Filesonic Removes Ability To Share Files

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Filesonic Removes Ability To Share Files

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday January 22, 2012 @05:00PM from the closing-shop dept.

Ihmhi writes "In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, Filesonic has elected to take preventative measures against a similar fate. The front page and all files now carry the following message: 'All sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled. Our service can only be used to upload and retrieve files that you have uploaded personally.' Whether or not this will actually deter the U.S. government from taking action remains to be seen."

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Correction for the title. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-22 17:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

Filesonic becomes useless.
1. Re:Correction for the title. by Kenja · 2012-01-22 18:00 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  More or less. Just canceled my account. Whole point was to be able to send people files too large for email.
  
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  "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
2. Re:Correction for the title. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-22 18:16 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  >Filesonic becomes useless.
  Internet within US jurisdiction becomes a little more useless.
  FTFY
  You know that piracy isn't bothered by what the US does to it's own Internet businesses, right?
3. Re:Correction for the title. by Moru74 · 2012-01-22 19:03 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  This hunting file-sharers is meaningless, they will just switch over to encryption and other distributed forms of transfer like i2p2.de for example. Encrypted anonymizer written in Java so it runs on all platforms.
  The side-effect is that real criminals will also benefit from this development and use the same means to communicate. Great, the pirate hunt will make it impossible to catch real terrorists. Is this really worth it?
4. Re:Correction for the title. by Ihmhi · 2012-01-22 21:26 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I wanted to also point out that uploaded.to pretty much completely blocked the United States. Just my luck, I find out a half-hour after I submit the story.
  The reaction of non-Americans (on Reddit, at least) seems to be "Ha, now you have to deal with the same shit we deal with from the BBC, Netflix, etc.".
  Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
  
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  Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
5. Re:Correction for the title. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-22 22:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Maybe is the best solution, remove USA from Internet.
Next by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-22 17:02 · Score: 5, Funny

US government requires written permission for moving files on your desktop.
Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by CRCulver · 2012-01-22 17:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

The sharing scene for the music I listen to mainly transitioned from P2P networks or Bittorrent sites to indexes of Megaupload/Rapidshare/whatever uploads. The advantages cited were the inability to track IPs and more dependability since one didn't have to wait around for seeders. These recent developments might be enough to send people back to Bittorrent, especially as legal challenges have not sufficed to bring down The Pirate Bay, let alone some of the (IMHO more useful) lesser known torrent communities.
If things go back to Bittorrent, remember that the community depends to a degree on you, so please seed.
1. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by SuricouRaven · 2012-01-22 19:11 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  "What if someone combined TOR with P2P?"
  
  Then you get Freenet. It's anonyminity is as good as it gets - it's designed for use by dissidents living under oppressive regimes, so tracing either source or destination is all but impossible even if someone could compromise many nodes. The cost of this is performance: You can download whole TV episodes and movies, but at a fraction of the speed of a less paranoid network.
2. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by Brett+Buck · 2012-01-22 19:11 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It's not a slashdot opinion - it's the idea that you can take something from someone else who spent some money producing it for sale, and instead get it for free. And then claiming it's somehow your right, or somehow noble to do it.
3. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by SchMoops · 2012-01-22 19:20 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It's no less arbitrary that those of us who create content (and I'm one of them) claim it's somehow our right to profit from it.
  Take a look at this blog post by Jonathan Coulton. I can't think of any way I could agree more:
  http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/
4. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by muuh-gnu · 2012-01-22 19:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  > Breaking the law simply because
  For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.
  A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.
  > help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws
  Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?
  > join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane
  All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?
5. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-22 20:05 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The problem with private trackers is just that - they're private.
  Sure, they might be able to keep the MAFIAA out, but as it seems they had an insider at MegaUpload (they appear to have every internal mail going back to the start), nothing will prevent the same thing from happening everywhere else. So that protection only works as far as someone isn't corrupted by the MAFIAA.
  The downside is two-fold:
  1) Hard to get access. As you get accounts on more private trackers, it tends to be easier, but it's still not like just doing a general search and clicking on a link.
  2) Lack of general access. The secondary purpose of any means to share files is the political side. Besides providing the data you want, they also need to make a statement through easy access to the data for everybody, thus massively undermining any and all attempts at stopping it. It must be a flood that makes it trivial to find and get whatever you're looking for, no matter what.
  The Pirate Bay does just that. It's public, it's run by idealists, it's loud and in your face about file sharing. It makes sharing easy and access to the shared equally easy. Sure it provokes but that's just the idea! - It's all about saying to the media business that they were too late. Too little and too late. We still can't obtain a lot of the stuff shared legally. I want to watch the new Underworld movie tonight but I can't because it's not out in any form I can buy. They simply won't provide it even at a price. That's not what the world wants and if they won't sell it we have to steal it. We need to repeat this until they get it. We want access to it all - globally and simultaneously. I'm sure a lot of the so-called pirates are honest people at heart, but they're forcing us to become criminals. All these people will be happy to pay for the stuff if they were only able. I would as I want to support the production of stuff that I like. But so far they won't let me. So we need to push even harder and if necessary push them out of business if they continue to refuse common sense and basic business knowledge (supply and demand).
6. Re:Thigs swinging back to Bittorrent and P2P? by muuh-gnu · 2012-01-22 21:12 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  > If every law were taken to a referendum then we'd still be living in the dark ages.
  Switzerland has had direct democracy for the last 150 years and is certainly not in the dark ages, it is working rather well. Thanks for the insult.
  They do not take every law to a referendum, but the key is that they _can_ if they want. They can and they often do veto crazy laws. The ability to legally stop crazy laws without having to resort to fighting, protesting, boycotting, begging politicians, i.e. how "democracy" is obviously understood in the US, is the key.
Re:Obvious by ScentCone · 2012-01-22 17:27 · Score: 5, Informative

Which is exactly why things like DropBox are so useful. But the key is to only support sharing with specific users. And, of course, to not have a business model (like MU) built around pirated material.

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Re:Obvious by icebraining · 2012-01-22 17:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

We don't need SOPA and PIPA as currently written, but we need something.
Do we?

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Local DC++ hubs, magnet and torrent trackers by D,Petkow · 2012-01-22 17:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

Some curiosity:In Bulgaria and also most other eastern European countries there used to be a funny practice amongst ISP's:Each internet provider used to have a NAS/LAN server, accessible only to subscribers/customers, loaded with warez, pr0n and movies, in a catalog type of way, year by year. This was way back in 1999- 2005. So You basically see what your monthly fee is, now much Mbps you get up/down, and also what kind of "bonus" warez this particular ISP has to offer, lol! I almost canot believe this was the de facto standard for many years! After some time the laws got changed and the ISPs were forced to quit this practice. But then torrents came in place. So what i am thinking is - we have at least a dozen trackers that are registered/hosted in Switzerland, Netherlands and other locations, like offshore islands or that Transnistria in Russia, where our local Bulgarian/EU laws do not apply. The servers/trackers themselves are configured to answer to requests only from Bulgarian peering IP addresses. So basically those servers remain unseen for the rest of the internet, including authorities, unless you use a Bulgarian proxy. My humble guess is that this kind of "localized" trackers will never go away, also i know for a fact that in Russia they have the same private trackers, DC hubs, and other p2p based ways of sharing warez. Just my 2 cents on this subject - i don't really care about the Filesharing hosts like MegaUpload, WUpload, Hotfile, RapidShare and so on, because they want money, because they have their pages bloated with ads and because of the crappy CAPTCHAs. Yeah.
Re:Obvious by Bogtha · 2012-01-22 17:41 · Score: 5, Insightful

If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.

This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?
File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.

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