The successor, mega.nz, is genuinely a great service. I know doctors who use it for (legally) sending patient scans, with the key sent OOB, for example. It has a nice linux CLI, mega-cmd, and is intelligently made, cheap, and widely available.
Unlike Megaupload, I have only used MEGA for personal use and not pirated content download.
I think MEGA being fully encrypted was their answer to them being targeted for hosting any illegal content (with MEGA, they were hosting encrypted files, which they don't have access to themselves because the encryption key remains with the client). Did it take off as the replacement for pirated content sharing because of it?
I never really understood how MEGA is any better. Sure, personal files are encrypted, and thus it's hard to detect pirated files that I upload for myself. But a lot of piracy happens with publicly downloadable files, which MEGA can definitely decrypt and search for copyright violations.
I'll be honest -- I've used both MEGA and Megaupload for piracy, and MEGA makes it easier.
> But a lot of piracy happens with publicly downloadable files, which MEGA can definitely decrypt and search for copyright violations.
This is straight up wrong. Mega cannot decrypt files and search for copyright files just like that. They need to have the key for that. I have shared a lot of copyrighted stuff on mega and the links are still available publicly but in closed forums( still active ). mega would've taken it down a long time back if they knew what was in it. They can only take down files when corpos notify them with the base links to the file. If they don't it stays up.
I once downloaded copyrighted material to my drive. I never gave the key out, yet a few days later it was no longer downloadable due to said copyright violation. Has Mega's encrypted design been audited?
Did you import the copyrighted material from someplace else ? The base link + key was given to you by somebody else ? If YES then copyright holder got hold of the base link and notified mega. This is common.
OR
You uploaded copyrighted material to your own computer to your own cloud, downloaded it and the file got taken down ? This is not possible. If yes then I am in trouble.
> But a lot of piracy happens with publicly downloadable files, which MEGA can definitely decrypt and search for copyright violations
How would MEGA do this, without crawling the web looking for links + keys? Which is certainly something they'd have no interest in doing.
Naturally, I'm sure that third party "rights enforcement" companies might trawl for these links and look for infringing content and issue a takedown notice to MEGA, but there must be an ongoing arms race between people sharing links+keys and the bots crawling for them.
Interestingly, a large percentage of my incoming spam has a mega.nz reply-to/return-path. Does mega.nz allow anonymous emails, or are these just spoofed?
I get that the fees are high, but if that is where you happen to have a lot of value stored, then maybe it is still worthwhile... especially if they want a degree of anonymity.
Perhaps ignoring for the sake of my question, whether the demand for Bitcoin will increase enough for the price to increase 10,000 times (or perhaps people misplacing their bitcoins, anything else?)...
I'm curious about your thoughts on something. If someone thought the price would go up by that much, wouldn't it make sense to put all available money into Bitcoin, except enough to make payments where only USD (or not Bitcoin) is accepted - plus some emergency fund, etc.
Because they would be keeping all possible money in Bitcoin, I think it would make more sense for someone who thought it was likely Bitcoin was going to increase 10,000 times in the next year to make every possible purchase in Bitcoin. Am I missing something? Transaction fees have been 'sorted' now with other layers, right?
Disclaimer: I have always been fairly skeptical of increases in cryptocurrency prices (which means I've been wrong so far), and don't see the use cases which will lead to it holding value long term. I also have some tiny amount (fraction) of Bitcoin as change from some experimentation earlier, so I suppose I would benefit greatly from a 10,000 increase. It has already increased to more than I put in to begin with I suppose, so even that small amount might earn more next year than I would from doing a day job.
Editing to note: the last sentence does look a bit sarcastic, but it is meant it in friendly jest. I think long term holders of cryptocurrencies have done very well so far, so hopefully they won't grudge me thinking the huge increases sound to good to be true.
Also, I see someone has noted the high fees in another comment, so perhaps this issue is not solved.
