
Feds, Please Return My Personal Files Stored at MegaUpload - nextparadigms
http://torrentfreak.com/feds-please-return-my-personal-files-megaupload-120120/
======
jsilence
"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)"

Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:

* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.

* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener ([http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&submit=Search](http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&submit=Search))

* For files you'd like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.

* distribute the shortened links

* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.

If you don't trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some
webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of 'How to build your
own OpenSource Dropbox clone' recipies out there.
(<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone>). AFAIR they all suck in different
regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.

If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly
neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here:
<http://www.hackerspaces.org> . Don't ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them
to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember,
with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not
paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.

The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized
distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for
the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when
the freebies are being taken away from us.

I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.

/rant

~~~
feralchimp
You're not wrong, Walter.

On the _other_ hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker
community is the prevalence of "see I told you so" and/or "bad things wouldn't
happen to you if you weren't such a dumbass" culture.

The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of
destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a
great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching
Moment.

The safety deposit box example is apt here. If my local bank gets busted for
some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with
all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our
government in that case?

And if we're not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our
realistic options for doing something about that?

~~~
abraxasz
"If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit"

Except that you will probably not put your money in a bank that's widely known
for being a drug dealers haven, will you?

I also am not a big fan of the "see I told you" attitude, but it seems to me
that no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on
megaupload.

Of course there is not guarantee that services like icloud or dropbox will
never get shut down, but they do look much more reliable than megaupload..

~~~
feralchimp
As others have said, "widely known" is an awfully big assumption to be
granting yourself with no argument. There is a wide gulf between a user
expected to competently interact with a web front end, per the features and
cost/benefit directly expressed by that front end, and a user who is expected
to evaluate (on what basis, exactly?) the probability with which a given
Company/Ownership is likely to be obliterated by fiat.

What's _worse,_ HN readership is arguably an upper-crust-of-savvy environment
for making that sort of appeal, but imagine:

\- two weeks ago, someone offers HN readers $100 bets that megaupload will get
raided / shuttered / data frozen in the next two weeks

\- if you take the bet, and you win (megaupload raided), you get $200 back

\- if megaupload doesn't get raided, you get $90 back (i.e. you pay as much
for losing the bet as a megaupload user pays to access to service)

Do you honestly think more than 10% of HN readership would have taken the bet
and tried to double their money? Or would the "smart money" (and again, some
of the smartest money available on the internet) been on megaupload staying up
and available?

~~~
abraxasz
You're right, my apologies for going overboard with a non-justified argument.
When I succeed in looking further than my tech-savvy like-minded friends, I
fall into the trap of thinking about other people about my age.

I don't know about you, but my facebook stream has been polluted with dozens
of messages crying over what happened to megaupload (and not because they had
there work uploaded on it), which (wrongly, I know admit) let me to think that
everybody knew about megaupload shadiness.

Now as you and others rightly pointed out, I forgot about the rest, maybe the
majority of people who used in a totally legal way.

Anyway, point taken !

------
scotty79
So basically police raided and closed off post office and now they feel
entitled to hold and read throuh all letters and all the security deposits of
random people because they have a valid suspicion that some of them contain
cd's with copied music?

~~~
pork
I agree with the sentiment, but in this case, the police raided a private
business with probable cause, and will hold all assets of that business as
possible evidence in a criminal investigation. If your car is found full of
drugs, they will also impound it and inconvenience the other possibly innocent
passengers. If they find a body in a storage facility, they will probably deny
everyone else access to the facility until they have gathered all the evidence
they need.

~~~
alex_c
_If your car is found full of drugs, they will also impound it and
inconvenience the other possibly innocent passengers._

While we're coming up with analogies, this seems more like impounding all the
other cars in a public parking lot because a percentage of them had drugs.

