Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload 2.0 Will Utilize Blockchain Technology | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload 2.0 Will Utilize Blockchain Technology

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96 pointsPolBaladas22 comments

There is an interesting pattern developing lately. From the numerous examples: Lavabit relaunch now requires name/personal details on signing up for the email.

Now the Megaupload 2.0 will add an exact record to their service.

How are all these services that praised anonymity now requiring less of it?

At the end of the day they have to cover their ass. So they are doing things that if they end up in court, they can use to defend themselves.

Lavabit now accepts Bitcoin and requires no personal information. I just signed up without supplying a name or address and using Bitcoin.

[edit] Also worth noting that I signed up using the Tor Browser Bundle and that there was no issue, no captchas etc.

Also Signal (at least on android) requires access to a bunch of permissions as well as your phone number. Not sure why everyone is so hyped on Signal.

Yet another investment scam from a lifetime fraudster. Isn't he due to change his last name again?

Hopefully his undeserved Robin-Hood glamour from government-troubles has faded by now.

I don't know, Megaupload and mega.co.nz are and were legitimate products and services. Surely a fraudster who was after investment scams wouldn't actually deliver products?

One of the few advertised products he's ever delivered, really. There's a decent writeup [0] for some of his past run-ins with the law and crazy claims. Come to think of it, there are some Trumpesque parallels.

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/kim-dotcom/

Sounds to me like he's providing a service that enables people to get around the government-backed scams of never ending copyrights. When the copyright's about to expire, the U.S. govt bullies other govts into signing another treaty extending the time period.

Didn't he already create a Megaupload successor, i.e. mega.co.nz?

Yes, but he resigned in 2013 (the same year MEGA was launched) in order to focus on his political career[0]. Bill Liu, who had some control over MEGA, was arrested in November, a couple of months ago[1].

[0]: http://geeksnack.com/mega-founder-reveals-bill-liu-5th-most-...

[1]: http://i.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-news/national-news/86407...

tldr; He has his own implementation of lightning network called "bitcache" and plans to use it as a payment method on his file sharing system. This seems more like a marketing piece for megaupload 2 than it does an interesting article on technology use.

sia coin will encrypt your data before upload and it's totally blockchain—based.

http://sia.tech/

Not open source like Storj. I hate nodejs but I'm not running a proprietary binary on something so important for my privacy and security.

Sia is 100% open source: https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia

He made $300,000,000.00 off MegaUpload off the backs of actual content creators. He knowingly and willingly broke the law. He's scum and he deserves to rot in jail.

</UnpopularOpinion>

It's an unpopular opinion because it's childishly simplistic.

You could say the same thing about the internet providers, where streaming media of copyrighted content consists of the majority of their traffic.

The providers do not know what streams are valid or invalid, and we do not want them to have the ability or right to monitor all of our internet traffic to determine that.

They know that many of their users are likely streaming or downloading media from sources that do not compensate the content creators. But they also know that if they start identifying that, then they'll start being liable.

Kim Dotcom was in the same situation. He knew that people on his platform were likely using it for file storage of files they didn't own the distribution rights to or own a license to have a personal copy of.

He was legally been unable to start going through those and removing access (unless reported through a DMCA-like-mechanism) because then he would be moderating his platform and that opens him up to liability if his moderation tactics are not 100% effective.

Safe Harbor provisions are important and he was trying to keep them in place for his service.

Sad part is for people who used it extensively for legitimate purposes and lost important data. Even businesses.

I have never heard of a business using Mega.

I used it all the time to send, host files for clients

People stored important data, they used megaupload as a "liable" service, not as a toy file sharing for unpaid stuff.

The fact that it was raided and destroyed without a warning made these customer backup disappear overnight.

You had me right up until you claimed Dotcom was in the same situation. They (kim and his mega employees) knew they were hosting infringing content and intentionally did everything they could to avoid removing it. For instance, one common tactic was deleting referring URLs to content without deleting the actual files so that it would be easy for users to just create a new link to the file without having to re-upload it.

THAT isn't just innocent "we don't want to know", that's intentionally infringing. I have absolutely no love for the MAFIAA and their ilk, but let's not pretend Dotcom was some sort of martyr.

A fairly insightful article on the whole affair: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/us-unveils-the-ca...

Read this: http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/1/9436735/megaupload-prosecu...

And this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/us-unveils-the-ca...

And if you're feeling feisty: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-edva/legacy...

What Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload purposefully and willfully schemed to accomplish is in no way comparable to to ISPs. And saying as such is anything but childish.

Users were paid for having files that were frequently downloaded. Some of those users were hit with repeated DMCA takedowns. What do you think happens to a repeat offender on DMCA? Do they get their account shutdown? Nope! They get rewarded with a bigger stash to upload more files.

MegaUpload had many identical files uploaded by many different users. These files were stored as a single file on the server. With each uploader having a unique link to that file. DMCA takedown requests would come in for many of those links. Which MegaUpload would do. However they would leave the file online and in tact with hundreds of other links to the same known to be infringing file. Which makes it effectively impossible to have anything removed.

Read the e-mails. They're beyond damning.

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