Can’t they both lose?
I’m really torn on this one. On the one hand, the US government is stomping around the internet playing freestyle HULK SMASH in the name of intellectual property owners. That’s going bad places, fast.
On the other hand, this needledick had his name legally changed to Dotcom.
Don’t like this whole Megaupload business one bit. As far as I can tell, the site functioned purely as a free storage and retrieval service. Made its money on banner ads. Inevitably, it became storage and retrieval for a whole lot of bad and stolen content, but Megaupload itself was just a digital U-Stor-It. It had 180 million registered users chewing up 4% of global internet traffic…and then the US reached over and casually pulled the plug. Didn’t need SOPA at all.
What happened to everybody else’s data? The non-pirates, I mean. What does this mean for the future of cloud computing? Who the hell would trust stuff in the cloud if huge sites could be wiped out any time at the pleasure of the US government?
And this kind of thing will surely not win friends. (It’s Megaupload’s current front page — but don’t worry, the image is hosted locally on this blog. You’re not clicking a bad thing).
On the other hand, this Dotcom weenus is a piece of work (if you don’t like Dotcom, his other alias is Kim Tim Jim Vestor). He started as a teenager, hacking into sites and stealing credit card numbers, and he got cuddlier from there. He’s been convicted of embezzlement, insider trading. Personally? Don’t get me started. The guy needs to go down.
So here you have a man who richly deserves a bloody nose, and there you have a ham-fisted bully who won’t stop with the richly deserving.
Ugh.
January 24, 2012 — 11:16 pm
Comments: 43