PODJACKING

Allison Geiger of ClubVeg forwarded this to me, and it was the first I'd heard of the phenomenon. But it seems seminal vegan podcaster Erik Marcus is a high-profile victim of a new practice of hijacking RSS feeds by seeding them in different directories with a go-between URL. The users don't notice the difference but the hijacker can, once the listener base is built up, extort the podcaster on the threat of closing down all the bogus subscriptions. Check it out, and if you have an RSS feed, make sure it's correctly represented in all the major directories.