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Five Years Later, Legal Megaupload Data Is Still Trapped On Dead Servers (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's been more than five years since the government accused Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom of criminal copyright infringement. While Dotcom himself was arrested in New Zealand, U.S. government agents executed search warrants and grabbed a group of more than 1,000 servers owned by Carpathia Hosting. That meant that a lot of users with gigabytes of perfectly legal content lost access to it. Two months after the Dotcom raid and arrest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion in court asking to get back data belonging to one of those users, Kyle Goodwin, whom the EFF took on as a client. Years have passed. The U.S. criminal prosecution of Dotcom and other Megaupload executives is on hold while New Zealand continues with years of extradition hearings. Meanwhile, Carpathia's servers were powered down and are kept in storage by QTS Realty Trust, which acquired Carpathia in 2015. Now the EFF has taken the extraordinary step of asking an appeals court to step in and effectively force the hand of the district court judge. Yesterday, Goodwin's lawyers filed a petition for a writ of mandamus (PDF) with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which oversees Virginia federal courts. "We've been asking the court for help since 2012," said EFF attorney Mitch Stolz in a statement about the petition. "It's deeply unfair for him to still be in limbo after all this time."
When you keep your data in the cloud, and don't keep backups on hand, you're at the mercy of the powers to be. I pulled my data out of the cloud when I realized that I didn't need to have it on the Internet 24/7. A local file server works fine for my needs.
When the servers went offline, many thousands of people lost access to their work and home files. I have my photo archive on Megaupload but I have still got no way to get it back as some scardy cat corporate tosser says "No" to everyone just in case someone might get a copy of some porno or action movie. FFS
"deeply unfair" is central theme of all US copyright law.
Why would you expect anything else?
Also do not store anything in the cloud that you cannot afford to get released on the Internet for anyone to see.
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#DeleteFacebook
And you wondered what all those donations to Democrats from Hollywood and the music industry bought?
Ok, spell it out then: what did they buy?
This is one of many reasons the cloud makes a terrible backup. The US government may confiscate your legal data during an investigation, and it takes years before they return it.
Exactly! People, keep your backups on a thumbdrive, so that the police can confiscate it instead.
This isn't the reason the cloud makes a terrible backup. The thing that you want to avoid with a backup is correlated failures: things that cause a failure of your primary store should be different from things that cause a failure of your backup. Your house burning down or thieves coming and stealing your computers will cause failures of both your original and on-site backups. It's a lot less likely that the founder of your cloud provider will be arrested for the same reason that you lose your laptop.
Remember: it only matters if your backup storage fails at the same time as your on-line storage.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Also do not forget that if sharing is what you want (so granma and granpa can see video of their grandkids) :
- Tarsnap, Dropbox, Google Drive might be more expensive for equivalent storage size / bandwidth. But at least there's less risk for them to go belly up.
(Even if there's risk for those with non-free/closed-source clients to rape your privacy).
And you should keep a local copy on your NAS anyway.
- You can serve the files from your NAS (lots of them feature file server), and YOU can control the protection (e.g.: GPG-encrypted files. Or simply AES-password protected Zip archives if your relative are less tech savvy).
For sharing with more users simultaneously (video of your *wedding*. And suddenly all the 20 branches of the family scattered around the planet want them) :
- You can also serve the files over torrent, so you don't need a big bandwidth. Most NAS have also the option built-in.
And again YOU are in charge of the protection (But if you want strong security, just dont use 'Password123' to encrypt the archive, even if that clueless cousin asks for something easy to remember).
No matter what keep a separate local copy (keep a copy on your NAS if you go DropBox. Keep a (non encrypted) copy in a separate non-shared directory on your NAS or a separate NAS if you serve the file themselves).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This presumes that the cloud solution doesn't also live sync with your machine, else an accidental delete is not covered...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Geez, I know this is Slashdot, but really. The guy did have a second copy, but it died - as copies do - at the worst possible instant. In this case, basically as the Mega servers were being seized. Should he have had a 3rd copy? A 4th? Sure, but that's not the point.
The point is: the US government seized servers containing data from thousands and thousands of users. The US government has made no provisions at all for people to retrieve their property. This is theft, plain and simple.
Consider this in meatspace: The government raids a restaurant thought to be violating health regulations. They seize all property in the restaurant: not only stuff belonging to the business, but the wallets, purses and bags belonging to the customers. The restaurant is in limbo - that's bad enough - but why should the customers' private property be seized and never released.
Of course, this is the same country that allows asset forfeiture. I'm sure your wallet is guilty of some crime or other...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Indeed. And the even bigger picture here is that the Government — the single biggest "power that is" — is the primary source of problems. Every interaction with it — be it the TSA agents, the police (even if they aren't after you), the DMV, a hospital, or even the Post Office — carry a high risk of being unpleasant if not outright horrifying. Having an uneventful encounter with these officials is the surprise, not the other way around.
Folks demanding, government takes over this or that are either idiots or hope to profit personally without being subject of the takeover themselves.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.