Slyck.com

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Slyck.com is a popular website dedicated to file sharing. It offers news, reviews, and opinion, and has very active user forums. The site tracks the latest versions of file sharing clients and network traffic.

Slyck began operations as Slyway.com during the early summer months of 2000. During this time, Slyck was an aggregate news site with some original content. It was also unique in that it had well written guides to the most popular file-sharing resources at the time. These included Napster, iMesh, Scour, Usenet and IRC.

While all other file-sharing sites at the time served as aggregate news sites, Slyway began writing its own news articles. This became the primary responsibility of their chief news writer, Thomas Mennecke. Slyck.com would become the first site dedicated to P2P and file-sharing with original news.

A year after Slyway opened, it was renamed Slyck.com.

As Slyck.com evolved, it began to receive greater recognition as an important news resource. In 2004, the New Scientist described it as a "popular file sharing news site".^[1] Slyck would often have interviews with notable individuals such as Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon)^[2], Michael Weiss of StreamCast^[3], Nir Arbel of SoulSeek^[4] or Pablo Soto of Optisoft^[5]. In 2003, Slyck became the only news source to ever interview Kevin Hearn of WinMX.^[6]^[7] It gained some fame for interviewing Dean Garfield of the MPAA in 2005.^[8] The 2007 Slyck interview^[9] with Muslix64, the hacker who first circumvented the AACS protection scheme for HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs, was cited by the BBC^[10], the Electronic Frontier Foundation^[11] and InformationWeek^[12].

Slyck remains an important information resource and has become the leading file-sharing/P2P news site. With its ability to understand the unique file-sharing culture, Slyck has gained a reputation for accuracy that mainstream media sites fail to obtain. While Slyck has gained a reputation for accuracy within certain circles, there is no visible editorial policy which could ensure that Slyck does develop into a more credible news website.

According to Alexa Internet, Slyck has been surpassed in the number of web page views by both Zeropaid.com and TorrentFreak.com since about 2007.^[13]

Since the departure of staff member Drew Wilson (a.k.a. IceCube), who moved to writing news for Zeropaid.com in January 2008,^[14], Mennecke has been the only news writer.