Diggnation. When a story hits the homepage of Digg and gets tons of hits and attention, the odds of the event being talked about on Diggnation increases. And then either the founder, Kevin Rose or producer, Alex Albrecht gives credit to the user who submitted that particular story. This gives Digg.com more of a human essence.

Although I do not watch the show much myself, I did watch the episode[2] after the HD DVD key fiasco to see the response from Rose and Albrecht. I would say that this episode is the one that captured my interest.

Sometime between last night and this morning, TechCrunch reported[3] that Revision3 gained $8 million in investment by Greylock partners. “Online video site Revision3 has raised an $8 million second round of financing, according to a source close to the deal, bringing the total capital raised to $9 million. Our understanding is that Greylock led the round,” wrote Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder.

Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation (which was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999), is also an investor in Revision3.  Having Andreessen as an investor is a classic example of Web 1.0 reaching out to 2.0.

With the new round of funding, I’m assuming that Diggnation will expand their network of online video programs.   Kevin Rose is a posterboy of web success.  Both of his ventures, Digg and Revision3 is kicking ass with no barriers in the way.

[1] Revision3.com
[2] Diggnation: Episode 100
[3] TechCrunch: Revision3 Raises $8 million From Greylock