Megaupload is down D:

Danarchy said:

I actually didn't know that Megaupload paid musicians and the like. This makes this even more fucked up. Obviously this is just the RIAA trying to eliminate the competition.

I'm vaguely aware of some arrangement that allowed premium members to earn money from downloads but can't recall the details. It'd make sense for an independent artist if they're receiving 90% of the income stream, instead of 5-10% of nothing until sales exceed the publisher's indemnity.

DooMAD said:

Just seen this posted on Facebook, not sure how accurate it is:
- FilePost - Deleting all material (so will leave executables, pdfs, txts)

Well, this leaves a loophole for self-extracting executables, embedded content, and plain old steganography. Of course, such schemes would have to provide deniable encryption.

Danarchy said:

I actually didn't know that Megaupload paid musicians and the like. This makes this even more fucked up. Obviously this is just the RIAA trying to eliminate the competition.

Certainly starting to look that way. Check out this article from december:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2011/111221airvinyl

DooMAD said:

Certainly starting to look that way. Check out this article from december:

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2011/111221airvinyl

Oh shit.

Aww man I just checked and he has dropped to #2 on the FFA leaderboard.

If nothing else, let him go so he can reclaim his title. Though I don't know why he didn't just hire a pro CoD player to keep him at the top.

TBH, I never understood how "file sharing" sites managed to survive that long or at least being given so much (apparent) leeway only to be cracked down upon literally out of the blue.

Technically, they are nothing more than plain old HTTP downloads, which were the very first form of distributing warez back in the early days of the internet (by part of not-so-smart warezers, may I add), which was easily tracked and stimulated the creation of Napster, Gnutella and all other file-sharing protocols by the end of the 90s.

So exactly where is the surprise here? That they busted sites which had open and free http downloads of warez, and which were cross-linked and referenced from all over the place? Hell, they managed to crack much more obscure stuff like torrents (also weak because of public trackers) and Gnutella/Kad nodes, so technical expertise was not an issue. If anything, the real question is why it took them so long to do anything.

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Dotcom...

HavoX said:

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Dotcom...

That tank is awesome :-)

Back in the day I used to have a free website on gamespy servers. I abused the hell out of it as my vacation ahrd drive. If I was ever at a school, hotel or something without my music and games they were on this site. Well apparently a lot of people found out about it. The site lasted maybe 10 years.

I actually got busted for it 5 years ago and they froze all of the files on it. Froze... but never deleted. I tried deleting them thinking oh shit I'm going to jail! But my permission to delete the files was not permitted... just those files nothing else. One of my friends ended up working for Gamespy and he said my site output 150 - 200 GB per month. I can only imagine what that cost Gamespy considering I never put up any of their ads.