where every alternative focuses on squeezing the most money out of people.
Uh... I don't think Kimble paid for his mansion, cars and other luxuries with good will and motivation. If you think this is motivated by revenge, not money, you need to visit the real world more often.
If you do it this way, then why would you use Mega over any of the other cloud-storage options on the market? The ones with more experience and infrastructure?
(had to split it up due to the lameness filter. doh!)
There isn't even a name for this order of magnitude. When cryptographers say that "1024bit can be broken with far greater ease than 2048bit", that is the understatement of the year. For comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated to be around:
I have no idea why you would choose to do this in JavaScript
Because Javascript is inherently insecure for cryptography. Never do any serious crypto in Javascript. Unless you want it to be broken.
but do we have to watch every little step and misstep of Kim Dotcom? He's starting to rub me the wrong way as a sort of attention whore.
And that's exactly what he is. He's playing/. and everyone else in a bid of either a) selling them out to the FBI - again (he's done it before, check his history) or b) getting out of his current predicament thanks to publicity and public pressure.
Ugh, and his name is something straight out of Idiocracy... did he try to change his first name to "The Bomb" but was blocked by the TSA?:-)
No, he's an attention whore. His actual name is Kim Schmitz. He's from Kiel, a small northern german city less than a hundred miles from where I live. He left Germany after a criminal conviction and because the hackers and geeks here had caught on to his game and he was widely despised.
One, if what the idiot co-founder said in the update is true, Mega can decrypt your data. Which means their deniability just died and they will be on the hook, which means they are very likely to give your data to law enforcement in order to get out of everything.
Two, a fantastic and fairly neutral german article outlines the impact on the markets and musings on some more philosophical backgrounds. The TL;DR version is that Kim is pretty much the same as the banksters we want to see in jail for the financial crisis - he takes an artificially scarce commodity he doesn't own (data in his case, money for the banksters) and creates a mechanism through which it gets artificially inflated (sharing / bubble of complex financial products) with the purpose of making a profit for himself, ignoring the devastating effect that inflation has on the base value for small market participants.
Or if even that is too long for you: Kim will make money, big musicians, movies, etc. won't really care, small artists and smaller movies will suffer.
As much as the truth hurts, but if you want to support small artists, then iTunes does more for them then Mega will. You'll need to do a bit of research to verify that, but it'll be enlightening. I applaud the Pirate Bay for realizing their effect and trying to undo it with their recent initiatives.
Read the update on the article as well. The guys are entirely clueless about security and encryption.
TFA is correct. This isn't a few minor issues. The main feature of the service is broken, and if what they say in the update is true and not just clueless, then law enforcement can and will get at your data, too.
Yes, together with the magic Unicorns that guard your data and the gnomes that print the money to pay for it all.
No, it's not a sting operation run by the US government that has made a deal with someone looking to a couple years of prison who desperately doesn't want to go there. They would never do that. He would never do that. None of them has done it before...
Problem here is that you will have to outright ban encryption to solve this problem.
You're thinking techie again, not legalese.
The law is quite familiar with seemingly shizophrenic approaches. For example, they have an odd thing that is neither OR nor AND nor XOR - a lawyer can claim that his client wasn't even near the crime scene at that time, but if he was he didn't do it, and if he did then he was intoxicated and not in his right mind. He can claim all of these three as true at the same time, and nobody in the courtroom will even raise an eyebrow, except for the techie whose brain has just shut down with a long list of logic errors.
What exactly is the difference between a public lockers providing company and what mega is doing?
The difference is that the law deals with humans and motivations, something you ignore entirely. If I were to set up that locker company, the case would probably be shut down. But if a formerly convicted criminal who is currently on trial for drug deals did it, and if he had made a public statement basically saying "only our company uses opaque steel doors instead of the glass doors other companies use, so even we won't know if you store, say, drugs, in them, hint hint" he would very likely be convicted if there is even the slightest bit of evidence.
And that can easily be done without making lockers illegal. It's how the law works. I've been in enough court rooms to understand that a judge will judge the particular case in front of him. Only the high courts consider the broad implications of their judgements, for good reasons. And you would be surprised how capable these people are. Kim and many techies is guilty of arrogance. You, too, seem to think that only geeks have brains. Most of the judges I've met were very smart people who can easily blow a big hole into your whole circumvention scheme.
Never forget that these people meet someone new who had a brilliant idea to get away with his crime every week. It's like your lawyer friend coming to you and saying something like "I've had this brilliant idea yesterday. Your web application you've been complaining about, it would run so much faster if you only... (insert old idea you've heard 1000 times before here)".
