Supernova
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Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement
WASHINGTON – Seven individuals and two corporations have been charged in the United States with running an international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works through Megaupload.com and other related sites, generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and causing more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI announced today.
This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime.
The individuals and two corporations - Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited - were indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 5, 2012, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement. The individuals each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit racketeering, five years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, 20 years in prison on the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, and five years in prison on each of the substantive charges of criminal copyright infringement.
The indictment alleges that the criminal enterprise is led by Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz, and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.
In addition, the following alleged members of the Mega conspiracy were charged in the indictment:
- Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
- Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;
- Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;
- Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;
- Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;
- Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.
Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann, and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach, and Nomm remain at large. Today, law enforcement also executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets, and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands, and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Mega conspiracy.
According to the indictment, for more than five years the conspiracy has operated websites that unlawfully reproduce and distribute infringing copies of copyrighted works, including movies - often before their theatrical release - music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale. The conspirators’ content hosting site, Megaupload.com, is advertised as having more than one billion visits to the site, more than 150 million registered users, 50 million daily visitors, and accounting for four percent of the total traffic on the Internet. The estimated harm caused by the conspiracy’s criminal conduct to copyright holders is well in excess of $500 million. The conspirators allegedly earned more than $175 million in illegal profits through advertising revenue and selling premium memberships.
The indictment states that the conspirators conducted their illegal operation using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download. The indictment alleges that the site was structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Megaupload for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content that was not regularly downloaded. The conspirators further allegedly offered a rewards program that would provide users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site, often through user-generated websites known as linking sites. The conspirators allegedly paid users whom they specifically knew uploaded infringing content and publicized their links to users throughout the world.
In addition, by actively supporting the use of third-party linking sites to publicize infringing content, the conspirators did not need to publicize such content on the Megaupload site. Instead, the indictment alleges that the conspirators manipulated the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Megaupload site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.
As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.
The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to launder money by paying users through the sites’ uploader reward program and paying companies to host the infringing content.
The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. The Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, Organized Crime and Gang Section, and Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section also assisted with this case.
The investigation was initiated and led by the FBI at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center), with assistance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. Substantial and critical assistance was provided by the New Zealand Police, the Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ), the Crown Law Office of New Zealand,and the Office of the Solicitor General for New Zealand; Hong Kong Customs and the Hong Kong Department of Justice; the Netherlands Police Agency and the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Serious Fraud and Environmental Crime in Rotterdam; London’s Metropolitan Police Service; Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt and the German Public Prosecutors; and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Federal Enforcement Section and the Integrated Technological Crime Unit and the Canadian Department of Justice’s International Assistance Group. Authorities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines also provided assistance.
This case is part of efforts being undertaken by the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property (IP Task Force) to stop the theft of intellectual property. Attorney General Eric Holder created the IP Task Force to combat the growing number of domestic and international intellectual property crimes, protect the health and safety of American consumers, and safeguard the nation’s economic security against those who seek to profit illegally from American creativity, innovation, and hard work. The IP Task Force seeks to strengthen intellectual property rights protection through heightened criminal and civil enforcement, greater coordination among federal, state, and local law enforcement partners, and increased focus on international enforcement efforts, including reinforcing relationships with key foreign partners and U.S. industry leaders. To learn more about the IP Task Force, go to www.justice.gov/dag/iptaskforce.
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- Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;
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+1
Yep, same here. I've abandoned torrents for good in favor of file hosting sites. Join a file sharing community and you'll never use torrents again. EVER. If you collect HD movies, tv shows, and lossless music, this is your best option.
To be honest I just don't think this is true at all.
I use torrents from usual sites. I'm in BKK on True internet, 690B per month. I get torrent speeds of 800-1000kB/s for popular recent torrents. It takes me about 6 minutes to download an episode of Big Bang theory.
Check your peers list for "local peers". That's probably the reason you're able to max out your connection.
I only download 720p/1080p scene releases and WEB-DL episodes; most of them aren't available on public trackers. Having said that, my choices are pretty limited. I'd go with a private tracker, but the ones I'm interested in joining are by invite only (i.e. CHDBits, HDBits, what.cd). Fortunately, a lot of stuff available on those trackers can be found on file hosting sites and elsewhere, so it works for me. And yes, it can all be downloaded for free.
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Chrome includes a special version of Flash which cannot be removed without uninstalling the browser itself. You can however disable it -- Go to about:plugins and disable the bundled Flash plugin.
Download and install the latest Flash Player from here.
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Get yourself an Rapidshare account
Torrent sucks in Thailand. The connection between seeders and leecher are terrible in East Asia.
It works only good in Europe and America.
Agree 100% the only way to go, torrents waste of time and bandwidth.
+1
Yep, same here. I've abandoned torrents for good in favor of file hosting sites. Join a file sharing community and you'll never use torrents again. EVER. If you collect HD movies, tv shows, and lossless music, this is your best option.
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I have no idea what it means when I see "0(2237)" for example - can anyone explain?
Number of connected and available peers respectively.
0(2237)
0 connected peers, 2237 available
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Here's mine:
Computer -> unRAID server (main backup) -> portable HDD (backup to unRAID)
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I've never used the True proxy or tried Pib's approach with Speedtest.net. But he's reported that doing so resolved the accuracy problem with the site.
See this post and the one above it.
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Proxy or no proxy, speedtest.net results are often exaggerated. Use the following services to measure speed instead.
