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At this point, using a VPN is kind of a must if we want to have even a bit of privacy. I've been doing my homework starting with things like TorrentFreak's Guide To VPN Services That Take Anonymity Seriously, 2013 Edition and the informational comments left on that article, and hopefully this month I'll finally have figured out which to go with.

The trouble with proxies is the added latency.

Try this, go through a proxy and just try to post here on Slashdot - or even load the page.

I tried using proxies and I just got so many timeouts that it made the web unusable.

I use a VPN. US$40/year (give or take, depending on who you use) gives you a fast connection, and the ability to be wherever you want. Chicago? Amsterdam? Zurich? Bucharest? Hong Kong? Kuala Lumpur? The better VPNs don't (or at least, claim that they don't) log connections, and you can use one that's not based in the US. You can find various reviews online at places like Torrentfreak.

"Sure, IP blocking is a blocking mechanism. If I IP-block you ..,"

Listen. You proved to me that you are an idiot a long time ago. There is no need to keep trying to prove it over and over. Seriously. You cannot possibly IP Block me, since an IP Address not only doesn't identify me in any way, it doesn't even identify a state."

"And you persist in misunderstanding the legal concept of "authorization". It doesn't depend on some sort of automatic mechanism."

Again, you are a straight moron. Seriously. How many times do I have to tell you that, in order to meet the legal requirements to claim someone is not authorized, said company ... and I mean any company, on the net or off ... must make a reasonable attempt to restrict access. No company, under any circumstances, can claim they have attempted to restrict access while simultaneously not restricting access in any way.

Just accept the fact that you are an uninformed idiot and move on with your ignorance based life, such as it is.

You can find a copy of the actual Comcast letter here.

For background :-

In June, Prenda and its boss John Steele were accused of running a “honeypot” based on an expert report authored by Delvan Neville, whose company specializes in monitoring BitTorrent users.

The report hinted that the law firm was seeding the very files they claimed to protect, and found that many of the torrents detailed in Prenda lawsuits originate from a user on The Pirate Bay called ‘Sharkmp4.

In an effort to expose the alleged honeypot, The Pirate Bay then jumped in and revealed the IP-addresses that ‘Sharkmp4used to upload the torrent files.

One of the subpoenas covered the Comcast IP-address 75.72.88.156 used by “Sharkmp4,” as can be seen at the bottom of the list of Pirate Bay IPs shown above.

After a few weeks Comcast returned the subscriber details that matched the IP-address at the time the files were uploaded. As can be seen from their response detailed below, this IP is indeed the Comcast account of Steele Hansmeier PLLC, which is directly connected to Prenda Law.

It's ironic that the method copyright trolls like to abuse, namely linking IP addresses to alleged infringers is now being used against them in this case.

As for your "good luck" comment, the same point was raised in the Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. lawsuit. Specifically, Google claimed that:-

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site.

Although summary judgment was granted to Google on other grounds, I'd say this argument has at least a fair chance of success.

You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?

Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.

Actually we can know what he meant, because he has stated it before.

https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcoms-gaming-lag-hints-spying-121004/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10838484
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/10/06/1723231/kim-dotcom-apparently-spied-on-for-longer-than-admitted

Which is exactly why Microsoft isnt getting a sale from me. You dont forgive the abusive boyfriend just because he promises to stop beating you.

so, then you are not gaming on Sony or Apple either then, Wii only?

If all shows would always be available in a convenient way, they people wouldn't pirate. But it's too little, too late. Only a few shows are available globally (and judging by the comments here, even in this case that is not entirely sure). But it is certainly too late. There are so many alternative ways to obtain a series or movie that people don't go back.

5-10 years ago, many people couldn't be bothered to figure out how this whole downloading thing worked. But the commerce of TV made them figure it out. Now, everybody can do it. There are loads of streaming websites, and torrents. By now, viewers do not only demand it becomes available globally, but also that it is available 24/7, so they can watch it at their own convenience. That is the luxury that downloading provides.

I'm so happy that streaming and downloading (but not uploading) is still legal in the Netherlands. :-)
http://torrentfreak.com/downloading-movies-and-music-stays-legal-in-the-netherlands-121221/

Iceland is looking good...

