Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich himself off of content that people were already sharing? There's a lot of retcon-ing those like him, Ross Ulbricht, etc as freedom fighters, when the truth is they were simply capitalists.

View on HN

Kim Dotcom is simply a career criminal, settling on piracy after having previously been convicted of trafficking in stolen phone calling cards and embezzlement. He simply figured out a crime that is socially more accepted than what he engaged in previously, but it was always about the money for him.

Know any decent computer nerds in the 80s/90s that weren’t at least dabbling in that stuff?

Hell there was a whole monthly meeting and magazine dedicated to that sort of behavior. Criminal? Yes. Part of hacker culture? Also yes.

Too bad Mr Goldstein lost all credibility (that he may or may not have had) when he started shaming folks for not taking the clot shot.

>Know any decent computer nerds in the 80s/90s that weren’t at least dabbling in that stuff?

I mean, if your definition of decent requires you to be a fraud and a conman, then no.

---

My father, while he certainly pirated a lot of software back in the 90s, wasn't stealing any phone cards, or doing any embezzlement. Presumably, that makes him not decent with computers.

I betcha he was whistling 2600. How is that different?

It's hard to take you seriously if you can't tell the difference between making a copy of a disk, and embezzlement.

(You probably can tell the difference, because I doubt you think that the former should be a felony.)

> Know any decent computer nerds in the 80s/90s that weren’t at least dabbling in that stuff?

Off the top of my head, Cliff Stoll did some pretty hackerish stuff on the right side of the law.

Dabbling, sure. But Kim was never a dabbler. He chose to go for ALL the money and the money only, everytime.

Many people seem to forget or not know that all along his career he went ripping off fellow nerds and hackers left and right for his personal gain. He spied on them on his BBS, stole their secrets, defrauded them, ridiculed them, even tipped them off to law enforcement when it was beneficial to him. He proudly admitted to doing all of this in german interviews.

Kim and his endeavours are undoubtedly part of hacking history, but he himself was never part of the culture. He couldn't give a rat's ass about the culture if it weren't to build his legend and bedazzle his followers. All he really ever wanted was cold hard cash, Rolexes and cars.

Now come again about Goldstein?

I know zero decent people, computer nerds or not, who engaged in embezzlement. A number of people dabbled in stealing phone services, and some of them probably made some money reselling them, but not to the tune of 60,000 euros — that's definitely career criminal territory.

And, much as it may surprise you, large numbers of "computer nerds" did NOT engage in any unlawful activities.

But your mention of "clot shot" certainly clarifies why you would be simping for a low life POS like Dotcom.

So I remember sharing a file to my brother and "uploading" it over very slow DSL at the time (I think I was getting 100kbps a second or something). The file was copyrighted, a TV show, Supernatural, or something like that. Anyway, the upload was instant. Apparently Megaupload would do a quick hash of the file (not sure if it was in browser or probably more likely the first 100k bits or something of the file), and if it was a file that was already on their servers, they would just make a new download link for it, and the "upload" would finish. Links would be taken down by DMCA notices from forums and other file sharing sites (back then you could get good money making affiliate links and such, so people did a lot of their own uploading). But your private links and links you didn't share would remain. The files remained.

The fact that they did the hashing thing and kept the files locally really, incontrovertibly, proved they weren't deleting the files themselves when a notice went out. And that they were aware the hashed file was given a DMCA notice. This one little thing, probably to save bandwidth (and convivence for the end user of course; though outside of Linux ISOs there's little question what kind of files people are sharing), screwed him.

Anyway, #freeRossUlbricht (Yes I know he tried to make a hit out and a lot of people died from drugs he enabled to be sold, but the hit never happened and the drug users were consenting adults.) A life sentence is insane. 20 years? OK. Life? Heck he rejected a plea deal that would've given him 10... bet he regrets that now.

Getting a DMCA for one user's copy of a file doesn't mean every other user's copy is violating copyright. And that's not a theoretical concern, I remember a recent tweet about google drive having false positives in that exact way.

That's an interesting argument but the hash for an "infringing file" would be universal across all copies of said file, since presumably the DMCA striker would be claiming the file as infringing. I doubt a jury would buy it.

They can claim that a file is infringing everywhere it exists but they'd often be wrong and I don't think inherently infringing files are a valid way to interpret copyright.

