The news revolving around Kim Dotcom is crazy. I still did not get how the feds were able to get the authority to go to this guys house and take his stuff but whatever.
From wikipedia:
New Zealand authorities were cooperating with the United States’ FBI and Justice Department, Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice, the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam, London’s Metropolitan Police Service, Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Department of Justice in the investigation preceding the arrests.
I guess this is great but why do we have different countries with different laws if we have people thinking that laws around the world should still be the same?
The worst part about all of this is how the US is being reflected on the internet over this. The future of cloud storage in the US is at risk now because we had to go seize a bunch of movies and whatever. People are not going to want to put any data in the US. Why host your data in the US when it is just going to be seized? Someone could intentionally infect your data with something illegal and then the FBI comes and takes it. It may just be talk on the internet now but people are actually thinking about this stuff somewhere. Making decisions where to put their data.
I have heard that in this case though many legal take downs where tried…but who really knows. Many legal take downs are tried all the time everywhere. If one user in some city shares a file on some p2p network do we take down the entire internet in the city to find this one user? No.
I really wonder how many of those files are legit and how many people they upset by taking this data. In the case that they are going to pursue against this gentlemen and others this is going to be a factor. It may be that large amounts of data may be legit. Quote from that link: “Counting only Web-based file-sharing, then, Megaupload accounted for more than a quarter of corporate traffic.”
This is HUGE and the impacts that this case and the actions that the FBI takes are going to be important. The future of the security of our nation and our economy will be effected by this case. We may be making things more difficult.
Remember this is not the first time that the FBI or a gov agency has taken a massive amount of sites or files down before. Remember the time they took down something like a million blogs because of a few bad nuts? That was miniscule compared to the amount of data and servers Megaupload had. Quotes like “Megaupload, the popular Storage and Back-Up Service which accounts for roughly 1% of total traffic on fixed access networks in North America.”
Here are some graphs and tables:
Stop pissing people off. Better ways exist to do the same thing that they are doing. How difficult would it have been to throw up read only copies of the data? For 1 more week the world could have stood Megaupload existing so honest people can keep their honest data.
They were talking here about how long it is taking to clone some data. 10 days to copy 26 terabytes? That is either a lie or it is embarrassing. I can clone 150 TB of data in a day with the right hardware. So can anyone.
Clone the dam hard drives and give them back or give them the clones. Stop delaying.
Dotcom is a moron. How the heck you have 150TB of data and not have that stuff backed up somewhere? (I get that it could have been backed up on megaupload servers but still…somewhere else) This is standard IT, act of god type stuff. The people that only hosted there data on mega-upload are suckers too. This is a good education in cloud hosting for everyone.
Megaupload was used to share pirated material and everyone knows this. But I bet Amazon EC2 is. Softlayer is. Any of the large data providers. That server you have your VPS on…I bet you someone with another VPS on the same server is hosting something copyrighted. When they find illegal data in the Amazon cloud you think they go in and take a whole rack of data? No.
If seizures keep going the way they are going hopefully people will realize what the ‘cloud’ is really for. Not that it is some type of magic layer of the internet that is safe and secure. It is a volatile layer of complex hardware and software that can have massive cascading failures.
I may not be educated in the global complexities of copyright law but even I can see that something is strange here and that we are doing it wrong.
I am not arguing for Dotcom or the FBI because I do not know enough, but from the news that I am reading…something is amiss.