Not only does their gov't respect the human right of privacy, the climate is ideal for major server farms.

http://torrentfreak.com/dotcoms-mega-debuts-spy-proof-messaging-this-summer-email-follows-130711/

A link to an actual article.

Don't know how reliable this stat is(http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-still-dominates-global-internet-traffic-101026/), but apparently P2P (BitTorrent mostly) is presently the largest in most areas of the world, followed or led by 'real time entertainment' (i.e. streaming video). It's an open question whether real time entertainment (which is usually inside a web browser) counts as web or not.

There's other data out there (lots of it) but it appears that reletive to other protocols, email has fallen off a cliff. Interestingly, mobile internet traffic is now larger than the entire Internet in 2002.

I use a gmail, so I figure google has tabs on what I email. it is interesting when I send a friend a chapter or short story I am working on and the ads I get after this...

That being said, will the feds come get me if I am sending a short story about an assassination?

A habit that I have gotten into a while back though, so as to not tie my searches in with my gmail, is that I use firefox for gmail and I use Opera in private browsing to search google. After reading this article, I realize that I am probably tracked via IP. This is disheartening.

It's time to invest in an anonymous proxy. I think I am going to start with this article then investigate further.

Yeah? Well maybe, just maybe, trade sanctions help stop that silly Soviet SOPA law... or maybe even reverse it by legalising non-for-profit peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Good! I've never been against porting to any platform that gives a dev more potential customers; Until the X1. Fuck those assholes for what they tried(and nearly succeeded) to do. We won't forget and my 360 is the last Xbox I will ever buy.

I know, let's support these assholes instead.

your right to submit takedowns is suspended for a month? These things are supposed to be carefully considered requests, not 'if we hit 7 out of 10, we're happy'...

Alternatively, some of the takedowns may be executed.

Each link to material they do not own 100'000 USD to the target of the takedown notice and the same to the actual copyright holder. Alternatively, 30 days in jail for the executive in charge.

I don't have reason to like the dtecnet much, by my taste their executives can go to jail for longer.
(quote from the linked FA):

It is worth noting that the DMCA notice in question was sent by DtectNet. This is the anti-piracy division of MarkMonitor, the same company that is also responsible for tracking down BitTorrent pirates as part of the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme.

http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-caught-using-pirated-subtitles-in-finland-121019/

You can find a good rundown of privacy and payment options for a lot of popular VPN services here: http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/

Basically, if you so choose, you can use a VPN service very anonymously.

What if you send Google a Cease-and-Desist letter? You won't be the only one who does this, and you would have more right to do so than others.

Except that time and time again, game, app, and indie movie publishers are shown that piracy actually ends up helping their sales and the spread of their product.

http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63620-New-Study-Says-Music-Piracy-Does-Not-Hurt-Music-Sales-May-Even-Help.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/29/report-album-piracy-may-help-musicians-sell
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-may-boost-sales-111102/

Let them first stop censoring the internet.

Voltage Pictures (who are these guys?) are doing the same thing in Canada, according to this article at Torrent Freak. Makes a good read. Basically, in Canada, the ISP Tek Savvy is not standing up to Voltage, however they have delayed proceedings for a month to notify their users. Here's a question for you Slashdotters: if a person removes all evidence of downloaded movies from their computer and denies downloading anything or ever possessing any "pirated" material can they still be found guilty? I know that there may be a record someplace of the bits having transited the Net to a particular IP address, but is this enough for a conviction? If there "is no body", i.e. no "pirated" file as evidence, how can anything be proven? Same for broadcast material? If I "accidentally" capture some radio waves from a private network and watch a pay-for-view show, then the show is over, how can anything be proven that a show was "pirated"?

tell that to the pirate bay

Yes, because they're operating with impunity.

Swedish prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad has filed a motion at the District Court of Stockholm, requesting for the seizure of thepiratebay.se, piratebay.se and the new thepiratebay.is domains.

So far they've been playing a shell game with domains, but they're being pretty aggressively pursued.

Perhaps they didn't pay you because they were busy embezzling the money:

    SABAM Charged With Copyright Fraud, Embezzlement, Money Laundering

The Pirate Times introduces the 3 elected representatives: Iceland Report #4 : History Made by a Hair’s Breadth

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original (Swedish) Pirate Party, comments: celandic Pirate Party WINS, Enters Parliament

Another article on TorrentFreak: Pirate Party Enters Iceland’s National Parliament After Historic Election Win

They forgot the kiddie porn charge and I guess they figured sticking him in solitary would enthuse him to cop a plea.

