Link.
Seems like poor timing to me, with SOPA and all in the news. And I’m already hearing a lot of people angry about this; plenty of people use it for things that have nothing to do with piracy. And you could use the same logic to shut down, say, YouTube; plenty of copyrighted material there, despite how they try to keep it off. Any general file sharing service will.
And I’m…extremely skeptical of that “$500 million” claim; I’m highly skeptical that it can even be quantified.
Noooo! Not Megaupload! Where will I get porn now?
The internet?
Interesting. I thought Megaupload was based in Hong Kong.
According to Wikipedia:
According to this story, the founder was arrested in New Zealand and assets seized in 8 countries other than the US.
Wow. This takedown was a global operation.
There’s always rapidshare…but damn, lots of porn links are going to go dead this week 
Along with things like links for game mods and small time band music and all sorts of other things.
Wow, looks like they took down Megavideo as well (but that makes sense as they were sort of hand-in-hand sites).
And I’m hearing reports that the Justice Department is apparently already under DDOS attacks in retaliation. The same goes for the RIAA and Universal Music Group, which some people blame for Megaupload being taken down because the UMG had a recent legal dispute with Megaupload.
The FBI’s official press release.
“International organized criminal enterprise” sounds more dramatic than “file sharing service”, I guess.
So the tweet I read wasn’t merely being sarcastic? Wow. Did it really only take 15 minutes, though?
I don’t know.
On another forum I see cynical types speculating that the whole reason to pick this moment to take down Megaupload was to provoke just such DDOS attacks and make the anti-SOPA/PIPA people look bad.
Feh, that seems a little conspiracy-ish to me.
On the other hand Anonymous is moving into the big leagues. Fucking around with some large corporations site is one thing. Taking a shot at DoJ means you had better damn well cover your ass.
In any case, taking down websites seems like a very weak tactic if you are against SOPA.
Big corporations want to brutalize the internet… so you respond by taking down sites yourself? Why would they care? If they can take down everyone else’s sites, corporations don’t have much need for their own anyway. Scorched earth is exactly what they want.
Oh, this is precious; they are apparently actually referred to in the indictment as “The Mega Conspiracy” (warning, PDF).
To earn a name like that, they really need masked uniformed minions and a volcano lair.
I was sitting here wondering why my downloads stopped around noon locally, checked and yes my conn is fine just can’t ping megaupload.com…huh…then I see this :eek:
MU was the best site to use with automated downloaders, the others suck.
Good luck reading that right now. Anonymous has taken down the FBI web site, the Department of Justice web site, and quite a few large media sites in retaliation.
Y’know, must agree, even if it was not a deliberate reverse-psych provocation (more likely, ironically, an attempt to show that with existing laws they are already vigorously tackling piracy issues), the nuclear response from Anon is only going to re-embolden the Congresscritters - “See? We NEED to put some law 'n order into the intertubes!”. Congratulations, Anon, Megaupload really worth that?