"Better safe than sorry" is certainly, uh, safer. But I don't know if you can really say the DMCA requires it.

Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by hosting pirated tv episodes. But one was started by ex-Paypal founders and the other bootstrapped (MegaUpload).

Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated they fell afoul of the law by stringently going after child pornographers and a court decided they can do that then they could do the same for piracy. So, they followed the law but, in their case, now the law is something entirely different and unexpected.

>>> Youtube became popular over similar sites (like Vimeo) by hosting pirated tv episodes.

+10x Twitch. I still remember JustinTV ..

>>>> Worse, while MegaUpload followed the letter of the law by doing removals of content that was reported as pirated

Could you please elaborate ? The implication is that other similar sites were not removing child pornography or similar ?

Not 100% sure what your first line means so apologies if I'm telling you something you already know but just want to point out that Twitch is JustinTV. They just rebranded the gaming section of the original site.

No need to apologize. To clarify. I remember when JustinTV was basically 100% illegal (copyrighted) content.

That's how the service that we now know as Twitch built its resilient infra: battle tested with a bunch of teens broadcasting random stuff. No one batted an eye . So i was using JustinTV (Twitch) as an example of piracy that was overlooked, because because someone big had invested in it.

They (mega) may have started to do this, but for several years I used to come across saved text files with lists of of mega links on most pedophiles computers. A different unit in the police sometimes checked the links and anecdotally they still (months after seizure) were valid and contained Child Exploitation Material (CEM). Often the same material stored on the device that I was wading thru. (insert cannot unsee meme) I am not talking about fakes, I'm talking about photographic documentation of the worst abuse held by offenders either as memories or currency. So when Mega came under fire I didn't really care that if came from the "copyright" end. I understand that Mega faced a large task to address this. Not simple. But the fact that CEM was hard for them to sort from the large corpus of "pirated" material seemed like a feature, not a bug. A least from a site design perspective. Selfishly, my sympathy is low in this case. Motivated by my own secondary exposure to some horrible shit as a result of the legal process.

that's hardcore

> Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich himself

You could ask the same question about the Hollywood studios that were built on evading patents.

What he did was clearly illegal - because the studios make the laws.

> Was he trying to stick it to the man, or find a way to enrich himself

Why not both?

Yeah, large scale copyright theft for profit is something that you're only allowed to do if your name is "Sam Altman".

I'd go with "Anarcho-capitalist."

Which of course explains their allure and the desire to retroactively improve their origin stories. They stand precisely in the face of what the OP himself retroactively considers.

> "I think it's clear for everybody that one cannot get away with this kind of stuff, once governments get involved."

Which is the mantra of the bullied. As if we aren't the government. When precisely did we all decide that copyright should exist for a term of life PLUS 70 years? The government does not seek our permission when applying these laws to us yet we have to implicitly sacrifice our freedoms in order to blithely comply with it?

And we all know that the problems with these individuals is not that they committed these crimes, it's that they explicitly called into question this very authority in the first place. That the government then uses this as further justification to destroy these individuals lives, permanently destroy their liberty, and broadcast a chilling effect over anyone who would ever attempt to improve these policies is what inspires people to lionize these figures.

I think if we’re having an honest argument this has nothing to do with copyright protection being 70 years.

I’d be willing to bet a massive amount of money that most pirated media is less than a few years old.

I don’t believe that we as a society are ever going to decide that copyright protection should be less than that.

It seems to me you are missing the forest for the tree here.

A society where we have open, legal access to all the cultural pieces of the last century is very different from our own. And it seems difficult to know how it would affect both the consumption, but also the creation of media.

Sometimes, when I argue about this IRL, I'm told that we are practically there because of piracy. But this is a debate of tech enthusiasts, we know how to download, we now how not to get caught. The majority does not

I've recently been pirating 30 and 40 year old games. It's pure insanity that it still counts as piracy.

You can fight for freedom while being a capitalist. In fact, you can fight for freedom with capitalism.

Only when you are not stepping on the toes of bigger capitalists.

If there were no copyright capitalists would find a way to invent it, so nah. Infringing copyright is just robber baron stuff from a capitalist perspective. A profiteer, maybe, but not a capitalist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com