If you mean BT Live, it's not meant for _files_ as you can find in TPB, but rather for broadcasts. It's also distributed, but a different animal altogether.

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-s-bram-cohen-patents-revolutionary-live-streaming-protocol-130326/

Just using a VPN isn't enough -- most of them hand over user data to the US government without question when asked, regardless of whether the VPN account was free or paid and even if the VPN company and all of its servers are located in other parts of the world. (Yes, the article was focused on the use of VPNs for file-sharing, but the lesson remains the same: don't trust them to protect your personal data from your government.)

Sure, go on over to Reddit. You'll be totally safe from this story over there.

(For the record, all of those links are on Reddit right now. I thought /. was bad at dupes, all of those are 100+, 4 of them are from the last 2 weeks, 3 from the last week....)

They don't need to: these days, relatively few VPNs around the world can be trusted to not throw users under the bus at the first hint of trouble from the **AA or US government, and there's no way to really know whether the 'trustworthy' VPNs were being totally honest. Outlawing VPNs would drive the users to companies or resources that are less **AA/government-friendly; if they're smart about it, they'll mimic lobbyists by giving nice large gifts to helpful VPNs as tokens of their gratitude.

You don't have to choose. The Six Strikes plan actually provides you with both!

http://torrentfreak.com/six-strikes-scheme-may-lead-to-lawsuits-against-pirates-121212/

The entire premise of TFA's so-called defense is that this is an alternative to being sued. In reality, it's creates the infrastructure and agreements to make lawsuits easier and more likely.

"While it is true that the MPAA and RIAA can use monitoring companies to track alleged infringers, from a legal perspective they have a much stronger case when itâ(TM)s done as part of the copyright alert system."

who don't follow up

As far as I can see, we won this fight. As an Internet user of 20+ years I hope you appreciate the neatness and 'netness' of the solution :) In Gilmore's words (20 years ago, this year):

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"

put their lives on the line, like the Egyptians.

Or the Tunisians?

http://torrentfreak.com/arrested-pirate-party-member-becomes-tunisian-minister-110117/

I'm saddened that you don't appreciate our victory today. We will however continue working politically for a world that's ... more Internet.

I've been using Private Internet Access for a few months and have been very impressed - they are cheap at $7, have plenty of locations around Europe and North America, and they don't keep logs. The TorrentFreak article I linked also lists several other decent sounding VPN providers which might be worth a look.

The people with clue will not be affected, the people with not enough knowledge, in the other hand, will end being punished for doing things that they don't understand or see as possibly wrong, or even without doing anything, as being used as proxies or unsecure wifi access points.

And considering what could be considered illegal this will be the perfect tool to put out of circulation inconvenient people or to push public opinion in the direction they want.

And if you openly pirate, say, Steamboat Willie, on the grounds that it should have passed into the public domain, I think that's a reasonable and arguably justifiable protest. But if you openly pirate, say, Wreck-it Ralph, or Brave, or (shortly) Monsters University - movies that have been out for less than a year - then your alleged argument that copyright should have a shorter, 20-30 year term is unsupported by your actions.

And therein lies the problem... How many people are pirating Steamboat Willie, the Seven Year Itch, To Catch a Thief, etc., as opposed to recent movies, music, games, and software? The Top 10 most pirated movies chart for this week lists Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Django Unchained, Argo, The Hobbit, Here Comes the Boom, Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, and Robot and Frank, every one of which is less than a year old. Similarly, the top pirated games (for 2011, I can't find 2012 numbers) were all released that year.

...

Your suggestion isn't bad, except that people shouldn't be pirating just anything, but specifically things that would have fallen into the public domain but-for the last extension. Things that are currently 60 years past the life of the author, say. That would be a meaningful, and credible, protest.

I agree with you that there's a difference, but...

I'm reminded of a story I heard somewhere (book, movie, sorry can't remember) were some people were on their way to work and they where discussing the fact that if they were late the punishment was death. Somewhere along the way they were delayed and were going to be late for their work and one guy asks another one what is the punishment for revolting, and the answer was death. So faced with the same punishment if they revolted or late for work and they were already late for work, they decided to revolt instead.

