Crashing the Waffles(.fm) Party
My prediction of it taking a week to replace Oink may have been a little hasty. As Waffles.fm has recently found out, running a giant torrent network isn’t as easy as it may seem. After launching yesterday, the site received a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which basically shut the whole thing down all night.
The respective IRC channels were abuzz with spectulation as to who would attack the site. Although this appears to be complete unsubstantiated, the prevailing theory was that a disgruntled partner in the project, who went off to start What.cd after some internal disagreements with Waffles, may have been behind the attacks.
Regardless, it appears that torrent sites are back to their old policies of being extremely careful about who gets invites. In the invite channel on IRC for Waffles anyone who “asks/begs” for an invite is immediately banned from the channel.
It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out. I wonder if any of these sites will try to move to an ad supported model to pay for their technology costs. If you think about the traffic Oink got with 170,000+ users, there is definitely an opportunity there. What is the best business model for an illegal torrent network?