The peak for warez communities was right around 2006. I distinctly remember how popular those forums and other sites were. There were ridiculous amounts of pirated software and media being shared, and most of that content was in fact hosted on Megaupload or RapidShare.
If you knew people (from IRC) you could get invited to scene torrent sites which was a much more efficient way of getting what you want. I mean, everything posted on warez forums was coming from scene FTPs anyway, it was just a matter of who had access to them.
EDIT: Hmm, this actually got me thinking. Did OVH ever get in trouble for how much illegal traffic they processed back in those days? If my memory serves, OVH was a very popular choice because of their reliable connectivity and really good upload/download speeds.
What I miss the most about this "peak warez" period (and most of the mid to late 00s, basically) is the huge amount of blogs uploading rare old music. During this sweet period I was able to get a lot of very rare music from all over the world (as a bouns, you could in practice guarantee that it was virus-free since unlike actual warez these files weren't executable. Yes, I know that dedicated attackers can still find a way, but for your average script kiddie it was much harder to include a trojan in an MP3).
There are things that to this day I haven't been able to find on Bandcamp or on streaming services, including youtube, but which I was able to download during this small gilded age. Then again I weaned myself from streaming services (and from anything "as a service") years ago, so maybe things have changed. I also remember finding a lot of rarities in Soulseek when I had lucky days, but now there is far fewer people using it. In general direct download was so much better for this kind of content, because you only needed one contributor uploading it, and it was available for everyone. In P2P sharing you need much more luck to find someone seeding what you want.
I wish finding rare music was so easy in legal ways. I just want to download DRM-free albums and I will gladly pay (nowadays I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp), but in many cases that's not a possibility any more. I have also found myself in a case where music is available but not in my country. I remember a time when the only place where I found certain albums was in the german Amazon Music, but since I'm in Spain, I wasn't allowed to buy them. Gabe Newell is 100% right when he notes that piracy is a matter of convenience and not price.
Some parts of the internet have certainly got worse with time and this is one of them. Bah, get off my lawn.
Hitting a college campus with a legitimately high speed OC level connection, a lax-internal network for connected machines, meant Napster and game servers went nuts on my campus turn of the 2000.
I still have a folder of miscellaneous files obtained from Napster by simply searching "remix" every few days. Yes, the quality is very hit or miss, but many I've never come across again, even in years of clubbing, videos online, etc. For example, this wound up in my collection:
I miss Audiogalaxy the most. Napster et al were a great early taste of being able to access most things I could think of (much like Youtube and friends became later) but Audiogalaxy was where I could find groups of people and when someone had an album by an artist I liked, I might see they also had others from the same label or genre, so I'd get those too.
I found so many things back then, and during that time period my musical knowledge/familiarity grew three sizes.
The thing is that in other occasions I believe I have bought DRM-free music from Amazon Spain. But those particular albums weren't available in Spain, and although I found them in the german Amazon, I wasn't able to purchase them. I assume that it was a matter Amazon only being license to sell it in some regions (side note, I'd rather not buy from Amazon. I was ready to bit the bullet because it was the only place I found them, after about two hours looking for alternatives, but even so, they didn't let me pay for it). Just another way in which copyright management goes directly against the user, I guess.
Yes, I know that fortunately there are many ways to pay for DRM-free music (I mentioned that I use Bandcamp pretty often). What I miss is the vast amount of content I had available 10 or 12 years ago; I have been able to buy a lot of music, but there is much more that just isn't available.
You know there are other companies that sell music besides Amazon? You might have heard of them - they are a 3 trillion dollar market cap company that’s been selling DRM free music since 2008.
I don't understand why we taxpayers decide to pool our money to pay for a staff of employees to ensure that we can't have free music and movies. I would prefer free music and movies over more federal payroll. It's like we all pitched in to ensure Kim Kardashian can have more money.
100% this. There was a copyism movement a while back that basically believed humans should have the right to copy and share as they like.
