The two options are not "cloud" and "none". Many alternative solutions exist, including hiring a safety deposit box, contracting companies such as Iron Mountain, or even just sending a copy to a friend's place.
Older versions of ZIP use a seriously flawed and known broken encryption (several minutes? More like several seconds!) However, newer versions use a much more secure version (AES-256 for WinZip, SES Certificate based encryption for PKZip)
Not entirely true. Tools and methods have been created, available on market, to detect TrueCrypt containers. I have seen papers on detecting hidden volumes as well, although it does involve significant analysis of the outer container and assumptions about behavior in the outer container that might not be true in all situations.
Don't rely on TrueCrypt containers being seen as only random data. Additionally, just how often is there a file of completely random data on a storage volume in the first place? That kind of sticks out like a sore thumb by itself.
Unless you call it pagefile.sys or hiberfil.sys. As a general rule, the Windows page file and the Hibernation data file are nothing but huge files full of completely random data. Common locations for these are C:\Windows or the root of any drive (for the pagefile) and the root of your single largest drive (for the hibernation data). And for bonus points, Windows doesn't always delete the hibernation data when hibernation is disabled, so you can just claim that you enabled hibernation once and it didn't delete it.
Actually, their claim that the DMCA didn't apply for that period is correct- you do have to appoint a DMCA agent in order to claim safe harbour protections. It's in the legislation.
No, my argument isn't wrong at all. Open source software companies are just as bad as closed source ones - Red Hat relies on the fact they can sue you for trademark infringement to prevent you distributing RHEL for example. (Hence why CentOS has to spend huge amounts of time stripping Red Hat marks out of RHEL before they distribute it as CentOS). Mozilla relies on the fact they can sue you for trademark infringement to prevent you distributing copies of Firefox in ways they don't like. Pretty much every Open Source company (barring the numerous foundations, which tend to make money from generous individuals donating, which is cool) utilises other aspects of IP laws to prevent distribution in general or distribution in ways they don't like.
You are correct. Also, the penalty for the offense must be imprisonment of 12 months or more (source).
Technically, money laundering is an offense with a 7 year prison term, so it qualifies. The US government have to prove to the district court that there is a reasonable belief that they were in fact money laundering. Conspiracy to commit the crime appears to have very similar penalties to actually performing it as well.
Um, no. Seven(?) governments were involved. Things like this require huge amounts of co-operation, and you can't just say "oh, there's some protests happening on the 18th, we're waiting until the 19th to do it".
Besides, this actually harms the case for SOPA rather than helps it - it provides evidence that SOPA is completely unnecessary, and that if the government sets its sights on an infringer, it can get them no matter where they are.
Read the rest. At some point, it starts into the bits where the owners of the site became intimately aware of what people used their site for and exploited it something chronic. They didn't even put on the appearance of legitimacy (see: Rapidshare).
The bit that's important is that they were aware of the pirated content - first because they on several occasions deliberately searched their servers looking for it so that they could view it themselves, second because they emailed pages with pirated content on it to their advertisers for demo purposes, and third because Google, PayPal, the movie companies and the government all told them so, and they ignored it. That the guy in charge issued a specific directive to ignore removal requests that came from anyone other than a big movie company is pretty bad too. As a general rule, once you become aware of your service being used for criminal acts, you're meant to do something - they did not.
There's a right way and a wrong way to run a file upload site - MegaUpload did everything the wrong way.
I agree. Which is why it pisses me off that only one side of the debate is allowed to use that rationale to defend their viewpoint. If the media companies aren't allowed to claim that every download is a lost sale (it's not) then the opposing viewpoint should not be allowed to claim that every downloader would never have paid in the first place.
Then read the actual Indictment. It looks pretty bad for MU. Especially since the government keeps calling Megaupload "The Conspiracy". You can't support a Conspiracy can you? That's just downright criminal!
Except that your day job wouldn't exist if people pirated to that extent - your employer wouldn't have programmers making software as it would be too risky. Suddenly, you'll need to care about the money...
Your assertion is foolish. This effort required global co-operation on a pretty big scale, with likely months of planning and no doubt a few overseas trips. There's no way it could be perfectly planned months before the protest was even known about to occur the day after the protects. As you say...
"the odds of that happening statistically, is as high as there not being sentient life elsewhere in the galaxy. it is approximating zero."
