It’s an incredibly simple concept. The meme is based on a bait and switch, whereby someone posts a hyperlink which allegedly provides content relevant to the current discussion, but in fact leads to the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead.

People who follow these links and end up viewing the song/video are said to have been “Rickrolled” and over the years millions of people have been fooled into doing so. However, those falling into the trap today are being met with something not nearly as entertaining and, if it’s even possible, something that is even more annoying.

Due to a copyright complaint, the original Rickroll video has been removed from YouTube.

Taking down a five-year-old video with tens of millions of views is strange enough, but it is far from clear why AVG Technologies – the people behind AVG Anti-Virus (?) – would want to do so at all.

Hopefully there has been some terrible mistake and everything will be sorted out soon. If not, the consequences could be unpredictable. The Rickroll meme started life on the notorious 4chan message board in 2007 and developed into a worldwide sensation from there, and as we all know that particular community is not known for its patience, nor lack of creativity when it comes to revenge tactics.

This is not the first time that the Rickroll video has been removed though. It was removed by YouTube in 2010 but reinstated shortly afterwards.

TorrentFreak contacted both AVG and Google-owned YouTube for comment and we’ll post their statements here when they arrive.

Update: After being blocked for 24 hours, the video is now back. We’re still waiting for an official explanation on what happened.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Although network congestion occurred “admittedly only a few times” the blame was leveled at a small handful of people using BitTorrent, Interestingly, bandwidth consumption wasn’t really the problem, it was excessive port usage.

“At this point you have to remember that we have a heap of bandwidth available. Some clients chomping through a lot of bandwidth isn’t a problem and running BitTorrent isn’t a problem per se,” said Codify’s David Connor.

The network operators decided that blocking the ports that BitTorrent uses wasn’t enough since they are easily changed, blocking the tracker URL was deemed insufficient and inspecting the traffic wouldn’t help since the main clients all use encryption. So a much more simple method was used.

“….we implemented certain, ahem, ‘interim countermeasures’,” wrote Connor. “We quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod from Jorke [Odolphi, Web Platform Architect Evangelist for Microsoft Australia] to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts.”

Microsoft also created a script which categorized WiFi users with a ‘naughty factor’, meaning those with the greatest number of active port mappings to distinct remote hosts were identified as BitTorrent users. The MAC addresses of the ‘most naughty’ users were blocked – around two dozen of them – and although some changed their MAC addresses and returned, they were identified again by their port usage.

For the 2010 event, users will now have to register their MAC addresses to access the WiFi network and will be allocated resources accordingly. Any problems with downloading movies and TV shows can be directed at the new BitTorrent Help Desk.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.