 _If they find a body in a storage facility, they will probably deny everyone
else access to the facility until they have gathered all the evidence they
need._

Shutting down MegaUpload isn't to "gather evidence", it's a punitive, open-
ended action.

~~~
milesskorpen
But if you knew 60% of the cars had drugs, and knew the parking attendants
were mixing in drug and non-drug bearing cars to hide the cars with drugs,
then I suspect you could get a warrant from a judge.

Yea. Stretching the metaphor.

------
YetAnotherAlias
Ignoring the backing-up data issue, this seizing of sites raises a couple of
questions. I had never used Megaupload and I don't have a clue about what that
site did. Assumming, I had stored a bunch of files on Megaupload: 1\.
Shouldn't the Feds return my files? After all those files are my property.
Irrespective of whether or not I had back ups, what gives the Feds the right
to seize my property indefinitely. 2\. Does seizing the site, give the Feds
the right to read through my files? what if I had been working on the next big
super-duper idea, and they steal my ideas? 3\. Would the 'unreasonable search
& seizure' amendment apply to people's files?

These questions would apply to all cloud-storage companies. Can someone with
more legal experience shed some light?

~~~
twelvechairs
> 2\. Does seizing the site, give the Feds the right to read through my files?
> what if I had been working on the next big super-duper idea, and they steal
> my ideas?

Regardless of precise laws (it will take years to make a precedent) it would
seem extremely naive to assume that anything you upload could and will not be
read by the federal authorities, or others (megaupload owners, some guy at
your ISP, etc.)... This is one of the major issues with using 'the cloud' as a
platform for anything sensitive, and doesnt get enough attention.

------
noonespecial
I used it to store embedded linux distro images that I made up for flash
cards. 250meg each. Now I've got a bunch of broken links and some work to do.
Looks like I'm going to have to suffer through all of Rapidshare's junk now.

Bummer.

~~~
Zirro
If they don't happen to have some condition which makes them hard to use for
your situation, I would recommend <http://www.mediafire.com>. I've not used
them as an uploader myself, but to me they seem to have the cleanest, most
modern interface and no annoying timers for downloading and so on. That should
be encouraged.

~~~
vog
While I agree that you should encourage proper business, I don't think that
Mediafire is a good solution for the mentioned purpose. They take $9/month for
4 GB storage, and $49/month for 10 GB storage. That's really expensive!

For $10/month you can easily get a VServer with 20 GB disk space or more. For
$50/month you can rent a Dedicated Server with 2000 GB hard disks. (...
assuming that someone who works with embedded linux images has no problem with
installing a tiny webserver and making regular security upgrades)

~~~
X-Istence
Where can you rent a $50 a month dedicated server with 2 TB disks? In the
United States preferably.

~~~
vog
I don't know (and also don't really care) about US, but here in Germany there
are several good providers. "Hetzner" and "1and1" come to mind.

------
Animus7
There's nothing right about this, but I honestly can't have much sympathy for
people who store their only copies of work files at a site that's notorious
for its association with illegal activity.

~~~
Zirro
I can excuse them for the "association with illegal activity"-part, but having
only one copy of your data, located on such a site, or in the cloud at all, is
very risky. It will be interesting to see how the feds handle this one,
considering Megaupload was used for plenty of legal activities as well.

~~~
mootothemax
_but having only one copy of your data, located on such a site, or in the
cloud at all, is very risky_

I agree with you, but think it's harsh to judge the users by it. It's not that
long ago that it was nothing short of a miracle if the average home user - or
small business for that matter - had _any_ backups.

In a way, I'm heartened by the progress.

~~~
Zirro
Oh yes, if they were backups it's all good. But the impression I got was that
some people had their _only_ copy of certain files stored there.

------
mootothemax
I feel really bad for some of these users; certainly, for the less
technically-inclined or interested, how were they to know that an otherwise
legitimate and professional-looking website would disappear with their data
overnight? Whether it's RapidShare, MediaFire or Amazon S3-backed others, to
the regular user they all look the same.

In the long run, if high-profile removals happen like this, I can see it
causing a general lack of trust in SaaS for the average home user.

~~~
cbs
_I can see it causing a general lack of trust in SaaS for the average home
user._

As it should. Unfortunately, current tech isn't there for the regular user; it
still isn't even there for the technically-inclined user who has a better
grasp on the risks going in. There are very few solid services out of there
right now, and the vast majority of them are only a platform for the techie to
build the user-facing services and/or are highly domain-specific.