This Megaupload case seems to be pretty political too (after all, we're having political discussions around it), so talking about how the Feds are in general isn't going to be as meaningful this time. And I don't know how US Federal courts can shut down a Hong Kong company (Hong Kong is a former colony of the British Empire, but was given back to the People's Republic of China around ten years ago). I guess they just stole the DNS record, because.com belongs to the US. Can Megaupload set up a.co.hk or something?
The servers were in Virginia, so no. Incidentally, the court case to determine if Kim should be deported to the United States occurs this afternoon at the North Shore District Court, in Auckland, New Zealand (where Kim is a legal resident). Funny how when it comes to Big Content, cases get rammed through faster than you can say "duh... what?"
Actually, Megaupload is the service that just gave the ability to delete files to the media companies directly - who then proceeded to delete files which they knew weren't even theirs.
Incorrect. Not every single one of the pirates is someone who'd never pay for it. You guys are all so fond of saying "Not Every Pirate is a Lost Sale", but when it's pointed out that by extension this means not every person who paid would not have done so if an easy way to pirate existed, or worse, we dare to point out that the basic premise behind "Not Every Pirate is a Lost Sale" is that you can't know whether the person would have paid for it also extends to you not being able to know whether they would have legally bought if no pirated version were available - suddenly that's "oh no, you're just a paid shill".
I don't see how "the internet" is relevant here. Spykk is right - anti-copyright advocates say that only physical property deserves protection because taking it deprives someone of something, but the only thing stopping people from rampantly copying physical products is the physical impossibility. And the only thing that makes physical objects so cheap is that it's not hugely risky to make them (i.e. there isn't a 99% chance someone will copy it and give it to everyone for free). If it were possible to simply "copy" physical objects, would you then declare that OK too? Even though it would result in less companies and individuals producing physical objects, and exponential increase in pricing due to the significantly higher risk that you will not be able to recoup the investment in raw materials.
Slashdot Mirror
The IP address points to servers in... Ashburn, Virginia, United States. It doesn't exist... the files are GONE.
The two options are not "cloud" and "none". Many alternative solutions exist, including hiring a safety deposit box, contracting companies such as Iron Mountain, or even just sending a copy to a friend's place.
Google and Amazon, unlike Mega, pay their protection money to the mob... er, Government.
Older versions of ZIP use a seriously flawed and known broken encryption (several minutes? More like several seconds!) However, newer versions use a much more secure version (AES-256 for WinZip, SES Certificate based encryption for PKZip)
Not entirely true. Tools and methods have been created, available on market, to detect TrueCrypt containers. I have seen papers on detecting hidden volumes as well, although it does involve significant analysis of the outer container and assumptions about behavior in the outer container that might not be true in all situations.
Don't rely on TrueCrypt containers being seen as only random data. Additionally, just how often is there a file of completely random data on a storage volume in the first place? That kind of sticks out like a sore thumb by itself.
Unless you call it pagefile.sys or hiberfil.sys. As a general rule, the Windows page file and the Hibernation data file are nothing but huge files full of completely random data. Common locations for these are C:\Windows or the root of any drive (for the pagefile) and the root of your single largest drive (for the hibernation data). And for bonus points, Windows doesn't always delete the hibernation data when hibernation is disabled, so you can just claim that you enabled hibernation once and it didn't delete it.
Pretty sure the courts at the Hague don't rule on anything but War Crimes. I'm not sure if The War on Copyright Infringement counts though.
They saw the service as red? Or do you mean make-up? No wait, they can't have seen it as make-up.
I'm not sure something built by Dreamhost, world leaders in network downtime, is something I want to trust my important files to.
Actually, their claim that the DMCA didn't apply for that period is correct- you do have to appoint a DMCA agent in order to claim safe harbour protections. It's in the legislation.
No, my argument isn't wrong at all. Open source software companies are just as bad as closed source ones - Red Hat relies on the fact they can sue you for trademark infringement to prevent you distributing RHEL for example. (Hence why CentOS has to spend huge amounts of time stripping Red Hat marks out of RHEL before they distribute it as CentOS). Mozilla relies on the fact they can sue you for trademark infringement to prevent you distributing copies of Firefox in ways they don't like. Pretty much every Open Source company (barring the numerous foundations, which tend to make money from generous individuals donating, which is cool) utilises other aspects of IP laws to prevent distribution in general or distribution in ways they don't like.
You are correct. Also, the penalty for the offense must be imprisonment of 12 months or more (source).