The legal system doesn't fall for these lame attempts at "hack the law". They've been dealing with creative interpretations, weasel-wording, finding-of-loopholes and everything else we techies think we're masters of for more than two milennia. Ourt "brilliant hacks" are barely worth a yawn in the area of law.
GP is completely right. A judge will look at this and basically say "dude, seriously?". The prosecution will have to prove its case, sure. But Kim and most techies think that's a problem of mathematics, and by adding a tiny variable of unknown value to the equation, they can make it impossible to solve.
But that's not how the law works. At all.
Disclaimer: I'm a techie, not a lawyer. But through business I've had more then ample contact with the legal system, including many court cases.
If Mega just takes down all the DMCAed links, it will have a 100 percent copyrighted material takedown record as far as its own knowledge is concerned.
Yeah, right. Because judges are stupid and fall for even the most transparent and obvious front. *facepalm*
You'd think his n-th run-in with the legal system would've made him a bit smarter. I feel sorry for the next bunch of naive folks he'll take down with him when they bust Mega and folks lose their data again.
Here's what I assume when I'm on wild speculations: The whole thing is orchestrated and Kim is in on it. Maybe not entirely voluntarily, but more on a "do this and we'll let you get off easily" way, but it wouldn't be the first time he sold out his partners.
Him starting up the next identical thing right away is very, very telling. Only a total fool or a total egomaniac would do that - or someone who wants to give the Hollywood lobbyists a "see, that is why we need even more laws" argument.
Stop thinking like a geek for a moment and try thinking like a politician. You passed a law. Someone blatantly violates it (or so you are told) and is finally brought down - but then the legal proceedings the muddy and he flips you the finger and does the same thing again. Wouldn't your reaction be that you need to re-write the law to make it easier to shut him down? You know, not because you are evil, because you are not, but obviously that law has some glaring holes. It needs to be more clear, needs to have exceptions removed and a speedier, simpler process to bring down the guilty.
Kim is doing more to support Hollywood than to damage it.
No, he hasn't. He made a point of seemingly conforming to the law, while behind-the-scenes, copyright violations were invited and supported.
Megaupload was just like a fence shop who said that they'll remove any item that the owners told them was stolen from the shelves, while still accepting truckloads of stuff from known thieves in the backroom.
But that isn't even my concern. My concern is that total idiots consider them "on our side". Kim is on nobodys side but his own. Our friends are the FSF, the EFF, EDRI, the Pirate Party - people that stand up for our rights and defend them, and want to change the law. Not publicity-horny money-grabbers who simply break it in creative ways for their own profit.
I know the concept is hard to grasp for many these days, as things like the US presidential elections have been turned into a "choose the lesser of two evils" campaigns. Take a step back and realize that by choosing the lesser of two evils you still support evil. If I were religious, I'd say it's the most devious trickery of the devil.
AFK - I need to add "you agree to only use this site while standing on your head naked at the center of a busy intersection" to my ToS. Burried somewhere in the middle. And then send out anonymous invitations to everyone I dislike...
I find it so hard to support them when they make my skin crawl.
Then don't. Why do you think you need to support them? Just because it's the standard/. view?
Kim is a career criminal and a scum. That some of his enemies are also yours doesn't mean he is your friend. On the contrary, he and his illegal, commercial copyright violations are the exact kinds of things that Hollywood wants and needs to lobby for more and harsher laws, and the last thing those of us interested in a balanced and reasonable copyright need.
True. His sole purpose in life is money and fame. If you know his history, you'll have to agree. He doesn't care for the law, good and evil or the copyright mafia. He's not your friend. He just happens to rob the bank you hate.
Now I don't live in the USA, but I've been watching from afar. And it seems to me that both sides are getting it all wrong.
As I see it, the real problem isn't the guns, but that people with guns kill other people.
So, banning guns seems to be starting at the furthest possible end of the causality chain. A more logical approach would be - and I am offering two alternatives here - to either a) ban killing or b) ban people
Much more logical and not subject to so much details and matters of definition.
PS: Someone will probably point out that killing is already illegal and didn't work, so we can move to proposal b) immediately.
The purpose of the second amendment is not for sporting, hunting, or even home defense. It is there to prevent the government from disarming the people and instituting tyranny and/or fascism. We have the second amendment to preserve our natural right to shoot tyrants and fascists should our system of checks and balances fail and they come into power.
And it became obsolete when the tank and fighter plane were invented. Good luck fighting the government with your pistol and assault rifle, when they can drive an M1A1 through your house, killing everyone inside, without wasting a round of ammunition on you.