I totally agree there is no good way for a regular, or even techie, user to
tell when a service is a fly-by-night. What do you have to gauge them on? How
good of graphic design they have for their website only tells you how much
they care about putting up a pretty face, which is not necessarily tied to the
quality of product at all. The internet is so full of both PR and unwarranted
rage, where do you even start to gauge the quality of a service?

It gets really, really difficult. I thought megaupload was a look-the-other-
way-as-much-as-legally-possible-while-piracy-happens operation because I was
only knew about it because of people who used it to pirate. But at the same
time there were plenty of people who thought they were what they advertized
themselves as, I even had buisness contacts at large reputable organizations
that used them to email me big files all the time.

------
janus
This is what scares me about backing up your files _only_ to the cloud. They
could go down any day and you would lose everything.

The fact that a local copy is kept is what I like about dropbox, and why I
also keep local backups in an external HDD.

~~~
km3k
It's not a backup if it's your only copy. Moving data exclusively to the cloud
is dangerous yes, but backing up isn't. At worst you get into a situation
where you local copy is your only copy until you can back it up to a different
cloud. Like you said, that's why it's good to have multiple backup locations.

------
jrockway
I'd like to get upset about this, but the legal precedent for seizures is
already well established. The government takes something, you get it back When
They Feel Like It.

Your files are gone. Restore them from your backup.

------
guelo
The EFF should collect these and enlist them in a class action lawsuit against
the FBI.

------
a9
My prediction: Client-side encryption is going to become more popular. All
users encrypt files ___before_ __sending to cloud. Then users decide who gets
access to their information. This is just common sense. It might help in areas
like medical records (HIPAA) as well.

If you give Dropbox write-access to your Desktop and all your unencrypted
original files, you are 0wned.

~~~
flomo
This is already common with Megaupload/Rapidshare piracy. People upload
password-protected RARs to prevent the files from getting pulled via hashes or
manual inspection.

------
wildmXranat
How hard would it have been to give people a warning and let them pull their
legitimate files first ? There's a whiff of malice behind seizures of this
kind.

~~~
jfoster
Fair point. MegaUpload has been operating for years. A week extra so that
legitimate users are less impacted would probably have been appreciated.

------
drcube
Law enforcement steals personal property all the time, with no recourse for
the owner. All they need is an excuse to link it with an investigation. Even
if nobody is ever accused of a crime, and nothing goes before a judge. Then
later they sell it at auction and put the proceeds in their own pocket.

Worried about your files? Try worrying about your car or house, they're
equally at risk. Not all cops are evil, but they'll all stand behind each
other regardless.

------
talos
is there any legal recourse against the federal government available to those
who lost property in the seizure?

------
qdog
Putting your files on a 3rd party site like MegaUpload is a lot like buying
food at a random food cart in a 3rd world country. You might not get sick, but
there's no guarantee. If there was a motto for life, it would be Caveat
Emptor.

If they are governed by US laws, it's possible the FBI would return assets to
lawful owners, much like the wind-down of MF Global, but that type of thing
takes quite some time. Also, as possibly bad as that sounds, if MegaUpload had
actually been the cause of data loss instead of an FBI take down, there is no
recourse...other than pursuing MegaUpload via a court system! While I don't
actually think this take down was reasonable, any expectation of warranty in
MegaUpload's service can only be assumed by accepting the laws of the
countries MegaUpload operates in.

------
chris_dcosta
I'm pretty sure dropbox wouldn't be affected by this if the feds decided to do
this to them, as the files are _also_ stored in the computers' folders.

Although it's not clear if a removal from Dropbox servers could trigger a
deletion into my own Dropbox. Perhaps someone at HN knows? Please advise...

~~~
Animus7
> Although it's not clear if a removal from Dropbox servers could trigger a
> deletion into my own Dropbox. Perhaps someone at HN knows? Please advise..

