I came across this entry titled RSS Hijacking? A threat to podcast and blogging infrastructure? which brought up an interesting issue. Of course, I was too late, and eWeek wrote some crappy story about it titled Podcast Hijacked, Held for Ransom.
I say “crappy story” because it has these two bits:
Those who posted responses to Vogele’s Weblog entry on the matter suggested other defensive strategies. One is to rename Podcast audio files on occasion and point to the new names in the legitimate RSS feed, thus causing the malicious site’s RSS feed to stop working and hence to cease gaining popularity.
Another tactic is to look at the referrer’s tags for Podcast downloads in a Podcaster’s Web server logs. Names of malicious sites that point to a Podcast will come up in the logs, and a large number of off-site listener referrals should raise flags.
Which I think are both bad ideas, and won’t work. I explained why in my comments on the original post. (Sorry, can’t point you directly to my comments, as the pages comment permalinks are broken.)
And I remember saying last year that the whole “podkeyword” idea was a bad idea, and always remember folks, try to be in control of your URI‘s, all the cool kids are doing it.