According to our own records, automatic or high-capacity weapons are used so infrequently to perpetrate crimes that they don't even have their own separate breakdown - they're sloshed into the 'other' bucket with weapons like 'talking billy bass animated fish sculpture'. The most popular weapon for crime appears to be cheap semiautomatic pistols. The cheaper the better.
But, like the TSA, the whole thing is just theatre.
Automatic weapons get the focus for two reasons. One, they create the more horrifying media pictures and two, it is easier to argue.
I'm with you 100%. Plus remember that most gun-related deaths and injuries are due to accidents, not shootings. But again, 100 people killing or wounding themselves over the course of a week throughout the country in individual events simply makes for 100 tiny page-10 articles in the local newspaper. But 20 people shot in one event, that's national news.
It's all part of the spectacle, to quote Hakim Bey.
Well, I guess that will be among the things that the court needs to find out. Right now, we only have the words of the to sides, which - highly unsurprisingly - both say what they need to say so it appears they are blameless and the other guy is responsible for everything. The truth seldom turns out to be so simple and binary.
You believe what you want to believe. Mega upload isn't accused of uploading copyrighted stuff themselves. The case resolves around them turning a blind eye to many, many violations of their TOS and their intentional inviting it. You can write whatever you want in your TOS, if your actual activities show otherwise, it is just a piece of paper. What you DO matters, words are cheap.
Why? There is absolutely no reason to bring charities into this equation, and you are very much in danger if getting some very unintended consequences - namely charities making good amount of money from spam and thus becoming disinclined to do join in the fight against it.
Slashdot Mirror
where every alternative focuses on squeezing the most money out of people.
Uh... I don't think Kimble paid for his mansion, cars and other luxuries with good will and motivation. If you think this is motivated by revenge, not money, you need to visit the real world more often.
If you do it this way, then why would you use Mega over any of the other cloud-storage options on the market? The ones with more experience and infrastructure?
I was pretty up on this new venture until all of these clearly misleading statements began to appear.
Indeed, for a self-labelled Robin Hood, it's all just so much standard corporate PR damage-control talk.
However, it is a lot more clueful than the first statements. At least this time they had someone who understood the basics of crypto look over it.
Isn't this kind of nitpicking?
I'm not sure. The difference between 1024 bit and 2048 bit is that 2048 bit is this times as much as 1024:
17976931348623159077293051907890247336179769789423065727343008115773\
26758055009631327084773224075360211201138798713933576587897688144166\
22492847430639474124377767893424865485276302219601246094119453082952\
08500576883815068234246288147391311054082723716335051068458629823994\
7245938479716304835356329624224137216
(had to split it up due to the lameness filter. doh!)
There isn't even a name for this order of magnitude. When cryptographers say that "1024bit can be broken with far greater ease than 2048bit", that is the understatement of the year. For comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe is estimated to be around:
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000\
000000000000000
I have no idea why you would choose to do this in JavaScript
Because Javascript is inherently insecure for cryptography. Never do any serious crypto in Javascript. Unless you want it to be broken.
but do we have to watch every little step and misstep of Kim Dotcom? He's starting to rub me the wrong way as a sort of attention whore.
And that's exactly what he is. He's playing /. and everyone else in a bid of either a) selling them out to the FBI - again (he's done it before, check his history) or b) getting out of his current predicament thanks to publicity and public pressure.
Ugh, and his name is something straight out of Idiocracy ... did he try to change his first name to "The Bomb" but was blocked by the TSA? :-)
No, he's an attention whore. His actual name is Kim Schmitz. He's from Kiel, a small northern german city less than a hundred miles from where I live. He left Germany after a criminal conviction and because the hackers and geeks here had caught on to his game and he was widely despised.
You should care.
One, if what the idiot co-founder said in the update is true, Mega can decrypt your data. Which means their deniability just died and they will be on the hook, which means they are very likely to give your data to law enforcement in order to get out of everything.
Two, a fantastic and fairly neutral german article outlines the impact on the markets and musings on some more philosophical backgrounds. The TL;DR version is that Kim is pretty much the same as the banksters we want to see in jail for the financial crisis - he takes an artificially scarce commodity he doesn't own (data in his case, money for the banksters) and creates a mechanism through which it gets artificially inflated (sharing / bubble of complex financial products) with the purpose of making a profit for himself, ignoring the devastating effect that inflation has on the base value for small market participants.
Or if even that is too long for you: Kim will make money, big musicians, movies, etc. won't really care, small artists and smaller movies will suffer.