Of course it's technically possible, and Dropbox could probably be compelled
by one law or another to make it happen. The question isn't "could it happen",
but "would it happen".

~~~
Dylan16807
Dropbox could definitely tell the client that all the files are gone, but in
that case you have a three-day local backup in the .dropbox.cache folder. This
has all the files in flat storage, and there exist scripts to put them back at
their original paths.

Dropbox is probably not capable of triggering an actual immediate deletion of
anything, unless they left some kind of backdoor. But any app could
theoretically have a backdoor.

------
thetabyte
This is both a volatilte issue, and a huge opporunity. Someone who hosted
business (or even personal, but business would be stronger) files with
MegaUpload should immidiately contact their lawyer and pursue a court order
demanding the return of their property, just as they would if a delivery
service was shut down for drug smuggling. Whether or not not they are able to
get it back, the ensuing legal and political battle (including whether or not
one occurs at all) may prove to be an important factor in the building
copyright war. I didn't personally have anything stored on MegaUpload, but I'm
making a plea for someone who did to contact their lawyer and find out how to
pursue a court order for the return of their property.

------
MarvinYork
Just use their IP: <http://109.236.83.66/>

~~~
krallja
That is probably a phishing site.

------
pbhjpbhj
Are Universal going to access server logs and start suing individual users to?

------
TomGullen
If they are just backups, can't they make a new backup?

------
av500
Megaupload terms of service:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sn3wCcf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sn3wCcfpn6oJ:www.megaupload.com/%3Fc%3Dterms+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

Whoever stored files there and had the idea they were "safe" should read point
(8) of the above...

~~~
ryan-c
Cache link is dead for me :(

------
16s
If you're storing your stuff in a crack house and the cops close it down and
take all the stuff, you're probably not getting it back.

Edit: Even if your stuff is legal.

~~~
andrewpi
I think the crack house analogy is wrong. What if instead of a crack house,
you stored your goods in an apartment complex where some people used their
apartments for illegal activities? Police wouldn't be justified in entering or
seizing apartments that they didn't have probable cause for.

~~~
16s
The server hard drives contain illegal and legal data and they are not
separately owned/occupied like buildings are. The alleged criminals own all
the hard drives. Cops aren't going to weed through all of that data _and_ then
figure out who owns the legal data _and_ then make an effort to contact _and_
return it to them... there's no way they can do that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There's the rub. The suspects own a company that owns the drives, but you
still own your data and the copyright to it ... it's a data warehouse; it
gettingg raided doesn't alter your ownership.

------
AlexC04
Could this ban not be bypassed if people knew the IP address megaupload was
hosted on?

How was it taken down? Just DNS or soemthing else?

~~~
dangrossman
The physical servers were taken from the data centers as evidence.

------
im3w1l
This gives new meaning to the imperative that you should have off-site backup.

------
melling
Why is this the #1 story on HN? Keeping anything important in one place is a
bad idea.

Btw, we all have our source in git or mercurial (vcs with full history) with
an offsite repo, right? also, RAID isn't a backup. How many lessons do people
need to keep relearning?

~~~
brador
"RAID is not a backup" Please explain...

~~~
cbs
RAID shares a single property with regular backups: it lets you recover from a
disk failure.

But backup is a separate copy of your data set aside for emergencies, while
raid just increases the reliability of your one, in use, copy of the data.

Heres an example: You just accidentally dropped a table from your database.
Can you recover it with a backup? Can you recover it with RAID?

~~~
brador
I guess it depends on the type of data you are backing up too.

If its music/movies it's not that big an issue to get 1 corrupted file, on the
other hand, corruption on critical work files could be a disaster.

I say RAID is fine for a media NAS box, but for critical business files, a
more thorough backup strategy is required...

~~~
cbs
>I say RAID is fine for a media NAS box

In that case I still wouldn't call it a backup. I'd just say that the array
itself was failure-resistant enough that you've chosen not to maintain a
backup.

------
MarvinYork
109.236.83.66

------
res0nat0r
Shoula used S3.

------
michaelfeathers
It's time for some proactive civil rights legislation.

------
its_so_on
Guys, I have some spare time. Any interest in a cross-platform app that acts
as a kind of "raid-1" (mirror) across two or more of these popular services
(e.g. DropBox), any one of which you more or less "trust", but, on the theory
that the Government can take them away? (or if you don't consier that likely,
then just on the theory of "don't put all your eggs in one basket")

The idea is that each service would think you're "just" using them; meanwhile,
you're really hedging your bets. Should ANY ONE of these disappear, in spite
of general internet connectivity on your part, software panics and downloads
ALL your data to your local hard-drive instead (on the theory that perhaps the
government is about to make ALL of them inaccessible to you), sends you an
email and SMS?

