Megaupload Lawyer Says User Data Will Be Held For Two Weeks
First time accepted submitter AlistairCharlton writes "Users' data on the seized Megaupload website will be saved for two further weeks, according to the website's lawyer, despite being shut down by US authorities. From the article: 'Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken reportedly told tech blog TorrentFreak.com that users' data would be saved for at least another two weeks, after it was previously thought that the data would be deleted by Thursday, 2 February.'"
Anyway, the question to who knows: is the data available to users now? Why don't they make it available? MAFIAA does not gain anything by not allowing current users to download their own material. Unless there is a technical issue of nobody's giving rat's ass about users of megaupload.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Since when does deleting destroy data?
Home of The Suki Series
Previously known as Kim Schmitz, Dotcom, was arrested at his luxury New Zealand mansion on 20 January; he was found locked in a panic room which contained a gun cabinet.
That's were you want the gun cabinet to be. Who designs a panic room with guns on the outside? The zombies could learn to use them?
I would have thought that all the evidence would need to be preserved. Surely if any data is deleted that would compromise the case?
And they even sent dozens of cops to arrest the fat, scared owner of the website
Forgive me if I somehow fail to see this guy as a scared, intimidated victim...
a self-styled âoeDr. Evilâ of file sharing... ...has made a career out of being larger than life, which seems appropriate for a six foot, six inch man... ...said he had hacked hundreds of US companiesâ(TM) PBX systems and was selling the access codes at $200 a pop, bragging that âoeevery PBX is an open door to me.â He also claimed to have developed an encrypted phone that could not be tapped, and to have sold a hundred of them...
In his 2001 interview with the Telegraph, he also claimed to have hacked Citibank and transferred $20 million to Greenpeace...
He also claimed to have hacked NASA and said that he had accessed Pentagon systems to read top-secret information on Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.
He bought stolen phone card account information from American hackers. After setting up premium toll chat lines in Hong Kong and in the Caribbean, he used a âoewar dialerâ program to call the lines using the stolen card numbersâ"ringing up â61,000 in ill-gained profits.
set up a computer system for the uploading and downloading of pirated PC software, charging people for access.
And on, and on, and on. And all of this is stuff he brags about in interviews.
The guy is not a victim.
The EFF and Carpathia Hosting announced this morning that they're working together to assist users who stored non-infringing files on Megaupload. Users can go to MegaRetrieval.com to connect with the EFF, which will review the cases and try to help resolve issues through their free legal services.“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” said Julie Samuels, Staff Attorney at EFF. “We think it’s important that these users have their voices heard as this process moves forward.”
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
but you would still have a right to your laundry, even if late.
Did you not read the indictment? Fake DMCA take down, confessions in emails, creating fake super users to keep files uploaded. Mr Dotcom has previous convictions too. He's going down for a long long long time.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
Not a hope of them winning. If you have files in Megaupload, go ahead an ask FBI for them. In the indictment, they even had emails from Mega boss telling them to fill Megaupload with youtube content to make it look like they had legitimate files! I mean these guys were such idiots they had a US based email system and like the cliqué bad guys discussed the plot with the victims first.
Well, there's only two real problems with the cloud, albeit possibly major ones depending on your utilization.
1. You can lose your stuff. It's not as easy as we fear, but the Megaupload situation shows that it is not as hard as we had hoped.
2. If you store private data there, you're taking a risk that you probably don't need to take.
Neither of these says that you should not use cloud services, what they do say, however, is that for critical data, you should not rely on it. For data expected to be secure, you should not use it at all.
For my part, the cloud is probably fine to use if you want to store anything that is not security or financially related. The fact that you could lose it doesn't mean you should not use it at all, it just means you should back it up locally. Otherwise, you should be able to keep using the advantages of cloud services, which are still, frankly, going to be more reliable than your home computer on average. They also allow you to get your data where and when you need it, which is another big advantage that should not be overlooked.
Caveat emptor.
And this is why I will never trust a server that I do not physically control (and back up) to have the primary copy of any of my data. This is also why I will never trust cloud computing. It was a bad idea when Larry Ellison proposed it fifteen years ago, and it's still a bad idea today, and for exactly the same reasons.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Just to clarify, the cloud is a great tool for some things. iCloud is an example of the right use of the cloud. It's a temporary repository for sharing information between multiple devices. If the cloud goes away, you still have a local copy of the app and a bunch of local copies of your data. You just lost syncing.
Sharing sites like Megaupload are also examples of the right use for the cloud, so long as you understand that they are temporary locations to store stuff that you want to share with others. The moment you start putting up links to them on permanent websites, you've gone off the cliff into "bad use of the cloud" territory. Unfortunately, far too often, people use these temporary repositories when they should be setting up their own permanent repositories. This invariably leads to damages all around.
For example, I was recently looking for some modified firmware for rooting an embedded device, and the first two links were to sites like Megaupload that had been recently taken down by the U.S. government. Three things made this interesting:
On the one hand, technically the FBI's sting operation took down an unauthorized reposting of copyrighted material. On the other hand, the FBI's sting operation did so without the consent or action of the copyright owner, in a manner that was detrimental to the ability of people who legally own a licensed copy of the content in question to use that content in a manner consistent with U.S. copyright law.
Copyright law is a freaking mess, and it's high time the government stopped misusing our law enforcement to take care of what should be properly handled by complex civil suits between the copyright holders and the sites in question, and, more to the point, to attack valuable shared resources in a way that harms the Internet, deliberately ignoring the legally compliant take-down procedures that were already in place. In effect, when they failed to pass SOPA and PIPA, the government decided to sidestep DMCA protection in a different way, and a lot of people—myself included—got caught in the crossfire.
Of course, the reason so many abusive companies and organizations push the government to do their dirty work is that they know they have a good chance of losing the court case, because the company they're suing was, in fact, compliant with the law as written. If they get a bunch of jack-booted thugs to knock the door down, they don't have to care about what's legal or just. They get to shut down the site without regard to whether or not they had the legal right to do so. Hence, the government absolutely should not ever do this.
To any lawyers who decide to file a class action against the FBI for this action, please add me to the list of innocent parties harmed by their action. The FBI should absolutely be held liable for all of the cumulative collateral damage that their actions have caused, however small each individual instance of that damage might be.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.