MobiTV Tries To Shutdown HowardForums Over Their Own Laziness
I became a member of HowardForums.com nearly 4 years ago, and am still a very active member. I learned most of what I know about mobile phones from there, and I’m a big believer that it’s important to remember your roots.
Here’s the quick rundown - Someone found a link on the Sprint forums showing how to get MobiTV for free. They posted it on HowardForums, along with instructions on how to use it. It’s a direct link to a file which you can view in Internet Explorer or other browser to see the direct links to all the MobiTV channels. Note that there’s not a shred of security around this file. No password, no device check, it’s just right there. Kinda like the link to any of the images on this and every website. Freely available.
MobiTV is requesting Howard Chui to remove the thread/instructions, claiming that they are hacked files. Direct quote from MobiTV representative, “As I mentioned before, these are not publicly available links. Nowhere on Mobitv.com are any of these available. It takes a hacker and debugging by your users to get this information.” So….protecting these links is basically the only thing keeping MobiTV from being a freely available service, and yet they’ve merely attempted to hide the URL to the file containing them? No security other than that?
You can voice your opinions to MobiTV’s lead council, below, but also make sure to use this link to Digg this story.
Josh Andrews
Corporate Counsel
6425 Christie Avenue, 5th Floor, Emeryville, CA 94608
phone 510.450.5279 mobile 415.971.1886
fax 510.868.6412 email jandrews@mobitv.com
web www.mobitv.com
This is completely ridiculous, that a company who obviously can’t secure their own content is threatening to take down one of the largest most helpful mobile phone forums on the net. A quick Google search shows that HowardForums was not the first, and is certainly not the only site with this information currently up. Likely he’s just smaller than the others.
Thanks for this post!!! All of us appreciate it.
thanks for posting this.
What a very sad situation. I have been using Howard forum for years and can see no harm in someone else putting a link on it which opens the access to an other site.
To make use of that site and its contents must require a security pass word. If that is not in place, then the host site is at fault, or am I wrong.