Technically, money laundering is an offense with a 7 year prison term, so it qualifies. The US government have to prove to the district court that there is a reasonable belief that they were in fact money laundering. Conspiracy to commit the crime appears to have very similar penalties to actually performing it as well.
Um, no. Seven(?) governments were involved. Things like this require huge amounts of co-operation, and you can't just say "oh, there's some protests happening on the 18th, we're waiting until the 19th to do it".
Besides, this actually harms the case for SOPA rather than helps it - it provides evidence that SOPA is completely unnecessary, and that if the government sets its sights on an infringer, it can get them no matter where they are.
Read the rest. At some point, it starts into the bits where the owners of the site became intimately aware of what people used their site for and exploited it something chronic. They didn't even put on the appearance of legitimacy (see: Rapidshare).
The bit that's important is that they were aware of the pirated content - first because they on several occasions deliberately searched their servers looking for it so that they could view it themselves, second because they emailed pages with pirated content on it to their advertisers for demo purposes, and third because Google, PayPal, the movie companies and the government all told them so, and they ignored it. That the guy in charge issued a specific directive to ignore removal requests that came from anyone other than a big movie company is pretty bad too. As a general rule, once you become aware of your service being used for criminal acts, you're meant to do something - they did not.
There's a right way and a wrong way to run a file upload site - MegaUpload did everything the wrong way.
I agree. Which is why it pisses me off that only one side of the debate is allowed to use that rationale to defend their viewpoint. If the media companies aren't allowed to claim that every download is a lost sale (it's not) then the opposing viewpoint should not be allowed to claim that every downloader would never have paid in the first place.
Then read the actual Indictment. It looks pretty bad for MU. Especially since the government keeps calling Megaupload "The Conspiracy". You can't support a Conspiracy can you? That's just downright criminal!
Except that your day job wouldn't exist if people pirated to that extent - your employer wouldn't have programmers making software as it would be too risky. Suddenly, you'll need to care about the money...
Your assertion is foolish. This effort required global co-operation on a pretty big scale, with likely months of planning and no doubt a few overseas trips. There's no way it could be perfectly planned months before the protest was even known about to occur the day after the protects. As you say...
"the odds of that happening statistically, is as high as there not being sentient life elsewhere in the galaxy. it is approximating zero."
This Megaupload case seems to be pretty political too (after all, we're having political discussions around it), so talking about how the Feds are in general isn't going to be as meaningful this time. And I don't know how US Federal courts can shut down a Hong Kong company (Hong Kong is a former colony of the British Empire, but was given back to the People's Republic of China around ten years ago). I guess they just stole the DNS record, because .com belongs to the US. Can Megaupload set up a .co.hk or something?
The servers were in Virginia, so no. Incidentally, the court case to determine if Kim should be deported to the United States occurs this afternoon at the North Shore District Court, in Auckland, New Zealand (where Kim is a legal resident). Funny how when it comes to Big Content, cases get rammed through faster than you can say "duh... what?"
Actually, Megaupload is the service that just gave the ability to delete files to the media companies directly - who then proceeded to delete files which they knew weren't even theirs.
I also did not vote for him. I voted Greens. Oppose S92a!
Incorrect. Not every single one of the pirates is someone who'd never pay for it. You guys are all so fond of saying "Not Every Pirate is a Lost Sale", but when it's pointed out that by extension this means not every person who paid would not have done so if an easy way to pirate existed, or worse, we dare to point out that the basic premise behind "Not Every Pirate is a Lost Sale" is that you can't know whether the person would have paid for it also extends to you not being able to know whether they would have legally bought if no pirated version were available - suddenly that's "oh no, you're just a paid shill".
Virginia actually is in the USA though, whether you wish it wasn't or not.
The servers are in Virginia. You can bet the feds have already raided the colo.
I don't see how "the internet" is relevant here. Spykk is right - anti-copyright advocates say that only physical property deserves protection because taking it deprives someone of something, but the only thing stopping people from rampantly copying physical products is the physical impossibility. And the only thing that makes physical objects so cheap is that it's not hugely risky to make them (i.e. there isn't a 99% chance someone will copy it and give it to everyone for free). If it were possible to simply "copy" physical objects, would you then declare that OK too? Even though it would result in less companies and individuals producing physical objects, and exponential increase in pricing due to the significantly higher risk that you will not be able to recoup the investment in raw materials.