While the current punishment for piracy isn't death, it's the same if you pirate a movie that would of been in the public domain vs. something that is current and wouldn't be in the public domain; then to the pirate, what is the difference?

Of course to the pirate, nothing, but if the purpose of the piracy is civil disobedience (which the OP was talking about and you responding to) then it does matter because it would be to express the idea that Copyright is broken.

And if you openly pirate, say, Steamboat Willie, on the grounds that it should have passed into the public domain, I think that's a reasonable and arguably justifiable protest. But if you openly pirate, say, Wreck-it Ralph, or Brave, or (shortly) Monsters University - movies that have been out for less than a year - then your alleged argument that copyright should have a shorter, 20-30 year term is unsupported by your actions.

And therein lies the problem... How many people are pirating Steamboat Willie, the Seven Year Itch, To Catch a Thief, etc., as opposed to recent movies, music, games, and software? The Top 10 most pirated movies chart for this week lists Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Django Unchained, Argo, The Hobbit, Here Comes the Boom, Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, and Robot and Frank, every one of which is less than a year old. Similarly, the top pirated games (for 2011, I can't find 2012 numbers) were all released that year.

...

Your suggestion isn't bad, except that people shouldn't be pirating just anything, but specifically things that would have fallen into the public domain but-for the last extension. Things that are currently 60 years past the life of the author, say. That would be a meaningful, and credible, protest.

I agree with you that there's a difference, but...

I'm reminded of a story I heard somewhere (book, movie, sorry can't remember) were some people were on their way to work and they where discussing the fact that if they were late the punishment was death. Somewhere along the way they were delayed and were going to be late for their work and one guy asks another one what is the punishment for revolting, and the answer was death. So faced with the same punishment if they revolted or late for work and they were already late for work, they decided to revolt instead.

While the current punishment for piracy isn't death, it's the same if you pirate a movie that would of been in the public domain vs. something that is current and wouldn't be in the public domain; then to the pirate, what is the difference?

Of course to the pirate, nothing, but if the purpose of the piracy is civil disobedience (which the OP was talking about and you responding to) then it does matter because it would be to express the idea that Copyright is broken.

but it should be particularly when the industry comes knocking in 2019 to ask for life + 90 to keep Steamboat Willy from entering the public domain.

I feel it's important to have a good copyright system. At the same time, this whole life + 70 nonsense is, as we've discussed, counterproductive. To that end, I propose a national day of piracy every year. Perhaps on April 1st, although I'm open to other ideas (September 19th?). The goal being to declare a specific day of civil disobediance where we openly pirate something that should be public domain and then declare what you pirated on a social network.

And if you openly pirate, say, Steamboat Willie, on the grounds that it should have passed into the public domain, I think that's a reasonable and arguably justifiable protest. But if you openly pirate, say, Wreck-it Ralph, or Brave, or (shortly) Monsters University - movies that have been out for less than a year - then your alleged argument that copyright should have a shorter, 20-30 year term is unsupported by your actions.

And therein lies the problem... How many people are pirating Steamboat Willie, the Seven Year Itch, To Catch a Thief, etc., as opposed to recent movies, music, games, and software? The Top 10 most pirated movies chart for this week lists Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Django Unchained, Argo, The Hobbit, Here Comes the Boom, Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, and Robot and Frank, every one of which is less than a year old. Similarly, the top pirated games (for 2011, I can't find 2012 numbers) were all released that year.

Now, I get that people will claim that they pirate newly released (or not even released yet) movies and games "because they disagree with overly long copyright terms, and so think any copyright term under the current regime is invalid," but:
(i) they lack credibility, since they sure look like people who don't want to pay for entertainment and are trying to come up with a believable post hoc justification;
(ii) the ones who claim there should be a 20 or 30 year term look no different from the ones who claim that copyright should be abolished, since they're taking the exact same actions; and
(iii) because of i and ii, no legislator is going to consider them anything more than a greedy, selfish crackpot.

Your suggestion isn't bad, except that people shouldn't be pirating just anything, but specifically things that would have fallen into the public domain but-for the last extension. Things that are currently 60 years past the life of the author, say. That would be a meaningful, and credible, protest.

but it should be particularly when the industry comes knocking in 2019 to ask for life + 90 to keep Steamboat Willy from entering the public domain.

