Customers of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload.com got a stay-of-execution for their files yesterday.
US-based companies Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, which were contracted to host files uploaded by Megaupload.com users, have pledged to keep data for at least another two weeks.
InternetNZ boss Vikram Kumar told NBR the decision was likely just delaying the inevitable.
“The loss of legitimate files stored with Megaupload is a probable outcome,” Mr Kumar said.
“The US federal authorities would have already made a forensic copy of the data they require. It looks like Megaupload has no financial resources to keep paying for the servers they have leased. There is likely to be a huge amount of data and a high barrier for anyone to figure out what is or isn't legitimate.”
Earlier this week, Carpathia and Cogent had threatened to start deleting Megaupload data as soon as Thursday.
With his assets frozen, Megaupload.com owner Kim Dotcom cannot afford to pay hosting bills to Carparthia and Cogent.
Those bills would be considerable. According to the US government’s indictment, Virginian-based Caparthia hosts 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on its servers – or enough to fill the hard drives of around 40 million home or business PCs.
Like the original threat to delete files, the two-week extension was granted through Kim Dotcom’s US attorney, Ira Rothken.
It remains unclear if the deletion threat was pressing, or to what extent Mr Rothken is using it as a PR stunt – the better to highlight that there were many legitimate users of Megaupload’s commercial file sharing and online storage service.
Premium Megaupload accounts cost from $US10 a month and were recommended by reputable sites like LifeHacker. Kim Dotcom’s camp maintains there were millions of businesses using the service to store files, and home users utilising the service to upload the likes of photos.
But the argument does run counter to another line pushed by Mr Rothken – that Megaupload is “just like YouTube”. The Google-owned YouTube hosts all its servers inhouse.
Comments and questions
Always knew megaupload had a legitimate & efficient service widely used for both personal and business clients. So much for cloud computing. This beat up and exageration for the US media industry speaks volumes about the lengths the existing corporates are prepared to go to protect their profit stream in a changing world.
I suggest the loss of data to legitimate users will create a total distrust now for users of the many services available including dropbox etc.
Dropbox is only a copy on the cloud, there is still a copy on your hard disk. That differs to Megaupload where some people (foolishly) kept their only copy of files.
I agree with the first poster here. Deletion of a business before any trial.
What would happen if Xero.com was found to be hosting the accounts of alleged money launderers? Would that business be shut down?
Kim dotyawn this was old news ages ago now it is just lame. Sometimes I cringe at New Zealand media
Cringe away mate- the storys only just getting interesting. What with the guy still locked up and cant get bail at any price despite not committing murder /rape or worse that usually is a ticket to temporary freedom in NZ. The NZ repeaters are just waking up that there might be a real story rather than just regurgitating the PR releases from big companies or govt pr machines. How about the police own media release that was full of 'errors' but made salacious reading and last but not least the fact that both extreme left & right in NZ are in agreement that something plainly wonky that FBI can conduct a raid in this country without some check or balance. I wonder if SIS or PM were advised?
Was Simon Power's resignation linked to this military style operation apparently without a New Zealand court order ? Reports in the press say the FBI application was made quite some time ago, so was Simon Power still the boss at that time?
This is precisely the reason why clear title to intellectual property is essential! Never trust your valuable data (photos, etc) to a 'cloud provider' who does not accept that (1) you own the data on his servers, (2) he is only looking after it for you (like a bank looks after your money on deposit) (3) you control the decisions about the uses to which that data will be pout once it is stored on the cloud (akin to the restrictions you choose when you put money on call, term deposit or other higher-risk/higher return investments at the bank and (4) he has accepted full legal and financial liability for its preservation and will delete it only on instructions from you, the legitimate owner.
This means that when third parties (e.g. Governments) require that the disks get wiped, they must accept responsibility for the inability of the cloud operator to fulfill its legally contracted obligations. This imposes a cost on them that will (hopefully) dissuade them from using brute destructive force on 'fishing expeditions' and (incidentally) lead to the ability to identify real pirates if the cloud operator is only (innocently???) storing pirated material on behalf of another party who actually incurred the breach of copyright. Much more efficient than 'three strikes' stuff.
Honest cloud operators who have nothing to fear will have no problems with offering such a contract. If they won't, then you can only presume that they believe that your data becomes theirs when it goes on the cloud and that this outs both you and your data at risk. 'Clouds' may save individuals from lost data when earthquakes occur, but they also introduce new risks such as the Dotcom case where the ethics, legality and even financial solvency of the cloud operator expose the data owner to even greater risks. The probability of being rorted by a crooked cloud operator is (in the early stages at least) many orders of magnitude greater than being struck by a Christchurch-type earthquake!
USA Law gives them the rigth to go in and pounch on servers or any it equipment that maybe storing data and take away until they have finished with it at no cost to them. This has happened more thsan once in the states, and basically has put honest bussiness out of business because they had no access to the only data
i hope they AT LEAST give us 24 hours access...i'm mad cause i had alot of stuff of on MU that i didn't keep a 2nd backup off (-)smacks head into wall(-)
p.s. if anyone is looking for a similar free host:
http://www.peeje.com/upload
imo it's better than megaupload since peeje gives u DIRECT-download links
Can someone confirm but it is my understanding that it not the US govt that is requesting/demading the information be deleted.
It is the host saying it will be deleted for non payment ( admit-ably because the US govt seized all their assets).
The same therefore goes for any cloud provider using a hosted service (most except for amazon, google, mircosoft and apple who use their own) that doesn't pay their bills.
Sad what happened with megaupload. After Megaupload, people will just start using www.tawkle.com or some other websites for their storage needs.
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