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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

We're lucky that some people are fine with becoming an unwilling partner since without them no internet, no phone, no email, no snail mail, no roads, no electricity, no open source software, no nothing. It's a sad fact of life that pretty much every useful technology, service or piece of infrastructure will be used for illegal dealings of some kind.

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It's a matter of proportion to me. If a service is used predominantly to facilitate illegality then I see no reason to continue to run it.

The internet, phones, email, regular mail, roads, electricity, software and on on have predominantly good and productive uses. File sharing websites attract percentage wise more bad than good, at least more bad than what I'm comfortable with.

So in the end that's a moral call and in this case my decision was to shut it down because of the types of crimes involved and the number of criminals on the service totally outnumbered the 'good guys' and our ability to deal with the assholes was limited.

> If a service is used predominantly to facilitate illegality

I guess we should all stop using cash, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency

It's obvious that you're trolling, but just in case you're not: Eventually you can expect a push against cash in the name of anti-terrorism and anti-crime campaigns. Obviously those will be founded in bull-shit but that's not going to stop it from happening. Whether or not it will succeed is mostly a matter of how it gets sold to the public.

As for how it is possible for all of the available currency to be contaminated with traces of drugs and yet that this does not need to prove that all (or even a majority) of the cash transactions done are drug related, I'm sure you're smart enough to figure that one out for yourself, but evidence such as this will figure prominently in the kind of discussion that will visit us some years into the future.

False analogy. Creating a file upload service with no authentication or no resources to keep it safe is like installing a fully loaded AK 47 at an intersection and hoping people would just use it to learn how it works or use in an emergency to shoot at criminals passing that intersection.

There are free file upload services and there are ways to upload from command line(1).

[1] https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader

You cannot compare bytes on a disk with a gun. People don't die from transferring data.

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