The world of tech can be a strange place. It’s a place where zeroes become heroes, where public enemies become pillars of society and where tabloid villains turn out to be perfectly legitimate after all. Come with us as we discover the sites, services and (ahem) personalities who became notorious on the net and then tried to come back.
From pirates to…
BitTorrent used to be a byword for movie piracy, but BitTorrent Inc has been making a concerted effort to go straight. BitTorrent Bundles, which combine free and protected content, have been used by Madonna, Eddie Izzard, De La Soul and Public Enemy to promote their work.
The protected content is unlocked when users provide an email address, but soon BitTorrent Bundles will offer content that is unlocked in exchange for money, with BitTorrent taking a cut of the proceeds.
The shy, retiring Mr Dotcom is the copyright industries’ public enemy number one: his file sharing website, Megaupload, was shut down by the US Department of Justice in 2012, and he’s currently being sued by six Hollywood film studios and facing possible extradition to the US.
Undeterred, Dotcom is planning to launch a legitimate music streaming service, baboom.com, later this year. Until the formal launch there’s only one album on it: Dotcom’s own (bloody awful) Good Times
Ashley Madison is the kind of website you’d expect to see advertised in the darker corners of the web: it’s a dating site set up specifically for people who want to cheat on their partners. However, through a combination of high-profile advertising, affiliate marketing and PR stunts, the site has become part of the mainstream: it boasts more than 21 million members in 30 countries.
Napster and its imitators destroyed the music business as we knew it: the lure of free music and the infinitesimal risk of getting caught meant an entire generation stopped paying for tunes. At its peak it had over 80 million users. Years of litigation finally killed the service in 2001, but the name and logo live on: today it’s a Spotify-style subscription music service.
Kazaa was a blatant attempt to mimic Napster without falling foul of the same legal problems that killed the file-sharing pioneer, but that didn’t stop the music business from suing it silly. Like Napster it went on to become a legal subscription service, but unlike Napster it didn’t survive. Its earliest backers did though, and Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis went on to create Skype and Joost.
Anyone who thinks The Pirate Bay wasn’t largely based on piracy is rather naïve. If all those torrent users were really sharing Linux distributions, Linux would be the most popular consumer OS on earth – but TPB did try a number of things to clean up its act, such as The Promo Bay.
The Promo Bay showcased up-and-coming bands that were quite happy for people to torrent their stuff, but even though it was moved to a separate domain it still ended up blocked by UK ISPs. That blocking was removed in late 2012 and UK internet users can now access The Promo Bay, but not its piratey parent (well, not easily).
Craigslist didn’t start off as an online bad guy: the listings service began as a way to publicise local events and became a cheap and cheerful home for classified ads. Unfortunately the more adult ads caused controversy, with Craigslist accused of facilitating prostitution and even sex trafficking. In 2009 Craigslist decided to clean up its listings and binned the adult services categories in the US and Canada.
Here’s yet another music poacher turned gamekeeper: a Kazaa-style peer-to-peer service that is now 100% RIAA-approved. It still does file sharing but content is limited to its database of 15 million approved songs and videos.
The BitTorrent client formerly known as Azureus was one of the world’s most popular BitTorrent programmes, but since version 3 it’s been pushing legal content from partners including the BBC and Showtime. Vuze is adamant that its users shouldn’t use illegal torrents.
Some technologies get a bad rap, and that’s definitely the case with Tor. Despite coming from military-sponsored research and helping activists avoid censorship and surveillance in the world’s scarier places, the privacy-protecting service is widely believed to be a tool for criminals.
According to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre last year, as reported in the Independent, 5,000 of the estimated 15,000 Tor users in the UK were using it for criminal purposes such as buying drugs and sharing illegal images.
Privacy activists are attempting to repair Tor’s reputation: the Electronic Frontier Foundation published “7 things you should know about Tor” this week and argues that everybody should be using it. You should be aware, however, that using it may put you on the NSA’s watch list.
In 2007, YouTube’s future wasn’t looking too rosy: media giant Viacom was suing its new owner, Google, for $1 billion in damages for alleged copyright infringement. Viacom had a point: as the Wall Street Journal reported back in 2006, many of the top-viewed videos on the site involved “some type of copyright infringement”. These days, of course, YouTube generates huge amounts of cash for copyright owners.
Christopher Poole, aka moot, is best known as the creator of controversial image board 4Chan, but in 2011 he amassed a reported $625,000 in funding to create a new online service called Canvas. The site was described as a PG-rated 4Chan, a place to create and share memes using its built-in image sharing tools. Canvas spawned DrawQuest, an online illustration app, but Poole ran out of money and closed both sites earlier this year.
Facemash was Hot or Not for Harvard students. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive,” wrote its creator, adding later “I’m a jerk for creating this site.” The site was shut down and accused of copyright violation, breaching security and violating people’s privacy, but its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, went on to invent Facebook.
See related stories from techradar.com