Another feature would be local encyrption. Let me know if there's interest in
this. Basically, this is like a raid-1 layer on top of two or more disjoint
services such as DropBox, optionally with local encryption.

~~~
joeyh
git-annex can do this. Currently it supports Amazon S3, The Internet Archive,
Tahoe-LAFFS, and rsync.net as cloud providers (with optional gpg encryption),
as well as various options involving your own VPS, local hard drives, etc.
Adding more cloud providers is a simple matter of haskell programming, or if
you don't do haskell, shell scripting.

------
billpatrianakos
This is ludicrous. How anyone can call MegaUpload a legit site is beyond me.
Everyone knows MegaUpload has been primarily used for storing and sharing
pirated works and while the site _can_ be used for legitimate purposes, by and
large it wasn't. I do feel for the people who honestly did have legit stuff
stored there but I think TorrentFreak's attempt to spin this story like a
legit site got shut down for no reason is laughable.

So every major city has one of those "massage parlors" that are really just
fronts for getting a happy ending. I'd liken this story to a hypothetical
"Massage Parlor/rub and tug shop" getting shut down and then having a major
local newspaper like the Chicago Tribune run a piece on how we should be
outraged that a legit massage place got shut down because of a few bad
employees and customers.

Give me a break, everyone knew what MegaUpload was doing and while I don't
doubt the possibility that some people didn't know and really were using it
legitimately, overall stories like this only give the pro-SOPA people more
ammunition to try to make our side look like a bunch of entitled, unethical,
lawbreakers. Or, as they like to say, "pirates" except when they say it it
implies something totally different than what some of us see it as.

Only the most pedantic of the pedantic could not pick this story enough to try
to make a case for defending MegaUpload. It's not like MU were hiding what
they were doing very well. They only had plausible deniability with their cute
disclaimer in the FAQ and the fact that it _could_ be used legitimately but
largely wasn't. There's no shortage of affordable, popular "file
locker"/sharing sites that are legit out there.

When you try to defend MegaUpload and say "this is what happens when laws like
SOPA take effect" what people outside this community actually hear is:

"look how SOPA can stop those law breaking pirates" and it actually makes us
look bad.

Instead, the message shouldn't be supporting MegaUpload but actually beating
the opposition at their own game by framing it as "look, the Feds can shut
down pirate sites just fine as it is so why do we need SOPA-like laws?" then
go into the dirty details of how SOPA is bad. Definitions and opinions on
piracy, copyright, sharing, etc. are irrelevant in this case. The fact is,
it's illegal right now and so it got shut down.

~~~
radu_floricica
Strange enough, I think both paid sex and non-commercial file sharing should
be perfectly legal.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Non-commercial file sharing and piracy are two different things. I hate to get
pedantic, and I know what you mean but I have to preface what I'm about to say
with this disclaimer lest some other pedant starts mincing words with me.

Anyway, our opinions on what should be legal are totally irrelevant. Fact is,
piracy is illegal and there are laws already in place and enforced on it. You
can't just break the law en masse and call it a protest. The opposition just
ends up marginalizing you as "a group of bad apples" no matter how many people
do it.

