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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.'"

29 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. slashdotted by mapkinase · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:slashdotted by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The government has a copy. They just need to go through it first to make sure no one was doing anything illegal--such as downloading pirated files, bad-mouthing the President, supporting the Occupy movement, etc.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    2. Re:slashdotted by LordLimecat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Oh good grief, Slashdot comments have reached a new low.

      Can you show me a single, solitary instance of where badmouthing the president has been treated as a criminal (or civil) offense, in the last 50 years? If not kindly keep your hyperbole to yourself.

      Ditto with "supporting the occupy movement", which I will note was given free reign to trespass on private property for well over a month before everyone decided it was time they complied with the same laws the Tea Party had to.

      Seriously, this silly karma whoring is getting irritating.

    3. Re:slashdotted by rubycodez · · Score: 2

      right, because HomeLand Security has never paid a visit to anyone who bad mouthed the president on facebook or yourtube or radio

    4. Re:slashdotted by LordLimecat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One would expect a rational response to the ideas presented in a post on slashdot, but I guess not if they have decided to fall back on ridicule and grammar nazism.

    5. Re:slashdotted by Fned · · Score: 2, Informative

      Can you show me a single, solitary instance of where badmouthing the president has been treated as a criminal (or civil) offense, in the last 50 years?

      You won't find one, because people bad-mouthing the President don't get arrested and tried. They just get secretly declared to be terrorists and summarily executed.

      ...which is AWESOME. I think it's super-great that our President has this power! GO OBAMA! WOOO! I am totally voting for him in November, I will even film myself voting and post it to Youtube so that there's public proof that I SUPPORT OUR PRESIDENT UNCONDITIONALLY!!!

    6. Re:slashdotted by LordLimecat · · Score: 2

      Wow rampant ignorance and /or misrepresentation of sources gets modded up on slashdot, who would have thought.

      The article youre referencing doesnt mention once anyone getting killed, tried, arrested, detained, or targetted for saying ANYTHING about the president.

      It DOES discuss whether the president can target people, in this case overseas (and cooperating with foreign beligerents), who also happen to be citizens. Which might be an interesting discussion to have, except it has absolutely nothing to do with first amendment issues or free speech or lack thereof, which is what we were discussing.

  2. Deleting? by Suki+I · · Score: 2

    Since when does deleting destroy data?

    1. Re:Deleting? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since data is stored in The Coud. Once it is deleted, the constant shuffling around will overwrite it in short order.

    2. Re:Deleting? by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

      The basic would be
      # rm -rf /volume/data
      Instead, they should manage to
      # rm -rf /volume/data/illegal
      only.
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    3. Re:Deleting? by Synerg1y · · Score: 2

      That's not the point, it's not accessible to those who need it so it might as well be considered deleted.

    4. Re:Deleting? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      Backups are proof against hardware failure, not against deletion. Once the backups cycle - which they will in a very short time, storage is expensive - the data is still gone.

  3. From TFA by ciderbrew · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:From TFA by Custard+Horse · · Score: 2

      It would be a rubbish panic room if you need guns inside. What you need are gun 'turrets' immediately outside the panic room. Possibly controlled by a smartphone app?

    2. Re:From TFA by tgd · · Score: 3, Funny

      Hello. Target Acquired.

      .....

      Are you still there?

  4. Deleting evidence by mrbill1234 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would have thought that all the evidence would need to be preserved. Surely if any data is deleted that would compromise the case?

    1. Re:Deleting evidence by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You assume the outcome hasn't already been determined.

    2. Re:Deleting evidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They don't care about the evidence.
      They don't care about the conviction.
      They just want MegaUpload gone.

      They got what they want, the rest is details.

    3. Re:Deleting evidence by Shikaku · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, a better idea would be a FOIA request for data.

    4. Re:Deleting evidence by ciderbrew · · Score: 3, Funny

      Better ideas require extraordinary balls. - Carl Sagan. I'm sure he said that.

    5. Re:Deleting evidence by Ihmhi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Are you kidding me? If Megaupload gets out of this, they're going to have tons of free publicity. "We fought the American government... and won!" Dotcom can paint himself as a rebel thumbing his nose at the most powerful country in the world and getting away with it.

  5. Re:Nice use of taxpayer dollars! by kiwimate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. EFF, Carpathia to Assist Users by miller60 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.”

    1. Re:EFF, Carpathia to Assist Users by TheSpoom · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There should be a "Promote to Article" button for posts like the parent.

      --
      It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
      - E. Debs
  7. Re:Sue u.s. govt for the data. by rubycodez · · Score: 2

    but you would still have a right to your laundry, even if late.

  8. They won't win by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:you lose credit when you say 'MAFIAA' by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:you lose credit when you say 'MAFIAA' by dgatwood · · Score: 2

    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.

    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.

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  11. Re:you lose credit when you say 'MAFIAA' by dgatwood · · Score: 2

    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:

    • It's perfectly legal content for me to download (since I own the hardware and already have the stock firmware without the extra pieces added, and the authors of the extra pieces have the legal right to distribute those pieces). The courts have ruled fairly conclusively on this point on multiple occasions, though I don't have time to dig up the relevant case law.
    • It is slightly dubious whether the people who uploaded them have the right to redistribute them (since A. it could theoretically be downloaded by someone who doesn't own the hardware in question, not that it would be particularly useful to do so, and B. it is technically an unauthorized derivative work). Presumably to protect themselves somewhat from liability, they therefore chose a bunch of legally dubious sharing sites to host the content.
    • Either way, the content was taken down not because the company that made the device objected, but because it was caught up in the fringes of an FBI sting on movie uploaders and other stupid bulls**t that had nothing to do with the content in question.

    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.

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