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Kim Dotcom Outs Mega Teaser Site, Finalizes Domain Name
hypnosec writes "Kim Dotcom has let out more information about the launch of Megaupload's successor Mega, which he claims will be 'bigger, better, faster, stronger, [and] safer.' Mega is currently looking for partners willing to provide servers, support and connectivity to become 'Mega Storage Nodes.' The prime requirement, according to Dotcom, is that the servers should be located outside the U.S. and that the companies should also be based outside of the U.S. For this reason, Dotcom has decided that the new service will be launching with 'Me.ga' domain name."
He has pretty big balls. I wish him all the best. But this time, I hope he will build a safe-room, in a safe-room because this is going to upset a lot of tier 1 criminals, eh businesspeople.
Kim,
Thanks for fighting the good fight.
Yes!
"The domain name associated with the website Me.ga has been seized pursuant to an order issued by the U.S. District Court"
(or equivalent).
And its not going to be "America's" internet.
We are going back to our old ways of isolating ourselves from the world because of the greed of a very few.
While Kim may be greedy and potentially an asshole, he's going to win and is playing by rules far more legitimate then our current IP circus.
To those of you in the MPAA, RIAA, and software, mobile phone, and ISP industries. You cannot fight this. Learn and adapt or you will fail while people like Kim refuse to lay down and prosper.
That's funny. He feels the same way about you, and he doesn't even know you exist.
I'm sick of hearing about the US projecting its bad laws outside its jurisdiction.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"You can't shut us down. The internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!"
Seems like our IP laws are really helping our industries right now. Soon all data centers will be located out of the reach of *AA ?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Well you're doing it to your self as the summary makes no referance to the ongoing legal case.
I'm really not sure that .ga (Gabon) was the best choice - see: http://www.internetnews.me/2012/01/13/is-the-gabon-registry-offline/
Looks like yet another classic Kim Dotcom scam.
This guy isn't an internet hero, he is a piece of shit.
According the the article I read in my dead-tree Wired issue, plus speculation, the new service is going to be fully encrypted, forcing all users to encrypt their uploads so that the upload service itself cannot see what the content on its severs is, and so they have total plausible deniability, with the added bonus that the government also can't find clear-text data on their servers to incriminate them with.
This might also allow you and your trusted friends to upload anything you want, and megaupload/your ISP/the government cannot then bust you for copyright infringement or whatever, for the practical reason that they don't know what the data is. Of course this is possible now with current technology, but a cloud storage service with a good user interface with this feature 'built-in' and mandatory might be what it takes to get ordinary people to encrypt their content. Imagine Dropbox with mandatory encryption. True cypherpunks would argue that everything should have always been like this anyway.
Of course, Big Content doesn't roll over for such technicalities so I expect this to simply spawn more anti-cryptography laws.
Just wait until it is the UN dictating the rules.
They are already lining up "blasphemy" laws restricting free speech and eyeballing a global Internet Tax.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
From the page on server limitations:
Unfortunately we can't work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process.
When people ask "why use me.ga?" they're going to hear the Kim DotCom story. Eventually it'll be taken for granted that Hollywood has corrupted the Justice Department. This could be the PR move that turns ordinary people against Hollywood.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
There's a procedure to follow, though. Anti-crypto laws are tricky things to get through politically. Doable, but it needs a good excuse, and 'Hollywood isn't rich enough' is not going to do it easily. The obvious justification is child porn. The mere suspicion of child pornography is toxic today, and any acts justified as opposing child porn are near-impossible to argue against without being branded a pedophile-enabler.
Imagine Dropbox with mandatory encryption. True cypherpunks would argue that everything should have always been like this anyway.
There are reasons why this isn't the default -- Dropbox relies on de-duplication to reduce their storage and bandwith costs.
Encrypting the data before upload would remove that possibility.
Not that it's not worth doing -- but it will be more expensive than a non-secure equivalent.
I get the feeling the RIAA, MPAA and the rest of the anti-piracy morons are holding us back, dragging us down.
At some point I stop caring about your "intellectual property" and "media licenses" and long for you to disappear.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I just pointed out to a friend of mine in I.T., last week, that it seems odd how U.S. govt. largely forgot about their interest in controlling encryption. I mean, it wasn't THAT long ago that they were still forcing Microsoft to make a separate version of Internet Explorer because it was a federal crime to export it with 128-bit encryption capabilities in it. And remember how worked up they got over the Pretty Good Privacy software when it was first released to the public?
But despite CPUs getting many times more powerful and the "common man" encrypting things with 1024 bit encryption in many cases as default settings in programs, you don't really hear a peep out of govt. about it these days.
I have to assume this means they're capable of breaking it on-demand, so they're happy to let people use the stuff freely and get a false sense of security. Maybe there's a back-door or flaw in the math the NSA knows about, or they simply have such massive super-computer data centers at their disposal now, they can brute force break it? I don't know ... but it's HIGHLY unusual for government to just quit concerning itself with something it was really paranoid about just years earlier, when it purports to make sure they can't view the contents of communications between people.