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BTW, the VPI/VCI numbers for 3BB is 0/33, not 0/32. Sorry for the typo... The Huawei modem supplied by 3BB should already have it set correctly, so all you gotta do is enable bridge mode on the MT880 device.
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Configure your devices as follows...
SmartAX MT880
Basic - WAN Settings VPI : 0 VCI : 32 Mode : Bridge ...and saveLinksys WRT310N
Network Setup - Router IP IP Address : 192.168.1.2 Subnet Mask : 255.255.255.0 - DHCP Setting DHCP Server : Enabled Start IP : 192.168.1.100 ...and save*** Enter 3BB info in the Linksys router - Internet Setup
*** Connect MT880 to Linksys "Internet port" using crossover/patch cable.
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Works fine on True ADSL.
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www.schaeffersresearch.com
Times out.
Need to enable proxy to access site.
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Routing issue ...but for over a week? Seems they don't know how to fix it.
True been having a lot of problems as of late (i.e. service outage two weeks ago, proxy downtime etc). They'll get it fixed, but it may take a while...
Their technical staff don't even know what a proxy server is... Go figure. Their proxy server returns Access Denied error, so it's useless.
Works fine on my end.
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Routing issue...
Only workaround is to use their proxy server.
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Configure your web browser to use True Proxy server (choose one):
proxy.asianet.co.th:8080 proxy.trueinternet.co.th:8080
Problem solved.
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^^ I concur.
Recovering the partition table should be first priority.
TestDisk is one such utility that will allow you to do this; click here for instructions.
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Sounds like a corrupt or deleted partition table. I ran into a similar problem not too long ago. Luckily enough, I was able to recover the lost partition table with TestDisk. All my data (200GB worth) remained intact.
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Use a LiveCD to scan for viruses instead of scanning from inside Windows...
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One more thing -- if you're experiencing constant buffering (pauses) whilst streaming video, maybe consider switching to another ISP.
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I have an I5 and my girlfriend has an I7. The difference is very noticeable. With all due respect, don't go with the ram upgrade suggestion. Get the I7. It rocks!
But my applications are 90% internet related, have you tried to compare for web browsing?
BTW, I have trimmed down some programs at startup, it helps a little, and have increased virtual memory to 8 gig, does this work?
Getting an i7 is not going to enhance nor improve your web browsing experience. You might as well dispense with the idea unless you're looking to build a new machine. The solution to your problem is a simple one: INSTALL MORE RAM as suggested throughout this thread.
Increasing virtual memory won't help you the least bit; if anything, it will degrade performance even further. Ideally, you want to AVOID using virtual memory or at least keep it down to a bare minimum. If your system has to constantly access the pagefile, it's time to install more RAM. No other way around it.
Virtual Memory is simply the operating system using some amount of disk space as if it were real memory.
Exactly how virtual memory is implemented is complex and well beyond what I'd want to present here. But in an over-simplified nutshell it works like this:
- You run programs that need memory. The operating system takes care of tracking which program is using what portions of memory, and allocating each program the amount of memory it needs.
- Those programs will need more memory as they do their jobs. Opening a large document may cause your word processor to request additional memory from the operating system in order to hold the document.
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If there isn't enough memory available to satisfy a request, the operating system may decide that another program's needs are less "important". Some of that program's memory will be freed, first by writing the contents to disk (the memory is "swapped out"), and then allocated to the program making the request.
- Later when the program whose memory was swapped out needs it back, that memory can be "swapped in" by reading it back from disk. This might cause memory from another program to be swapped out to make room.
Also remember that the operating system itself is also just a program. So it too will have need for memory. It can allocate memery to itself and its memory may get swapped out to disk as other needs arise.
As I said, disks are slower than memory, so if the operating system is doing a lot of swapping between the two it's going to slow your computer down. If that's happening frequently or if your computer seems to be "thrashing" or constantly swapping in and out from disk, then it might be time to add some memory to your machine. It can be one of the most cost effective ways to increase your system's speed.
- You run programs that need memory. The operating system takes care of tracking which program is using what portions of memory, and allocating each program the amount of memory it needs.
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BTW, just wondering whether a quad core i-7 is better than dual core for my application; multiple windows web surfing and online tv and live quotes? Is this consider multi tasking?
I've been running an E6600 2.4GHz Dual Core for quite a while and I have quite extensive applications I have to run plus it plays all the top games with no problems. <snip>
Multi tasking, is as you show, running multiple applications concurrently and can be done, and has been for years, on just a single core machine.
+1
Running an (overclocked) E4400 here. I'll be upgrading soon though; need something with a little more juice.
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You say that the CPU can't keep up with the online video streaming - I don't believe that. Most likely your connection is just too slow, especially at times of high usage.
Yes, where especially I have multiple windows running with a couple of dozen taps, could this be the problem?
My CPU runs around 60%, ram at around 1.5 to 1.7 GB out of 2 GB at the moment, looks like ram still have some space, is it necessary to upgrade ram?
Strictly a RAM issue.
When your system runs low on RAM (like above), Windows moves the least used pages of memory out to a hidden file on your hard disk to free up more RAM. It is this "swapping" to and from disk that bogs the system down.
Solution? Install more memory. This will enable you to do more such as open multiple applications at once and make things run a little smoother. The more RAM you have, the better off you'll be.
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Their technical staff don't even know what a proxy server is... Go figure.
Feds Shut Down 'Megaupload'
in IT and Computers
Posted
Anonymous Goes on Megaupload Revenge Spree: DoJ, RIAA, MPAA, and Universal Music All Offline
Click here