After a short hiatus; which included time in Mexico, where my internet connection was less than predictable, a stint of illness, that I brought back with me from Mexico(no, not caused by drinking the water), and a fried hard drive, I am back to posting regularly.
The first thing I would like to mention has to do with my fried hard drive. As you can see from the title of the post, I’m referencing a previous post Yahoo! Video — Mania_t_v **A Warning* from March 14th. In all seriousness, it is possible that there is no connection between my problems with the ManiaTV site and my crashed hard drive. So, I will just lay out a few facts and you can be the judge:
1. As stated in the previous post(please see link above), when navigating to ManiaTV’s site my browser and then my system both crashed.
2. As I already stated in a comment to the previous post, the search terms from which E-Life gets the highest click through rates are “maniatv” and various things such as “spyware”, “adware”, etc… Not really helping business any, but it is happening.
3. To go along with point 2 here are two results of such queries:
http://www.denverpost.com/sports/ci_4792210
“There’s also the issue of “video spam” in which people upload malicious files as video clips to the ManiaTV website, said ManiaTV chief operating officer Peter Haskins.
‘There’s not a lot of technology out there on the video front that can figure out what a video is,’ he said. ‘It’s a significant operational issue for a business like ManiaTV.'”
http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index.php?showtopic=99173
This is a forum entry where someone is apparently having problems with a hijacking program of some sort, that is taking them to ManiTV.
4. I have 1-3 machines running in my office at all times and while on vacation when there were 3 running including my server, the only one to go down was the machine that I was having the spyware problems with in relation to ManiaTV. The hard drive was completely thrashed…
Now, I haven’t completely ruled out the idea of simple hard drive failure, but from my experience with ManiaTV and the information I have been finding, I’m being lead to believe that I am not the only one that has seen such problems. And this was a continuation of the problems. If it is a problem with people uploading spyware to the site, what is being done to combat this? What is ManiaTV doing to combat this with the site over all? It would be very interesting to find out.
I believe that companies engaging in projects to bring different forms of media together on the net, are the future of the net. It would be a shame to see such efforts scared by spyware, adware and malware.
