MegaUpload
Update: Excellent interview with Kim Dotcom on Campbell Live.
Now I had never heard of MegaUpload until this story broke in NZ about it, and him living in Coatesville mansion (that place looks wicked!!) which is in my region (Auckland)! Straight up, that's intense!
But I feel sorry for him, I hope the pussy NZ government doesn't bend over and extradite him (they will) I think it sounds a bit of an over-reaction at this point in time, I mean take this excerpt from Wikipedia below, I have yet to find anything decent about exactly what he's done wrong. He claims he's innocent according to reuters. Perhaps he is bad, even if he is, taking the site down should be enough, he doesn't need to be arrested and extradited.
The best article I've found so far has been this Ars Technica one Why the feds smashed MegaUpload. At least this makes me confident now the feds have some "proof" knew they were pirates, but so is YouTube in many ways too, and at least both YouTube AND MegaUpload provide a take-down tools for copyrights holders to remove stuff. Another good place to check is this Quora page.
Scariest part of it all tho, is this bit at the end of the NYT article: “The government hopes to use their private words against them,†Mr. Kerr said. “This should scare the owners and operators of similar sites.â€
Legal commentators point out that while the indictment may be correct and Megaupload might have acted as a criminal conspiracy as claimed, a number of points in the indictment are based upon selective interpretations and legal concepts (described in one article as "novel theories" of the law) and could be challenged in court. An L.A. Times analysis stated that the author was "struck by how far the indictment goes to find something nefarious"; likewise a TechDirt analysis concluded that while the founder of Megaupload had a significant history of "flouting the law", evidence has potentially been taken out of context or misrepresented and could "come back to haunt other online services who are providing perfectly legitimate services". Both analyses concur that other evidence could show criminality; the concerns were not irrefutable.
I mean the site's been replaced by an FBI logo, stink. They reckon at one stage is was the 13th biggest site on the net.
Anonymous Respond
Global hacker group anonymous have responded by creating this web browser based DDOS tool:
http://pastehtml.com/view/blakyjwbi.html
...which seems to automatically fire up a bunch of connections to justice.gov. Nasty!
Created by: Paralegal.net