Discussion on:

Megaupload, Anonymous, SOPA and the Internet fallout

Really? As opposed to...legal crimes?

That's all you have to say?

No comment on the story other than an unfortunate use of words?

But it was a funny, unfortunate use of words. Sure it doesn't contribute to the discussion, but its harmless and entertaining. I, for one, enjoyed it.

EDIT: I think its even more hilarious that Megaupload's owner is called Kim Dotcom

proud to be a new zealander (he's actually german) but we gave him residency :/

This is really the thing that stuck in my mind after reading that article -- in part because it seems like such sloppy thinking, which would help explain parts of the rest of the article, too.

Seriously? The US Government is now home to some of the best looking, most interactive websites....and THIS SEIZURE PAGE is all the US Justice Dept could come up with? Could they at least have "margin: auto " it?
http://www.megaupload.com/

Like the US Gubbermint doesn't already have *way* to much bloat & stupidity built into it -- now you want them to waste even more of my tax dollars to send all these law officers to HTML and CSS schools just so they can make a prettier "these bad guys are screwed" homepage?

What more actually needs to be said on the page?

P.S. It looked just fine to me in both Firefox on Winders & Chrome on Linux... maybe you need a better browser. I'm just sayin'...

and it's just as applicable with the Hollywood crowd as it is in any other industry, like with the environmental movement, and others.

The more government gets involved in any part of our lives, the more freedoms we lose, and the consequences will mount, including huge repercussions to the economy, as can be seen with companies moving operations and jobs to foreign lands.

I think the SOPA/PIPA protests were good and while largely symbollic, showed Congress just what would happen to them and the Internet as we know it.

As for Megaupload, its closing was good, the lashback was bad.

What seems like a lot of people have overlooked is the role of ACTA in all of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

Already ratified by the US and New Zealand, this probably facilitated the arrests of Kim Dotcom and the rest. From what I've read it seems there are SOPA/PIPA provisions already present in this agreement.

Would it be nice, if the big search engines would not provide results for government and entertainment industry inquiries for just a month in protest? It is an election year! How many of us really know the full URL of any sites anymore.

"What if small business owners inside the US decided to start their new online projects using servers, email systems, online office suites, and so on, all based in other countries, because they don???t want to risk having biased agencies spying on them?"

As long as they don't move to countries that have signed up to ACTA ...

Governments intent upon pleasing their richest lobbiests are untrustworthy, but vigilantes can kill us (for all the reasons you list). A company can assess and mitigate the risk of dealing with a government, any government, because governments act predictably. And democracies are even accountable to a meaningful degree. The Internet Blackout steered our government away from a very bad idea. They'll have more bad ideas, and eventually one of them will become law, but at a pace our businesses and economy can accomodate.

Anonymous struck in an instant without warning and without recourse. No business can meaningfully mitigate the risk that some site on which they rely will excite the ire of some creative social networking genius with a Twitter account, and if the anarchists are titillated by his/her story, the LOICs take aim. This is real power, the power to alter economies, and it's in the hands of the completely unaccountable.

They were wrong about megaupload.com, and the whole world watched it happen.

OpMegaUpload was not just a small error, though. It's an inevitability. Vigilantism has a proven track record of failure across centuries of human endeavor. The mob doesn't wait patiently to hear the whole story, so such mistakes are a part of the process. And the errors don't stop there. Vigilantism might offer a justification in the speed and efficiency of its work until some cunning individual learns to guide the mob; then the innocent start dying and the rich getting richer all over again.

No good will come of this.

We can then have two internets, the Americans, and the rest of the worlds.

We all know that hackers operate on the dubious side of the law, so for Anonymous to get involved and make demands... It smells more like terrorism then activism. And lets face it...we all like the activist Anonymous better then the terrorist

Who is going to represent the average US citizen?

How about the Average US Citizen? One of the main foundation points of our country is that the government is supposed to represent and be accountable to the people. The people just need to remember that.

Aren't "the people" the ones who are using the illegal download sites?

It has been a long time since our government did anything to prove that they were accountable to the citizens of the nation. They are constantly proving they can be bought by anyone who has enough money though.

That would be your local elected representative, be it congressman/selectman/minister/whatever. You do vote, right?

I'd suggest making them aware of your thoughts regarding this and any similar legislation, in a clear and cogent fashion.

(You can bet Hollywood will be).