As much as the truth hurts, but if you want to support small artists, then iTunes does more for them then Mega will. You'll need to do a bit of research to verify that, but it'll be enlightening. I applaud the Pirate Bay for realizing their effect and trying to undo it with their recent initiatives.
Read the update on the article as well. The guys are entirely clueless about security and encryption.
TFA is correct. This isn't a few minor issues. The main feature of the service is broken, and if what they say in the update is true and not just clueless, then law enforcement can and will get at your data, too.
Yes, together with the magic Unicorns that guard your data and the gnomes that print the money to pay for it all.
No, it's not a sting operation run by the US government that has made a deal with someone looking to a couple years of prison who desperately doesn't want to go there. They would never do that. He would never do that. None of them has done it before...
Problem here is that you will have to outright ban encryption to solve this problem.
You're thinking techie again, not legalese.
The law is quite familiar with seemingly shizophrenic approaches. For example, they have an odd thing that is neither OR nor AND nor XOR - a lawyer can claim that his client wasn't even near the crime scene at that time, but if he was he didn't do it, and if he did then he was intoxicated and not in his right mind. He can claim all of these three as true at the same time, and nobody in the courtroom will even raise an eyebrow, except for the techie whose brain has just shut down with a long list of logic errors.
What exactly is the difference between a public lockers providing company and what mega is doing?
The difference is that the law deals with humans and motivations, something you ignore entirely. If I were to set up that locker company, the case would probably be shut down. But if a formerly convicted criminal who is currently on trial for drug deals did it, and if he had made a public statement basically saying "only our company uses opaque steel doors instead of the glass doors other companies use, so even we won't know if you store, say, drugs, in them, hint hint" he would very likely be convicted if there is even the slightest bit of evidence.
And that can easily be done without making lockers illegal. It's how the law works. I've been in enough court rooms to understand that a judge will judge the particular case in front of him. Only the high courts consider the broad implications of their judgements, for good reasons. And you would be surprised how capable these people are. Kim and many techies is guilty of arrogance. You, too, seem to think that only geeks have brains. Most of the judges I've met were very smart people who can easily blow a big hole into your whole circumvention scheme.
Never forget that these people meet someone new who had a brilliant idea to get away with his crime every week. It's like your lawyer friend coming to you and saying something like "I've had this brilliant idea yesterday. Your web application you've been complaining about, it would run so much faster if you only ... (insert old idea you've heard 1000 times before here)".
No, you are missing the GP's point.
The legal system doesn't fall for these lame attempts at "hack the law". They've been dealing with creative interpretations, weasel-wording, finding-of-loopholes and everything else we techies think we're masters of for more than two milennia. Ourt "brilliant hacks" are barely worth a yawn in the area of law.
GP is completely right. A judge will look at this and basically say "dude, seriously?". The prosecution will have to prove its case, sure. But Kim and most techies think that's a problem of mathematics, and by adding a tiny variable of unknown value to the equation, they can make it impossible to solve.
But that's not how the law works. At all.
Disclaimer: I'm a techie, not a lawyer. But through business I've had more then ample contact with the legal system, including many court cases.
If Mega just takes down all the DMCAed links, it will have a 100 percent copyrighted material takedown record as far as its own knowledge is concerned.
Yeah, right. Because judges are stupid and fall for even the most transparent and obvious front. *facepalm*
You'd think his n-th run-in with the legal system would've made him a bit smarter. I feel sorry for the next bunch of naive folks he'll take down with him when they bust Mega and folks lose their data again.
That's a lot of assumptions there.
Here's what I assume when I'm on wild speculations: The whole thing is orchestrated and Kim is in on it. Maybe not entirely voluntarily, but more on a "do this and we'll let you get off easily" way, but it wouldn't be the first time he sold out his partners.
Him starting up the next identical thing right away is very, very telling. Only a total fool or a total egomaniac would do that - or someone who wants to give the Hollywood lobbyists a "see, that is why we need even more laws" argument.
Stop thinking like a geek for a moment and try thinking like a politician. You passed a law. Someone blatantly violates it (or so you are told) and is finally brought down - but then the legal proceedings the muddy and he flips you the finger and does the same thing again. Wouldn't your reaction be that you need to re-write the law to make it easier to shut him down? You know, not because you are evil, because you are not, but obviously that law has some glaring holes. It needs to be more clear, needs to have exceptions removed and a speedier, simpler process to bring down the guilty.
Kim is doing more to support Hollywood than to damage it.
No, he hasn't. He made a point of seemingly conforming to the law, while behind-the-scenes, copyright violations were invited and supported.