Let's not pretend that free sharing leads to starving musicians. All but a very few are already starving now, and our culture is centralized into a bland nothingness because of it.
In a free to share world, value for value wins. Artists have experimented with donation requested but otherwise free music and won.
In this model there's also no need for distribution or streaming middleman.
Because the rich owners of media companies can pay your government, the only entity with a monopoly on violence to act against your interest.
I don't condone piracy and I think the people infringing on an EULA should be punished if brought to a court by the infringed party.
This doesn't mean that the government should do the job for the, spy on you or even just make the job easier for them.
Persecuting piracy is not convenient because the company involved is selling a lot of copies of their work, and therefore making money.
There is no reason for society to bear the cost of this exercise, if not corrupted government officials.
it's a very complex issue to understand the intertial (traditional) forces behind why we cannot have a megaupload.
Maybe we can make some sense of why we cannot have a megaupload by realizing that we are talking about acting against forces that have existed for dozens of hundreds of years, namely commerce in any form. whereas the internet is barely going on 30 years, and even less as a truly mainstream medium.
> Would you be okay if large for profit companies didn’t have to abide by open source licenses?
Yes. I believe in the MIT licensing model.
> What’s the incentive to make movies or music just to be given away for free?
Firstly, almost all the money made from movies/music is not made by the artists who created. It goes to the shareholders of large corporations. Secondly, I believe in the hacker ethic of free information online. All media/information/etc online should be free. In the physical, making copies of anything costs time and money. Whereas copying digital items is a click of a mouse. Thirdly, artists can still make money via their fans. If fans like their stuff, those who can afford it will pay.
> Would you work for free?
Nobody is. But then again, why pay someone for something they didn't create. Licensing doesn't exist to protect artists. It exists to protect large corporations.
The open source crowd didn’t whine about closed source software. They created their own alternatives. Instead of clamoring for others to give their stuff away, work with like minded people to create your own.
Or is your time more valuable trading labor for money like most people?
> Instead of clamoring for others to give their stuff away, work with like minded people to create your own.
I'm not the one "clamoring" for anybody to give anything away.
Disney didn't work with any of the original creators of these tales, nor their surviving relatives, yet they took that "stuff" and made it solely their own.
> Or is your time more valuable trading labor for money like most people?
I think shared culture is more valuable than having it exploited and gate-kept for purely commercial purposes.
Yet we now live in a world were institutions and people can get "punished" for singing happy birthday.
It's plainly absurd, but by now so normalized that most people stopped caring or even questioning the kind of power and influence Disney has amassed trough it's questionable practices.
If a company doesn't abide the OSS license of my software I need to sue.
I want companies to sue me for eg. redistributing their content without permission.
Not being fined by the government with my own money.
My parents live relatively close to Kim’s mansion in Auckland and every now and then I’d see his car driving around (instantly recognisable with his “KIM.COM” personalised number plate).
New Zealand, at least back then, wasn’t known for fast (residential) internet. I thought it amusing such a global file-sharing juggernaut was headquartered so close to home.
If I'm remembering right, Kim spent a SHITLOAD for a fiber connection to his home. He was a huge gamer and wanted super low latency. I also remember Kim finding out he was being watched because he noticed his ping went up and traceroute showed an additional hop.
and the internet died a little bit that day, we saw a glimpse of what it could be and it was glorious... however the socio-economic and political realities disallow such a grand, free, widespread accessibility of all kinds of media.
And mediafire.com was wiped of nearly everything on the same day, which was also devastating for a lot of niche music scenes that had uploaded an unprecedented amount of material there.
I refuse to invest any time, energy, or money in MEGA. The reason? The brand has reputation issues. They could've dropped `Mega` from the service's name, but determined researchers would find out it's by the MegaUpload crowd and blow the whistle on that, so there's no recourse from the raids, just tarnished reputation, encrypted files or not.
