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Comment by feralchimp | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong, Walter.

On the other hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker community is the prevalence of "see I told you so" and/or "bad things wouldn't happen to you if you weren't such a dumbass" culture.

The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching Moment.

The safety deposit box example is apt here. If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our government in that case?

And if we're not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our realistic options for doing something about that?

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The Libertarian community has been on top pf this sort of thing for decades and would surely be able to offer a lot of "see I told you so" as well. Remember that analogy about how people said SOPA provisions were like shutting down the Ritz Carlton because occasionally politicians cheated on their wives there? Take away a few layers of class, and there have been some motels that the government has seized (or tried to sieze) because occasionally tenants would do drug deals there.

A handy article on the topic that was easy for me to find: http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/...

In short, don't hold your breath waiting for your data to come back.

> The Libertarian community

Note for the future: This adds no value to your comment, and makes you look like you're trying to spin this story in someway to benefit your political alignment.

It's a shout-out to the parent poster's use of the phrase "the hacker community" and its own attendant "I-told-you-so"-ism (which I'm pretty sure is construed as a negative). It's a community I personally completely identify with but I've read some of their work and respect certain parts of it. Here, let me write a 50-page essay on the minutae of my political views, that'll be real interesting reading for the HN people.

cut me some slack, jack.

somehow i dropped the words 'not' out of 'a community i personally completely identify with'. I blame acute lack of caffeine. my shipment of Tonx coffee was delayed 2 days on account of MLK day and the local postal worker.

my apologies.

Gee, maybe that's because some "political alignments" are substantially better than others when it comes to this sort of issue.

I would have just pointed out that the phrase "Libertarian community" is an oxymoron, heh.

The cops at various levels do this kind of thing all the time. Let's say you shoot someone breaking into your house. Let's say it's a clean shoot - the guy was a serial killer (or whatever) and you're 100% inside the bounds of the law. The cops show up and take your gun. "We'll give it back after the investigation," they say.

Time stretches on. They investigate. The DA agrees it's a clean shoot and declines to file any charges. It's been 18 months. You ask for your gun back.

"No," they explain. And that's... all, pretty much. They have no legal right to keep it. They offer no explanation. You can always spend ten grand suing over an item worth less than $1000, but you won't and they know it.

So if you had files at Megaupload, even though (I think we agree) you have a perfect right to expect the feds to return your property, you probably shouldn't actually expect them to do so.

I don't get this. We're* quick to shoot down any arguments which equate online piracy to real world piracy, but when it's "our" files which are affected, we're quick to go back to the online-real world analogies.

*"We" might not include you, OP, so apologies. Not directed at you. Just noticing a trend.

Probably because we* have stupendously weaker protection of our data than pirated-content-providers, be it in the form of multiple backups or the quality of the hosting. When MegaUpload went down, I doubt any software companies lost their only copies of what they were building, or any music groups completely lost their albums. An Average User™ with files on MU though...

*"we" intentionally including non-tech-savvy people.

After the countless threads about this topic, I don't get how the distinction between copying bits and deprivation of property isn't clear. If the FBI mirrored megaupload's entire data store (ala piracy), none of those tweets would exist and most people wouldn't even be aware anything happened (since copying a sequence of ones and zeroes has no quantifiable impact on one's property). I'm not defending megaupload for copyright infringement, but your allusion to hypocrisy makes no sense since these people are being denied access to their legal IP.

If they don't have a copy of the file any more and their last copy is taken, it's quite a bit different than if the Feds made a copy of their files.

"If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit"

Except that you will probably not put your money in a bank that's widely known for being a drug dealers haven, will you?

I also am not a big fan of the "see I told you" attitude, but it seems to me that no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload.

Of course there is not guarantee that services like icloud or dropbox will never get shut down, but they do look much more reliable than megaupload..

no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload

How do we explain to sane, but non-internet-savvy, people what rules they should use to tell "safe" places to store their data from "unsafe" ones.

Megaupload took pains to not show infringing content on their home page and they did not provide a search engine that would return it. I'd ended up at the site several times and, though it set off a few of my red flags, I can't really explain why.

Simple.

File in two widely separated places: pretty safe

File in three widely separated places: safe

File in only one place, no matter where it is: unsafe

This is what I usually tell non-tech-savy people to do. "Remember to make backups" seems to be too abstract and thus they tend to procrastinate the "make backup" topic away.

"Copy your important stuff to at least one other place, be it an external hard disk, a USB-Stick, a DVD or an online storage service."

And then I usually configure Dropbox for them and show them how to use it. And I tell them not to put sensitive information like online banking PINs on there. And tell them that I can also show them a way to further secure the data with TrueCrypt.

But some are even resistant to this. I don't bother pushing them, because I know they will lose data at some point. When that happens I "told you so" them once and after having a good laugh at their dangling unmentionables I help them setting up backup/redundant storage.

A great answer...but to a slightly different question.

Which, I think, confirms my suspicion that with both financial institutions and websites it's probably impossible to explain to nonexperts how to judge their credibility.

As others have said, "widely known" is an awfully big assumption to be granting yourself with no argument. There is a wide gulf between a user expected to competently interact with a web front end, per the features and cost/benefit directly expressed by that front end, and a user who is expected to evaluate (on what basis, exactly?) the probability with which a given Company/Ownership is likely to be obliterated by fiat.

What's worse, HN readership is arguably an upper-crust-of-savvy environment for making that sort of appeal, but imagine:

- two weeks ago, someone offers HN readers $100 bets that megaupload will get raided / shuttered / data frozen in the next two weeks

- if you take the bet, and you win (megaupload raided), you get $200 back

- if megaupload doesn't get raided, you get $90 back (i.e. you pay as much for losing the bet as a megaupload user pays to access to service)

Do you honestly think more than 10% of HN readership would have taken the bet and tried to double their money? Or would the "smart money" (and again, some of the smartest money available on the internet) been on megaupload staying up and available?

You're right, my apologies for going overboard with a non-justified argument. When I succeed in looking further than my tech-savvy like-minded friends, I fall into the trap of thinking about other people about my age.

I don't know about you, but my facebook stream has been polluted with dozens of messages crying over what happened to megaupload (and not because they had there work uploaded on it), which (wrongly, I know admit) let me to think that everybody knew about megaupload shadiness.

Now as you and others rightly pointed out, I forgot about the rest, maybe the majority of people who used in a totally legal way.

Anyway, point taken !

I think you overestimate the "common" knowledge that Megupload is used for illegal file sharing. I can bet you that 90% of my parents' friends have no idea.

Except that you will probably not put your money in a bank that's widely known for being a drug dealers haven, will you?

Yes. No one would ever use Wells Fargo now, would they?

(If you didn't get the reference: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-d... )

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