Megaupload was just like a fence shop who said that they'll remove any item that the owners told them was stolen from the shelves, while still accepting truckloads of stuff from known thieves in the backroom.
But that isn't even my concern. My concern is that total idiots consider them "on our side". Kim is on nobodys side but his own. Our friends are the FSF, the EFF, EDRI, the Pirate Party - people that stand up for our rights and defend them, and want to change the law. Not publicity-horny money-grabbers who simply break it in creative ways for their own profit.
I prefer to not choose an evil, thank you.
I know the concept is hard to grasp for many these days, as things like the US presidential elections have been turned into a "choose the lesser of two evils" campaigns. Take a step back and realize that by choosing the lesser of two evils you still support evil. If I were religious, I'd say it's the most devious trickery of the devil.
It is a crime right now?
Seriously?
AFK - I need to add "you agree to only use this site while standing on your head naked at the center of a busy intersection" to my ToS. Burried somewhere in the middle. And then send out anonymous invitations to everyone I dislike...
I find it so hard to support them when they make my skin crawl.
Then don't. Why do you think you need to support them? Just because it's the standard /. view?
Kim is a career criminal and a scum. That some of his enemies are also yours doesn't mean he is your friend. On the contrary, he and his illegal, commercial copyright violations are the exact kinds of things that Hollywood wants and needs to lobby for more and harsher laws, and the last thing those of us interested in a balanced and reasonable copyright need.
True. His sole purpose in life is money and fame. If you know his history, you'll have to agree. He doesn't care for the law, good and evil or the copyright mafia. He's not your friend. He just happens to rob the bank you hate.
Now I don't live in the USA, but I've been watching from afar. And it seems to me that both sides are getting it all wrong.
As I see it, the real problem isn't the guns, but that people with guns kill other people.
So, banning guns seems to be starting at the furthest possible end of the causality chain. A more logical approach would be - and I am offering two alternatives here - to either
a) ban killing
or
b) ban people
Much more logical and not subject to so much details and matters of definition.
PS: Someone will probably point out that killing is already illegal and didn't work, so we can move to proposal b) immediately.
The purpose of the second amendment is not for sporting, hunting, or even home defense. It is there to prevent the government from disarming the people and instituting tyranny and/or fascism. We have the second amendment to preserve our natural right to shoot tyrants and fascists should our system of checks and balances fail and they come into power.
And it became obsolete when the tank and fighter plane were invented. Good luck fighting the government with your pistol and assault rifle, when they can drive an M1A1 through your house, killing everyone inside, without wasting a round of ammunition on you.
According to our own records, automatic or high-capacity weapons are used so infrequently to perpetrate crimes that they don't even have their own separate breakdown - they're sloshed into the 'other' bucket with weapons like 'talking billy bass animated fish sculpture'. The most popular weapon for crime appears to be cheap semiautomatic pistols. The cheaper the better.
But, like the TSA, the whole thing is just theatre.
Automatic weapons get the focus for two reasons. One, they create the more horrifying media pictures and two, it is easier to argue.
I'm with you 100%. Plus remember that most gun-related deaths and injuries are due to accidents, not shootings. But again, 100 people killing or wounding themselves over the course of a week throughout the country in individual events simply makes for 100 tiny page-10 articles in the local newspaper. But 20 people shot in one event, that's national news.
It's all part of the spectacle, to quote Hakim Bey.
Well, I guess that will be among the things that the court needs to find out. Right now, we only have the words of the to sides, which - highly unsurprisingly - both say what they need to say so it appears they are blameless and the other guy is responsible for everything. The truth seldom turns out to be so simple and binary.
You believe what you want to believe. Mega upload isn't accused of uploading copyrighted stuff themselves. The case resolves around them turning a blind eye to many, many violations of their TOS and their intentional inviting it. You can write whatever you want in your TOS, if your actual activities show otherwise, it is just a piece of paper. What you DO matters, words are cheap.
Refresh rates? A TV shows 24/25/29 fps, while most gamers want to have 60fps. Doubling the frame rate for a display device isn't exactly trivial.
Note this is just a guess. I don't have a TV so I don't bother checking specs of any new ones, but this seems to be the most immediate difference.
Why? There is absolutely no reason to bring charities into this equation, and you are very much in danger if getting some very unintended consequences - namely charities making good amount of money from spam and thus becoming disinclined to do join in the fight against it.
mod parent up.
If the fee would go to the recipient, we could be talking anti-spam measures. With the fee going to FB, it's just cashing in on spam.
There is no meta-life. But life being an Infinite Game, it has multiple layers that are meta to each other, but not to the game per se.