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Kim Schmitz has a history of ratting people out.

A group calling themselves AntiLeaks has taken responsibility for the attacks. Here are a couple of stories on a german tech site about the group. You can translate it into german. http://www.gulli.com/news/19466-antileaks-ddos-angriffe-als-protest-gegen-wikileaks-2012-08-08 http://www.gulli.com/news/19456-ddos-angriffe-legen-wikileaks-lahm-2012-08-07

A group calling themselves AntiLeaks has taken responsibility for the attacks. Here are a couple of stories on a german tech site about the group. You can translate it into german. http://www.gulli.com/news/19466-antileaks-ddos-angriffe-als-protest-gegen-wikileaks-2012-08-08 http://www.gulli.com/news/19456-ddos-angriffe-legen-wikileaks-lahm-2012-08-07

The text below is a translated excerpt from an obituary for Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth, an infamous lawyer who in the 1980s entrapped young nerds by sending letters in which he pretended to be a teen girl ("Tanja") who seeked copies of games. Gravenreuth was also the lawyer behind the "Explorer" trademark farce. Gravenreuth (much) later shot himself when he faced jail time after he had been convicted of fraud in a different case. That suicide was the cause for the obituary which also shines a light on the cooperation between Gravenreuth and Kim Schmitz, who is the alleged puppeteer behind Megaupload. The full obituary is in German and available here. Translation:

But GvG (Günter Freiherr von Gravenreuth) couldn't touch the scene without inside contacts. So he hired wannabe-hacker Kim Schmitz. Kim was known for his gigantic ego, and for talking without really knowing what he was talking about. Instead of doing his own hacking, he had naive insiders feed him hot information. In the mid-90s, Kimble worked on his presence in the warez scene. He paid with calling cards for all uploads of warez to his Munich based BBS "House of Coolness". For many, calling cards were the only remaining way of making free telephone calls at the time, after the illegal use of MCI and AT&T satellites had seized to be possible. BlueBoxing was the name of the method by which certain frequencies tricked the satellites into believing a call had ended, after which the channel could be used freely. Until Kim Schmitz demonstrated the procedure on German television, German Telekom had no clue. Additionally German Telekom had also profited from the excessive use of the 0130 numbers. When blockers and filters were installed against the freeloaders, the only remaining alternative was calling cards. But Kimble didn't just want a fast board, he also wanted to be at the center of the scene. Schmitz founded the PC and console group Romkids and had unpublished Nintendo games and PC software delivered to him by suppliers. But that wasn't enough. Kim Schmitz joined the mostly British Amiga group Loons, who at that time illegally distributed several big title games on diskettes. The Amiga games ultimately gave Kim Schmitz access to about a hundred illegal mailboxes all over Germany. Word got around that he had made his way into the scene and that he could supply the latest titles quickly. Many operators threw their suspiciousness overboard and granted him access to their systems. Schmitz uploaded and downloaded and made a record of all files that were available on each system. He took the captures to Gravenreuth, wo allegedly paid Schmitz per busted BBS. This benefited Kimble in several ways. He himself was under the personal protection of the lawyer and could get rid of unwanted competition as he pleased. Allegedly the cooperation even went so far that they jointly operated a telephone hotline for the scene by the name of "Szenetalk", which offered callers rooms where they could talk to scene members from all over the world. Calls were billed to the true owners of the calling cards. This way Schmitz cashed in twice: As operator of the hotline and as the wholesale dealer of illegal calling cards. Evrim Sen mentions in his book "Hackertales" that Gravenreuth eventually simply stopped paying his supplier. Kimble stopped being an informant to GvG, Szenetalk closed shop and Schmitz moved on to other projects.

The only known successor to Kimble was Darklord, but the cooperation didn't last long. There wasn't much left of the scene anyway, after the raids he had ordered. The old guard was almost completely devastated. Those who weren't busted themselves sought other hobbies because they feared legal persecution or used the opportune moment to leave the scene without losing face.

So there you have it. You're rallying behind a man who got rich delivering the German warez scene to the content industry on a silver platter.

To assign Window hotkey functions to winamp, I use a free winamp plugin called Flexplug. Its a free (beer) stripped down version of their Flextouch software, and has no ads or spyware that I am aware of. Works well for me.

A quick google search also turns up hotplug [seems open source], hotkey RC, and Winamp KeyController 4.0 [freeware]. Winamp KeyController seems to be the most popular one in my brief search.

By now, xmms users are probably feeling left out, so here are a few links for them: xmms-shell which allows us to control xmms from the command line, gkrellmms[1] a plugin to control xmms from gkrellm, and xvfb [no link available], which allows us to use xmms without it cluttering the main x session [all exist as packages in debian-stable: xmms-shell, gkrellmms, and xvfb]. I tend to use screen within rxvt alot, so I do a quick 'xvfb-run xmms &>/dev/null &' and use gkrellmms to supervise what's playing. Then I have aliases (actually shell scripts) named mp3[z|x|c|v|b] which use 'xmms-shell -e <command>" to go back, play, pause, stop, or go forward. mp3i is another shell script that runs the following command: 'xmms-shell -e status | head -n 1 | sed "s/Playing:\ //g" | sed s/channels/ch/g' [displays song name and a bit of information]. That way, in a majority of the programs I can quickly use a shell escape and control the song (no, I'm not really fond of the mouse).

It might seem like a bit of work, but I tend to play a lot of music on my computer - why not make it easy to use?

[1] For those of you who don't use gkrellm, there is wmusic [apt-get install wmusic] and wmxmms.