I favor copyright and don't much like piracy only because I wouldn't want my
work to be pirated, however I do see the danger in SOPA and the extension of
copyright so I would definitely protest with you guys here. The problem is we
can't make change and be comfortable at the same time. If you want to see a
change in policy you have to imcomvenience yourself a little in this case.
Sitting on your computer and downloading torrents all day them writing a blog
post about it doesn't do anyone but preach to the choir. You have to get
active and get out into the streets. Protest in front of the offices of
Universal, make t-shirts, formally organize, and start talking to the non-
techie public in a way they understand. Unfortunately, us nerds seem to be
terrible at doing that. We're all so pedantic, we argue amongst ourselves over
the little things, and when we do try to educate the public we all spew out
different, non-unified messages that the public doesn't see a reason to care
about. We're all so enamoured with our ability to disrupt systems and do
things our own way that we think we can always play by our own set of rules. I
think thats hubris on our part and it's hurting us. In this case I think we
need to play by their rules in such a way that we turn their own rules against
us. Let's start a PR war. The kind of PR war that uses bumper sticker slogans
and tactics the other side uses. We may think its beneath us but would you
rather be right or would you rather win?

~~~
radu_floricica
By non-commercial file sharing I mean file sharing without making a monetary
profit from it. This definition covers people using megaupload, but does not
cover megaupload itself - who quite obviously made profit from distributing
copyrighted works. There is a different discussion on whether closing it this
way was the right thing, but I'm not interested in it right now.

What I want to point is that the guy downloading and sharing the movie for
home-viewing is definitely non commercial. And this is very much included in
the common definition of piracy (along with commercial distribution like
bootleg cds).

Now, about how it's not ok to break the laws: I disagree. I view laws as a
convenience for having a civilized society, not as sacred rules. I have
enormous respect for them and I am perfectly aware that respecting just the
laws you feel like when you feel like is a recipe for chaos. But I am also
aware that not all laws are just. More to the point, I am aware that
historically a huge number of laws were completely absurd, and from a modern
point of view they were (also literally) medieval. I have absolutely no reason
to believe we are now above having such absurd laws and I think drug and
copyright laws are such modern examples, having no basis in fact and
rationality. Therefore not only I have no respect for them, but also no
compunction about breaking them (other then getting caught).

Prostitution is a different matter btw - in principle I am for legalizing it,
but in practice there are ways it could backfire. Human trafficking is real,
and while I suspect having prostitution illegal only helps it I don't have the
same degree of conviction.

With copyright on the other hand there is no doubt in my mind that it's an
absurd law - therefore I am morally free (and somehow obligated) to ignore it.

Your main objection is that breaking the law doesn't help change it - this I
do not think is true. Having millions, really having a majority of the
population pirating movies and smoking pot - with no catastrophic consequences
on either - only helps drive the point that the laws are absurd. If everybody
respected the law just because it's the law we'd just have a world of sheep.
It's enough we often get the circular reasoning that "all drugs are bad
because they're illegal". I have no desire to see it applied to copyright.

------
gcb
So, how about some real-world analogy?

if someone rents a storage space, and dump a truckload of cocaine there. what
happens to the lawful customers of said storage company?

~~~
worthlessgenius
Wouldn't they be unaffected when the ATF comes and raids that one storage
space? Or would the ATF be so heavy-handed as to barge into everyone's space
and shut the company down?

~~~
gcb
well, by the analogy, the storage company was making money from the cocaine
($10/month to rent the space)

plus they had a gumball machine and two snacks and drinks vending machine in
the hall that led to it and other units! they were clearly making money
everytime the criminal went there with a client.

------
Skitzor
DropBox and MegaUpload are where I keep copies of software that I purchased.
They are commercial software backups.

I GUESS DROPBOX IS NEXT!

------
dbbo
I made a FOSS gnome icon theme whose sole host was megaupload (the tarball was
too large to upload to gnome-look.org). I hope I have the original on an old
computer somewhere.

------
quattrofan
Idiots.

------
DanBC
It's the 21st century. People on HN are supposed to be tech-savvy.

There is no excuse not to have suitable back-ups of your files.

~~~
ohgodthecat
Everyone gets to go through the oh no I've lost everything what am I supposed
to do now. It is almost like a right of passage, most people assume it will
never happen to them and once it does the lesson sticks in really well.

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haakon
JPEGs for twitter screenshots, how annoying.

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jonhendry
Am I the only person who would never consider uploading important stuff to a
site mostly full of warez and bootleg videos and whatnot? That is run by a
known crook?

~~~
droithomme
Yeah, not a good idea to upload stuff to YouTube, you're right. I don't think
it's completely fair to call Eric Schmidt a known crook though. He did ransack
the company for a $100 million "bonus", but he retired last year.

~~~
jonhendry
I wouldn't put important things on YouTube with the need and expectation that
they not disappear, either.

