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Carpathia wants to delete orphaned Megaupload data, pay the bills
The Federal shut down of Megaupload did more than jail its founders, scare its competitors and worry its users -- it also left Carpathia Hosting footing a $9,000 a day bill. The outfit previously agreed to preserve Megaupload's frozen data, but now that the service's unpaid bills are piling up, it's ready to change its tune. In a emergency motion filed with the U.S. Federal Court in Virginia, Carpathia asked the court to either take the data off its hands, pay it for retaining the data or else allow it to delete the data altogether after allowing users to reclaim their files. The hosting service won't take action on its own, it says, as that might "risk a claim by a party with an interest in the data," such as the Motion Picture Association of America. With any luck, the matter will be settled in a court hearing next month. If not? Well, we'll just take it as a lesson: back up locally, you never know when your files might get wrapped up in the legal system.
Megaupload co-founder's bail appeal rejected
While users housing content on the troubled Megaupload site were given a two-week reprieve, one of its co-founders is having less luck. Kim Dotcom has lost his appeal for bail, with prosecutors fearing that he would flee from New Zealand and return to his native Germany, possibly making him safe from extradition. According to the BBC, the prosecution alleged that Dotcom -- formerly Kim Schmitz -- had multiple passports and bank accounts, and "a history of fleeing criminal charges." His next court appearance his scheduled for February 22nd.
Megaupload users' data to be kept another two weeks, EFF to help folks retrieve it
Megaupload's digital doors may have been closed due to the presence of pirated materials, but there's still the matter of all that legal content residing on its servers. Naturally, folks want their files back, but now that the government's gotten what it needs, the hosting companies no longer need to keep the data around because Megaupload's no longer paying them to do so. Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, however, have decided to preserve the data for another two weeks while a deal is brokered with the DOJ for its release. In the meantime, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has teamed up with Carpathia to create a website that puts folks in touch with EFF attorneys so users can try to retrieve their data. No word as to what legal wrangling the EFF can do to make it happen, but those affected can get the wheels of justice started at the source below.
In the wake of Megaupload crackdown, fear forces similar sites to shutter sharing services?
The Feds put the smackdown on Megaupload and its whole executive team last week, charging them with criminal charges for copyright infringement and racketeering in addition to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and money laundering. As a result, it appears that several other cloud locker companies have curbed their sharing ways to avoid similar DOJ entanglements. FileSonic and Fileserve have eliminated file sharing from their service menus, and Uploaded.to is no longer available to those of us in the US. Naturally, none of these companies have said that Megaupload's legal problems are the reason for the changes, but the timing suggests it's more than mere coincidence. Disagree? Feel free to speculate about the possibilities in the comments below, and let us know if any other online storage services have made similar moves while you're at it.
Federal prosecutors shut down Megaupload file-sharing site, founders charged
Details are still somewhat light at the moment, but reports are now coming out that the popular Megaupload file-sharing site has been shut down by Federal prosecutors in the US, and that the site's founders and other individuals have been charged with violating piracy laws. According to The New York Times, the indictment says that the company has cost copyright holders some $500 million in lost revenue, and that the site was at one time the 13th most popular on the internet. As the Times also notes, this news comes a day after Megaupload voluntarily blacked out its website to protest the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation now being considered by Congress. Update: As The Verge reports, the indictment itself doesn't mince any words, calling Megaupload an "international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy," and alleging that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom et al generated more than $175 million in "criminal proceeds." Those charges also come with some potentially hefty prison sentences, including a maximum 20 years for conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years for copyright infringement, 20 years for money laundering, and five years for each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Stanford program cracks text-based CAPTCHAs, shelters the replicants among us
CAPTCHAs. In the absence of a Voigt-Kampff apparatus, they're what separate the humans from the only-posing-to-be-human. And now three Stanford researchers have further blurred that line with Decaptcha, a program that uses image processing, segmentation and a spell-checker to defeat text-based CAPTCHAs. Elie Bursztien, Matthieu Martin and John Mitchell pitted Decaptcha against a number of sites: it passed 66% of the challenges on Visa's Authorize.net and 70% at Blizzard Entertainment. At the high end, the program beat 93% of MegaUpload's tests; at other end, it only bested 2% of those from Skyrock. Of the 15 sites tried, only two completely repelled Decaptcha's onslaught -- Google and reCaptcha. So what did the researchers learn from this? Randomization makes for better security; random lengths and character sizes tended to thwart Decaptcha, as did waving text. How long that will remain true is anyone's guess, as presumably SkyNet is working on a CAPTCHA-killer of its own.