Kim Dotcom’s Mega goes online at Mega.co.nz
mega.co.nz
mega.co.nz
> Unfortunately, we can't work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user-generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process.
This is simply false. Legitimate non-infringing websites have been seized by the U.S. justice department without due process.[1] There is a reason to have due process and innocent until proven guilty; the reason is that otherwise power is abused by those with the power.
[1] http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120505dajaz1
What this has to do with the meat of the comment you're responding to, I'm less sure of; that comment was useful in that it corrects an extremely common misconception about the DMCA (that if you simply have a process to honor takedown requests, you're a service provider immune to prosecution).
Regardless of your opinion about copyright or the DMCA, it remains an under-appreciated fact that if you do the things Kim Schmitz was discovered to have done (it's spelled out explicitly in the Mega emails), you're violating the DMCA whether or not you honor takedowns; further, you're not simply committing individual infractions by doing so, but instead (potentially) forfeiting all your protections as a service provider under the DMCA.
For one thing, its application is much less capricious than the echo-chamber would like you to believe; there's a cascading availability bias at play, because it's hard for Techdirt and Torrentfreak to drive page views with stories about sites that play by the rules and don't have a problem with takedowns. You only hear about the dramatic cases, but the fact is that the boring cases are much more common.
For another, regardless of whether you can be taken down by accident or malice when you follow the rules, you will, if you're popular, be taken down, sued, and potentially prosecuted if you run a site the way Kim Schmitz ran his.
I'm less interesting in refuting you or any other commenter on this thread than I am in being clear about what the situation is. There is a widespread belief on HN that the takedown of Megaupload was unlawful because Kim Schmitz and his team responded to takedowns. Whatever technical or even Constitutional issues may or may not have tainted the case against Megaupload, we now know that Megaupload was in fact a conspiracy to evade copyright law.
We can dispute the legitimacy of the prosecution, but it's no longer possible to credibly dispute the underlying facts. And, back to this thread: those facts are instructive. There is more to US copyright law for service providers than accepting takedown requests.
What happened to that website was an exception, not the rule.
On your second point, the evidence was so overwhelming clear on MU being a criminal enterprise, that when combined with KimDotCom's long criminal history, it was quite clear what was going on.
http://static.kim.com/mega/release/css/index.css?v=8
http://static.kim.com/mega/release/js/main.js?v=8
I wonder how long the "kim.com" domain will last?
For me this is the most important bit of the website. That bit demonstrates the dedication of building something that will be very hard to shut down.
If you combine this with the VPN tunneling at the backend to obfuscate parties for the final host and content (similar to what piratebay did a month ago according to the news)- it has the potential to become very powerful and take a good share of torrents traffic.
That pesky browser thing never could do anything of value. Umm...Dah... What a joke! It's all "boondoggle"!
It unquestionably couldn't ever be used to build "apps" [1].
Certainly could never ever be fast enough [2].
Obviously cannot ever possibly utilise multiple cores [3].
Most definitely never ever could do 3D [4].
So, you're right, I doubt it will ever do crypto [5].
Those fools might even consider "Online Banking" or something crazy like that!
When will those stupid browser idiots learn?
[1] http://facebook.com, http://gmail.com, http://twitter.com, etc.
[2] http://arewefastyet.com - http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/
[3] http://w3.org/TR/workers - http://chromium.org/developers/design-documents
[4] http://khronos.org/webgl - http://chromeexperiments.com/webgl - http://ro.me
Hopefully the Government hasn't tried to put a backdoor in it, but I assume that would be discovered pretty quickly.
We can dream though, can't we?
If you have an SHA hash as part of the request url and you can trust the SHA hash calculator to verify the authenticity of the final file then you can trust the whole encryption layer to return whatever data it wants because hash verify will refuse tampered servers.
The trick is to ensure the hash calculator is 100% untampered. For the more paranoid people this means using command line hash calculator for this just as it's used for linux distro .iso files etc.
September did never end uh?
Assange is still chill-banging. Sipping Aguardiente. Schmoozing Ecuadorian diplomats. Yelling shit about the commander-in-chief out from the balcony to the glassy-eyed press [1].
As for Mr. DotCom, don't hold your breath. NZ is still busy kissing his arse [2].
[1] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/julian-assange-labels...
Although Kim has become a bit of a celebrity in NZ now, he's even looking at funding a program to bring free fibre optic to NZ. ( http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7904696/Dot... ) So the government may not do something too hasty as it would cause a large amount of public backlash.
"Make us an offer. We prefer unmetered fixed monthly payments."
Right. And I want a flying Llama that poops gold bars.
Unmetered != unlimited.
There's still going to be a maximum capacity for the connection, and for unmetered connections that's the basis used to price it.
For anyone missing it, "mega.co.nz" -> Mega Conz -> Mega Cons:
then i realization sunk in.
I've read about people trying to get their files back off the servers and all the other hoo-ha going on, and have nothing against people trying to do that or using the excuse that it was their main backup... just seems extremely silly to rely on it form my point of view. It's not possible to rely on Google, for fear of them shutting down your account for some violation or T&Cs (and no recourse for appeals), so to rely on these kinds of companies...
Not sure why I got down votes for a genuine question.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme and http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt
You could try OpenDNS or "8.8.8.8" or something.
If you choose to change, please be aware of the implications.
Thanks.
Some
Enquire
None
Ever
Tell
Imagine some kind of worldwide system, without a central server and dedicated administrator, distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another.
In your dreams!
Because if people did, anti-piracy companies would start paying attention to it. Therfore making it way more expensive to run Usenet servers and expose users to legal risk.
It's success depends on its relative obscurity.
You have to provide a credit card to use Usenet (unless you use bitcoins). Making it easy to be targeted.
Torrents "done properly" can be completely anonymous for everyone involved and still free.
So I don't agree that the problem was completely solved by Usenet. Despite being a happy Usenet + NZBmatrix user (oops broke the rule :p).
Which does nothing but say you accessed the server- not what for. Furthermore, the better providers don't keep logs.