After apparent threats of ISP hassling and cease & desist litigation, all is now good between community resource HowardForums and mobile TV provider MobiTV.  As we reported on Friday, the streaming TV company - which is behind Sprint’s cellphone TV service - took issue with posters on HowardForums discussing how lax security (i.e. unsecured feed urls saved in a basic text file and visible to anybody curious enough to look) meant people could bypass carrier subscriptions and view the MobiTV content free.  However, Howard Chui and MobiTV president Paul Scanlan have apparently talked and all is good again:

Howard, great catching up today. Again, we’re big fans of the sight and our intention was never to bring your entire sight down or to “censor the Internet” like we’re being accused. The irony is that is quite the opposite type of company we are and as one of the leaders in new media, we couldn’t be more supportive of the rights of sights like yours. Please know that our first priority is always to fix any security issues with our system and we’re doing that. Additionally, we also have a responsibility to our content and carrier partners to reduce the impact of any breaches to the system once they occur and that was really the basis for the correspondence you had with our legal team.

I look forward to continuing to find interesting and vibrant insights from HowardForums.

Best regards,
Paul Scanlan
Cofounder, President

While Scanlan is insistent that pulling the plug on HowardForums was never an option, it’s something he might want to discuss with his legal team; they seem a little more rabid than he does about chasing down information about the company’s poor security.  In an email to Howard Chui, they stated:

The url “qtv.mobitv.com/sprintTVlive.mcd” is not publicly available, nor is it posted anywhere on our website for viewers to access. The only way to access the links is through this url, and the only way to obtain this url is through hacking/debugging.

“Anyone with a computer can view the file” - Actually, only people who have access to this url that was obtained in violation of our IP rights (hacking is a violation) can view it.

We are going to contact ICANN as well as your host to resolve this matter if you refuse to remove these threads. Please confirm by the end of business today (Pacific time) that you have complied.

If, then, as Scanlan says, MobiTV was simultaneously taking security as their “first priority” and making the feeds visible only to subscribers, it looks like the company legal team was more interested in preventing anybody from finding out how rubbish those provisions were in the first place.  “Reduce the impact of any breaches” would seem to mean “don’t let potential customers find out we messed up.”

Still, we’re happy that the dispute is resolved, and that HowardForums are still online.