TehSkeen Returns - Sort Of ...

Brakken has returned and is certainly giving some out towards some sites and to be fair its a damn good read.

Welcome to my new personal "scene" blog. With the closing of TehSkeen, one of the Internet's most unbiased, uncensored, independent news and development sources I've been left with a yearning for something to write about. If you've been around for the last three years you are probably aware of the rise and fall of my activities and the aggressors that tried to keep me down. Unfortunately, TehSkeen had to close and these "other" entities are still flourishing. Although, I find it ironic that an honest site had to close while others whom feed off of the talented authors in the various homebrew console development scenes flourish.

My new blog will retain TehSkeen's name, but you won't find scene news here. What you will find is my personal opinions on various political developments in the scene and the reporting of dubious activities that these "other" scene sites participate in to fill their own pockets at the communities expense.

You may recall my Anti-PS2NFO site humbly named "PS2BANZ". In good faith that things would get better I took the page down. At the time I believed this was a right course of action. If I was going to be running my own scene news site I wanted to distance myself from the trouble the page stirred up to clear TehSkeen's name of any actions that were taking place due to the page. Even though I was taking an unbiased stance on both pages I believed that running an anti-PS2NFO site and a scene site would cause the public to be confused.

If you weren't around to see the pre-mentioned page I will briefly explain it's purpose. PS2NFO, now calling themselves PS3NEWS (the name change was to try to wash their bad image down the drain) is a self proclaimed scene site that feeds off of the work of others. After analyzing their business model I aggressively monitored and reported on their various activities including, but not limited to censoring forum posts, blatantly plagiarizing other peoples work, removing the authors credits and legal documentation from homebrew releases and replacing them with their own unwarranted website address and name.

As you can tell those are some pretty harsh accusations, but I had screen shots, binary dumps and authors of the stolen programs to back me up. Sadly, Mr. Serafin, the owner of PS2NFO hired a lawyer who drafted a letter stating I was violating his clients rights by using his sites name, likeness and images without permission. Other then using the images, which I believed were covered under the Fair Use Act (title 17, U. S. Code) I was doing nothing illegal, but my web hosting company (the same one I'm using now) was frankly scared to defend it's own customer and sided with Mr. Serafin. After this happened I moved the page to a Russian hosting company who in all reality deleted the correspondence that PS2NFO, Maxconsole and PS2-SCENE were sending to them (I'll get to the other mentioned pages here shortly).

So here I am three years later. Running my own scene news site for two years led me to learn a lot about the internal politics and helped me forge valuable relationships with fellow site owners, homebrew coders and console hackers. During this time, as I've stated already, various scene sites that use the public lack of awareness to profit have flourished. This sickens me. My new blog will be dedicated to revealing, to the best of my knowledge, the truth about these various sites. Don't expect any fancy screen shots to back up my claims, but what you should expect from me is my honesty and what you should expect from yourself is to keep an open mind with your eyes wide open.