I feel it's important to have a good copyright system. At the same time, this whole life + 70 nonsense is, as we've discussed, counterproductive. To that end, I propose a national day of piracy every year. Perhaps on April 1st, although I'm open to other ideas (September 19th?). The goal being to declare a specific day of civil disobediance where we openly pirate something that should be public domain and then declare what you pirated on a social network.

And if you openly pirate, say, Steamboat Willie, on the grounds that it should have passed into the public domain, I think that's a reasonable and arguably justifiable protest. But if you openly pirate, say, Wreck-it Ralph, or Brave, or (shortly) Monsters University - movies that have been out for less than a year - then your alleged argument that copyright should have a shorter, 20-30 year term is unsupported by your actions.

And therein lies the problem... How many people are pirating Steamboat Willie, the Seven Year Itch, To Catch a Thief, etc., as opposed to recent movies, music, games, and software? The Top 10 most pirated movies chart for this week lists Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Django Unchained, Argo, The Hobbit, Here Comes the Boom, Flight, Zero Dark Thirty, and Robot and Frank, every one of which is less than a year old. Similarly, the top pirated games (for 2011, I can't find 2012 numbers) were all released that year.

Now, I get that people will claim that they pirate newly released (or not even released yet) movies and games "because they disagree with overly long copyright terms, and so think any copyright term under the current regime is invalid," but:
(i) they lack credibility, since they sure look like people who don't want to pay for entertainment and are trying to come up with a believable post hoc justification;
(ii) the ones who claim there should be a 20 or 30 year term look no different from the ones who claim that copyright should be abolished, since they're taking the exact same actions; and
(iii) because of i and ii, no legislator is going to consider them anything more than a greedy, selfish crackpot.

Your suggestion isn't bad, except that people shouldn't be pirating just anything, but specifically things that would have fallen into the public domain but-for the last extension. Things that are currently 60 years past the life of the author, say. That would be a meaningful, and credible, protest.

Last month, just a couple days prior to the launch of MEGA, Slashdot ran a story that informed us all that each user would get 50GB gratis storage on the service. This story brought with it a comment from the creator of ScatterBytes, the distributed storage backend that MEGA uses. The entire reason that gratis 50GB can even be offered to all users, and indeed one of the oft-touted improvements of MEGA over MegaUpload (to try and convince us we won't lose our data at the whim of any given government like last time), is that anyone with spare storage space and bandwidth can be financially compensated for hosting the (encrypted) data of other MEGA users.

The concept of this distributed storage and accompanying financial compensation system is certainly a more novel approach to what file lockers have offered in the past, and this is precisely what ScatterBytes is providing to the infrastructure of the MEGA network. But I was shocked to learn, in the comment of ScatterBytes creator, that the financial compensation system would be using PayPal. Why the creators of MEGA & Scatterbytes would be so short-sighted and foolish to base their system off of a centralised, USA-based payment company widely known to be the Internet sector of the US financial-military-industrial complex was completely beyond me.

As a server operator myself, why would I want my disk space (NOT in the USA) to be a part of the MEGA network (NOT a US website) when details of my contribution (and a cut of the profits) would be handed directly to a US company known to directly work with the US government? Had the people behind MEGA & ScatterBytes not been paying any attention to PayPal's history? Shouldn't the operators of a file locker site which was mercilessly raided by the moneyed American corporate interests trying to stymy progress (and currently entangled in a court case) be slightly more intelligent and aware than this?

In my response to his comment, I asked the ScatterBytes creator why they are creating a system that would hand the US government banking-level details of MEGA collaborators , easily sortable by size of contributions no less! For the successor site to MegaUpload, this level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing. MegaUpload's servers are still sitting in limbo, and people have served jailtime over this service. Why any third-party (ie most of us on Slashdot) would be enthusiastic to contribute to the relaunch of this service, even if it does differ technologically from the previous incarnation, when it means giving all of our personal information to an organisation as nefarious and unfriendly to progress as PayPal is beyond me. To Jack's Complete Lack of Suprise, within a week of the launch of MEGA, an organisation seemingly created to kill file locker services (at least ones which multimedia publishing cartels decide to target) worked to shut off PayPal access to the primary MEGA resellers. So much for paying attention to history.


