More website wars: Ytmnd Vs Ebaum's World

At the start of this year, I wrote about an incident between Ytmnd and Ebaumsworld - long story short, after Ebaums hosted an animation created on Ytmnd a whole bunch of web communities desended upon Ebaumsworld (a site that has an, er, colourful past where image theft is concerned) and utterly mangled the site, forum and anything else they could get their hands on. I've always been fascinated by what happens when websites collide, and this one was no exception. You can see more about this controversial aspect of Ebaums here. All that over Lindsay Lohan - wow.

At any rate, it's all kicked off again - this time, over a pretty amazing recording of a telemarketing call where everything does not go according to plan. Despite the fact that the person who claims to have "created" this file (taken from their friend's Livejournal blog with permission, apparently - though I'm not sure how this translates into him having "created" it) only intended it to be used on his Ytmnd creation and a couple of other select sites, sure enough, it ended up on Ebaumsworld.

What I'm really interested in, is the legal status of this particular soundfile - it's obviously been lifted directly from a call and (as far as I'm aware), you'd need the permission of the "crazy old woman" to go public with it. So all this bellyaching could be for nothing if that's the case. Why is nothing ever straightfoward with these meme / humour sites?

The reaction so far? Well, I haven't seen any leet hax or DoS attempts, but I'm sure they won't be far behind. The last time I saw a site get mangled by a bumrush of visitors (some of whom had malicious intent and hacked the site repeatedly) was Eon8 - bizarrely, a site whose spreading popularity was partly achieved through mass pimpage via Ytmnd. Currently, Ytmnd Vs Ebaumsworld Part 2 has gone as far as massflooding the chatrooms and mangling the forums with hundreds upon hundreds of nonsensical posts. It seems to me people are trying to re-create the original "Lohan War", but it's just coming off as a poor-man's imitation. In addition, stuff like this really hurts the reputation of the Ytmnd site - I'm quite sure the owner of Ytmnd (Max Goldberg) doesn't need accusations stacking up against him regarding his "flunkies" hacking Ebaumsworld for the second time in a year. Seriously, what's so innovative about doing it all over again? Mind you, the name of this particular assault on Ebaumsworld is pretty inventive - Operation Telemarket Garden.

Anyway - one to keep an eye on because I have a feeling it's about to explode. Something big is planned for the 25th - it may well start off as a "forum raid", but (as happened last time) it will more than likely result in webhacks and (potentially) some serious damage done. Last time round, people were putting "how to hack" tutorials up on ytmnd - it's not beyond the realms of possibility to imagine more of the same tactics coming down the pipe.

Here's some of the inevitable Sound & Vision links for you to waste ten minutes of your Friday evening on:

The clip everyone's arguing over
Forums, Ruined
Chatroom, ruined
EBaums Vs Telemarketer Lady
The Situation Room
Join the Battle
Victory?

They're good, I guess.

But nothing beats Lohan.