LeaseWeb: Statement on former client MegaUpload | Hacker News Reader

LeaseWeb: Statement on former client MegaUpload

blog.leaseweb.com

119 pointsHagelin30 comments

Expecting LeaseWeb to sit on these servers indefinitely without any communication with Kim is unreasonable. While what happened to MegaUpload is a travesty, expecting their hosting partners to share collateral cost/damages is unreasonable given their other obligations.

As stated in the other thread, I think what LeaseWeb has done is fine and Kim should reconsider his comments. In a similar situation, I doubt he would have done otherwise.

This is now one parties word against another's. Kim says he tried to contact them, they said he never did and sent him a notice.

Leaseweb kept the servers a year at their own cost, if the end result is bad PR from Kim, they should have just cleaned them right away. Alternatively, they could have coordinated a positive story for both parties.

So the local feds took 60 servers? Out of 690?

I can't tell from the 1HU front plate of a generic server what it's contents are. So maybe those were the only servers they could directly implicate in transmitting copyrighted stuff? But I'm not sure you can even make that distinction (load balancers, proxys, internal networking different from outside view, ..). The charges also included racketeering and other capital crimes, so I'd imagine they could have easily taken all of these servers on that charge alone.

Also, the way searches work here is that the people executing them are usually not involved in the actual investigation. They call it the executive arm for a reason. So they usually get a broad description of what to take (servers), and from whom (Megaupload) and then take everything they can find. Police here commonly confiscates displays when looking for hard disks.

Also, why did LeaseWeb not immediately re-assign after first non-payment? What was the bet here? That MegaUpload would be able to stave off capital charges on absolutely no capital at all (initially), spanning 5+ countries?

From what it looks like, these servers were tainted, and should have been taken in as evidence.

(Whats the connection here with https://www.eff.org/cases/megaupload-data-seizure ?)

Maybe they just took the servers that were used for/labeled as email or other corporate purposes and left the storage farm that had all the content on? Assuming a segmented network I would think all the corporate servers were on one network (possibly all in the same racks) that was probably obviously labeled and the storage servers were identical arrays on another network.

But then why are there 60 of them? You don't need that much for corporate email.

The Fed took 60 because those are the ones belong to Dotcom. They probably need to jump through more hoops to take the 630 leased ones. So they didn't bother.

Kim's response:

Leaseweb says: "After a year of nobody showing interest in servers & data we considered our options." Data preservation emails say otherwise

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347417997901697024

Nobody should believe for a second that we haven't tried everything to convince #Leaseweb not to delete #Megaupload user data.

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347420452462931969

They probably should have had this conversation in public first time round...

I consider that an excellent written response to a tricky situation. Props to them.

Reasonable. Let's see what Kim has to say to that.

Hypothetically, if Kim Dotcom found the money to run those servers, would he have been allowed to pay LeaseWeb to keep them unwiped?

He did find the money and he chose to make mega.co.nz instead.

Everything else is just a plea for attention.

Your opinion of course. This is Leaseweb's side of the story. I imagine that Kim's side sounds very different.

The difference is that Dotcom has a long history of lies and fraud. Leaseweb, on the other hand, doesn't have any negatives I could find in the last few years aside from Dotcom's complaint.

Swap out hard drives, mail them to kim dotcom with a bill. Its a good idea anyways.

Kim called it a "data massacre", he's not one for understatement. Kim should of already had backups, he can't expect a business to hold his leased servers without any compensation.

Sucks to be Kim but why should another third, seemly innocent party, have to suffer too?

600 servers that be leased at, say, $100 a month is $60,000 a month or $720K a year. Kim, FedGov...Jesus or whoever should pay if they want to keep the servers idle. Leaseweb had more patience than I would have had.

As for evidence: My guess is that the Feds have enough preserved servers to make their case. You do not need them all unless you want to file 100++ million charges. If they have 10 servers and within them they have enough data about xxx violations of the law, that's good enough. He will be charged with them and that's it.

Low blow from Kim.

Also note that $100 per month is pretty low-ball figure.

I think its high ball. The servers were no doubt paid-for by that point.

The only real cost they could have is depreciation on the servers themselves and power to keep them on. I dont think its fair to call potential income they could get from re-renting them lost money, as its not like leaseweb stopped taking customer orders.

Also, I think this is actually going to be good for Kim. While everyone from the MU side denys it, the overwhelming use for MU was infringing content. By LW deleting this, I believe it benefits MU more than it hurts them. Prosecution has to prove guilt, not the other way around. If evidence gets deleted that goes to serve MU, not the USDOJ.

This is what they could have done to save the data:

- replace the hard drives

- start renting the servers to other people

- save the old hard drives just in case

How much would it have cost them to save the old hard drives on 600 servers? Not much.

Yes, but why is that their responsibility? Had MegaUpload offered to buy the hard drives, or pay for their safe keeping, sure. It's not clear to me why a company should, in perpetuity, be required to keep the data for a former customer that is not paying them to do so.

How much would it have cost them to save the old hard drives on 600 servers? Not much.

over $100,000 based on a very conservative and unrealistic estimate only factoring in the cost of removing and installing 600 hard drives.

100k is less then the 750k - 1M that lost for hanging onto them for a year without use. Sorry but something smells fishy here, the first month they should have swapped the drives and put those servers back up. (saving the drives intact just incase the feds came asking for them)

You're forgetting that when they initially decided to keep the servers they didn't know whether Kim would regain access to his funds or whether he would want to buy the data back at all. In retrospect they could've made the decision to do what you're suggesting.

I know conspiracy theories are appealing, but it's much more likely that they took a calculated risk by holding on to the data/servers for one of their bigger, well-paying clients (~1.5% of their total server count). Then, when the gamble didn't look like it was going to pay off, they decided to cut their losses and reuse the servers.

MegaUpload had about 25 pentabytes... so that's a lot more than $100K USD. And a lot more than just one drive per system. You more talking about a BackBlaze Storage Pod type configuration.

> over $100,000 based on a very conservative and unrealistic estimate only factoring in the cost of removing and installing 600 hard drives.

I don't think datacenter monkeys cost that much... are you including the costs of the drives themselves?

>> I don't think datacenter monkeys cost that much... are you including the costs of the drives themselves?

Fine, so you should have bought them 600 new hardrives, maybe they would have done the labor for free. It's not like they cost that much. Or maybe Kim should have done so, instead of starting new companies and living large in NZ.

You lease servers--for as long as you keep paying them. You get a 30 day or so grace period if you do not pay, but Kim got way more than that.

I wasn't asking or saying anything about Kim Dotcom.

I was commenting about the price of labor to replace 600 server's hard drives. If you use a team of 600 datacenter monkeys each taking out and replacing 1 server's drives at a time and gave them each an hour to do it... okay, that's $166 an hour per datacenter monkey. Those are highly paid technicians.

they COULD have, but why WOULD they?

> During the year we stored the servers and the data, we received no request for access nor any request to retain the data