To see adoption of BitCoin is good news, but it's what should have been done at launch. It's 2013. We don't need centralised US-controlled middlemen spying on all of our financial transactions and taking our money anytime we want to transfer funds. We ha

"After a long battle with the international arm of the MPAA, Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has called it quits. The site had been operating under adverse conditions, not least almost total censorship by a court-ordered ISP blockade in the UK."

"Add to this a climate of fear driving individuals providing vital services away from the site, plus legal action against PayPal aimed at Newzbin2's UK-based payment provider, and the site's operators have decided to shut down."

I've just cancelled my service with Verizon.

Google has recently started delisting 'pirate' web sites from its search engine. Not all at once which people would notice, but slowly they are phasing this in. http://torrentfreak.com/google-removed-50-million-pirate-search-results-this-year-121228/

Not really, no. The old article was from the 24th, stating that this was probably going to happen, and the new one is from the 28th, stating that yes, this is actually going to happen as the WTO has approved it. There's a big difference between a small country saying they will take US copyrights at whim and the WTO saying they are allowed to.

Not really, no. The old article was from the 24th, stating that this was probably going to happen, and the new one is from the 28th, stating that yes, this is actually going to happen as the WTO has approved it. There's a big difference between a small country saying they will take US copyrights at whim and the WTO saying they are allowed to.

You're more correct than the OP, in pointing out that The Pirate Bay only transfers metadata. However, The Pirate Bay hasn't run a tracker since 2009: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tracker-shuts-down-for-good-091117/

This weird criminal somehow has 50 GB * 1,000,000 = 47.6 petabytes of enterprise storage? Without getting one dollar? How is this paid for? Not to mention all the data traffic back and forth which will be even more expensive?

1. Not every user is using 50gb.
2. He has lots of money.
3. He is investing in a new enterprise and knows that he has to spend money first in order to make money in the future.

I assumed all that was fairly obvious. What's your theory, by the way?

A single one of his new racks holds 720TB of data. http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-shows-off-mega-rack-121218/

The artists want out of these RIAA handcuffs as badly as do their fans. They see there is a different, more direct model that doesn't fatten the talentless go-betweens sitting in air-conditioned offices, producing no value at either end of the production pipeline.

Sorry, Mr. Ego Hat, David Geffen.

The artists want out of these RIAA handcuffs as badly as do their fans. They see there is a different, more direct model that doesn't fatten the talentless go-betweens sitting in air-conditioned offices, producing no value at either end of the production pipeline.

Sorry, Mr. Ego Hat, David Geffen.

Interesting. Mega seeks to achieve profitability by sharing revenue with participating artists - creating a channel with as little rent-taking as possible. As opposed to the super-rent-seekers: today's media and telecom conglomerates.

Kim says Megaupload was killed by the Obama administration, as a gimme to the media cartels - in return for financing and as a replacement for failing with SOPA. I'd add that Megaupload was SPECIFICALLY targeted over Eastern European hosters for enforceability, and over others because of Dotcom's incipient "MegaKey" agreement with big-name urban artists.

So, from where will the source of this revenue come? Ads are obvious - but really another nut to crack. I don't think this is what the new Mega has in mind for a foundation pillar.

Rather, I suspect that the artist agreements are expected to drive enough subscriber interest, for real takes, vs. simple freeloaders. The volume of signup in the past 24 hours is a great validation for Dotcom, if prospective participants need prompting.

The site can't be monitored directly. That's the whole point. I'm sure they will be watching, but not directly. Were I in their place, I'd be looking for sites that link to files uploaded to Mega. A few careful google queries, a custom crawler, even entering into a few sneaky agreements with ISPs to do DPI and see where people are going. The idea not being to catch all the pirates, but to catch all the highly-visible pirates and the communities they form around. So only private, invite-only forums can survive.

Un-necessary to go to all the trouble. http://torrentfreak.com/verizons-six-strikes-anti-piracy-measures-unveiled-130111/ The relavent information will likely be automatically reported to them.

The solution for Google would be to block Free for a few days, as The Pirate Bay did to another ISP a few years back. That would surely make them reconsider...