Sure, the MAFIAA can trawl file sharing sites and get the password to the key. But they can't trace it back to who uploaded it, so they can't sue you. And Mega can't know that you've posted the key, so Mega can't know what's in the encrypted file. So they can't sue Mega either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why would he be re-launching his site (the explicit topic at hand)? I'll give you a hint, it' because the US projected it's power outside its jurisdiction.
Meh, the Internet will just route around the damage. The problem is that the "damage" is the USA.
Learn to love Alaska
Carpathia still has the warez on their servers. Which are still frozen by DoJ.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/10/05/report-seized-megaupload-data-be-subject-future-us-court-hearing
Is the wrong way to go. It provides several points of failure that are hard to get around, and has proven to be vulnerable time and time again as we lose sites like Demonoid and Library.nu ( and countless others before them ).
Best bet is to go underground with something like Freenet or I2P. Sure, it may not be as 'transparent', but that is fixable by creating brain dead installers and multiple public access points. ( then you play whack-a-mole as those are shut down ). The days of the 'open net' is limited.
This way there is nothing specific to shut down.
Of course if there is a money trail, and there will be with Kim, that is still vulnerable.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's funny how right wingers in the USA seem to think the United Nations is all-powerful.
Guys, the UN has no power whatsoever, it cannot dictate laws to member states, much less enforce them.
No sig for the moment.
The problem is that the "damage" is the USA.
HARDLY
The USA is not alone in this bullshit by any stretch. There are just as many problems in the EU right now. ALL governments right now are corrupt and owned by very powerful groups with intense interests in protecting the revenue from their copyrights.
Nobody wants to change, and there are a bunch of rent seeking sociopaths that are trying to kill freedom as quickly as possible, because it is the most direct route to having the control required to protect their business models and assets.
To say it is the USA only, gives a huge pass to those governments in the EU.
There are tons of bad treaties that come out of the UN and that are nearly impossible for member nations to leave. For example, the US couldn't legalize drugs however much it may want to. These treaties often represent policy laundering and are imposed undemocratically by the executive branch. Furthermore, the UN has something much stronger than military, namely the power to punish states through trade penalties, and those penalties are imposed on any nation that steps out of line, including the US.
The UN isn't all powerful, but it is also far from powerless. And we should never forget that the UN is not a democracy and has no moral authority; the majority of its members are undemocratic or worse. The UN is merely a body where states can try to work out their differences, nothing more.
Nah, the US is the damage. Just like nobody outside China is affected by the great firewall, and most inside don't know or aren't affected by it (the damage routing has already been done), the routing around the US is happening now. Europe and such are better, at least most placed don't allow patents on math, yet, so no software patents. Strange that the US law prevents a sorting algorithm on paper from being patented, but if you patent it "on a computer" that patent can be applied t the algorithm on paper. That kind of insanity is damage and will be routed around.
THe ??AA have the choice to adapt before irrelevance is complete, or they will be routed around, no matter how may of who they buy. Sure, they can shut down Napster and megauploads, but how's that doing for online piracy? Still going up? How about CD prices? Still increasing as downloads increase? You can (economically) prove the system is broken just from that. Demand goes down and supply goes up while prices go up. A person sufficiently cynical would argue they are keeping CD prices artificially high (and restricting authorized online availability) to push people to illegal downloads to then go out and make all that illegal, when dropping the price on CDs to $5 or $10 each for everything would greatly increase profits and revenues.
Learn to love Alaska
Possibly. But encryption is needed for internet commerce, which is worth $684B in the US. If there is anything that talks louder than the military, it's money.
Panem? Check. Circenses? Check. Revolution averted.
You're right. Pedophile enabler is stupid. And yet, it works. Do not underestimate public ignorance and desire for a good old-fashioned moral outrage, or a legitimate target to hate. Pedophiles are the new communists, or witches. A little flimsy evidence is all you need to ruin someone's life. After all, if they won't reveal the key, they must be guilty.
To say it is the USA only, gives a huge pass to those governments in the EU.
The thing is, though, it seems very much to be USA driven., and the Euros (from what I've read) have been fighting against it harder than pretty much anyone. TPB is Swedish, yes? SOPA, PIPA, TPP, DMCA, yada, yada, yada: USA! When it showed up in Poland, thousands (tens of thousands?) of people actually hit the streets (literally) in lousy weather and scared Polish politicians silly enough to kill it. France is "this close" to killing their "N Strikes" (HADOPI?) thingy. Portugal, Spain, ... don't appear to think this's a problem worth their time, or that kind of a solution to the problem is worse than the problem itself.
The US, on the other hand, continues full speed ahead; damn the torpedos! The USA's legacy entertainment industry is definitely the prime mover behind most of this madness.
[I love Poles. :-) This world needs lots more people like them.]
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit