How megaupload works

These links are then often crawled by popular file search sites. That sounds like it would use up gobs of bandwidth. How do these companies make money? The companies offer the file downloads for free, but require the user wait a certain amount of time, often about a minute, to download a the file. Sometimes, users are also limited to a certain number of downloads in any given day. Bit Torrent, a method of grabbing a file that is shared in a user-generated cloud of downloaders, is an older method of sharing illegal and legal files.

It avoids the pitfall of the file being hosted in any specific place as the user is downloading bits of the file from other downloaders. However, using Bit Torrent can take much longer than downloading the file with a file sharing website, especially since many Internet providers slow-down torrent traffic.

A file that might take a day to download on a torrent could take ten minutes with a filesharing service. This means that uploaders are rewarded for spreading popular material. This incentive program is at the heart of the legal case against Megaupload. So these services just let the illegal files stay up? For the most part all of the services will follow the rules of the U. This means that the half-life of any given file on the network is relatively low. So why were the Megaupload guys arrested?

Why has FileSonic shut down? From the FBI release:. FileSonic has halted sharing as a preemptive way of avoiding a similar case and is instituting several proactive measures for finding illegal files being shared on its servers, presumably to head-off a similar case against the company. Basically, FileSonic nuked its own service to protect its employees from any possible legal charges.

How is any of this different from a service like Drop Box? From a technical perspective, not too much. Both services allow a user to upload files to a cloud and to share those files with other people. However, unlike services like Megaupload and FileSonic, there is very little indication that Drop Box is marketed as anything other than what it appears to be, namely an easy way for people to back up their files for use across multiple computers. Will these arrests slow down or stop the proliferation of these services?

Slow down? Hard to say. The voluntary sharing lock from FileSonic shows the companies are clearly spooked by the arrests. However, many of the companies are located in jurisdictions harder to attack than Megaupload.

The real question is if users will still feel comfortable giving money to companies that might get shut down at any moment.

A vegan-friendly brow makeup product that promises to "tint, tame and thicken all brow types. It's cold outside. And the best way to beat the winter chill is to wear a cool — cold-weather appropriate — coat. Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox.

This was no impediment to the FBI, though, as Dutch law enforcement helpfully confiscated a portion of the hardware and shipped it to the United States for analysis.

The remaining servers owned by Leaseweb but containing files from Megaupload were kept in storage for a year before the company wiped them, citing lack of communication from Megaupload as the reason for doing so. Although the case against Dotcom has stalled for close to a decade, Megaupload itself was irrevocably dismantled. However, given the name recognition of the website, a new service called MEGA. However, as of , the connection between MEGA. By , he had no more connection to the file storage service, although he continues to promote MEGA on his website, kim.

Unlike Megaupload, which functioned entirely as a file-sharing site, MEGA is a fully fledged cloud storage service. That means that while you can still use MEGA to share files, its primary focus is personal file storage, just like other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, pCloud or Sync. This includes the assertion that the company was forced into a hostile takeover by Chinese investors, and that the New Zealand government has since confiscated the shares from said investors, now exercising direct control over the service.

The claims get more outlandish from there, with perhaps the most eyebrow-raising one being that the service is run by a shadowy collection of Hollywood executives. MEGA itself has repeatedly denied these allegations, and Dotcom has been unable to provide any proof. As we mentioned briefly in the last section, Kim Dotcom is the notorious founder of Megaupload. His first arrest in was a bit less glamorous — he was arrested and held in custody for a month for selling stolen phone numbers.

Seemingly unfazed, Dotcom was arrested again in , this time for additional hacking charges and convicted on multiple counts of computer fraud and data espionage. In , he again ran into legal trouble when he purchased a large number of stocks in a company called LetsBuyIt. Following his purchase, he announced that he planned to invest 50 million euros in the company, causing the stock price to soar and earning him a profit of 1.

To avoid prosecution for market manipulation, Dotcom fled to Thailand but was nonetheless arrested there and handed over to the German embassy.

After being transported back to his home country, he pled guilty to embezzlement and spent five months in jail before receiving yet another suspended sentence. Probably fed up with the German authorities, he finally moved to Hong Kong in , where he incorporated various companies, including Megaupload.

He eventually moved to New Zealand in , receiving residency status after investing 10 million New Zealand dollars in the economy. While living in New Zealand, Dotcom got entangled in a political scandal revolving around his financial contributions to John Banks, the mayor of Auckland at the time.

Banks was initially convicted for this, though he was later exonerated. Dotcom faced no legal consequences for his involvement in the scandal. When the January indictment from U. Nevertheless, local law enforcement raided his residence two weeks later and arrested Dotcom and several of his associates — including Mathias Ortmann, CTO and co-founder of Megaupload — though a judge quickly released them on bail.

Through all the legal twists and turns in the following decade, Kim Dotcom remained in New Zealand, making periodic public appearances and headlines, usually regarding his case or the successor to his file-sharing website, MEGA. The charges brought against Kim Dotcom are varied, but the main thrust boils down to the allegation that Megaupload was fully aware that the website was used for copyright infringement and chose to do nothing about it.

In fact, the charges claim that the website actively encouraged such behavior by incentivizing users with popular downloads while removing files that received little attention. The fact that the website was fully capable of policing the content it hosted is hard to dispute, seeing as it had systems in place to crack down on more nefarious file-sharing activities like child pornography.

The said provision protects websites that host copyrighted content so long as the websites either have no knowledge of it or act to remove the content once aware of it. Aside from the general copyright infringement case, the U. Since Dotcom resides in New Zealand, but the warrant for his arrest is in the U. It took three years before this extradition request even made it in front of a judge.

The next major update came from the New Zealand high court, which upheld the previous decision that Dotcom could be extradited but with a pretty significant caveat.

Since digital copyright infringement is not a crime in New Zealand, the judge concluded that this was not a basis for extradition. Dotcom and his legal team celebrated this decision, saying it was a step in the right direction for their case.

Fortunately for the U.