Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mega has launched

mega.co.nz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 272 posts

Re: Mega has launched

#221

Post by freshhawk »

meshugga wrote: post #207
freshhawk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't have to respect him (I would have a lot of questions for someone who did) to mostly take his side in the whole mega upload situation.

I don't take his side in making money off of intellectual property that doesn't belong to him. Torrent sharing is one thing. Selling access to downloadable material that doesn't belong to you quite another.

Maybe I'm cynical but every file locker service makes money selling access to downloadable material that doesn't belong to them, mega was just honest/stupid about it.

I completely agree that there is a distinction, and one I also feel strongly about. But really the only distinction between the pirate bay and megaupload from that point of view is maturity and technical/political savvy. I feel I have to draw the line at a place where selling access to a file locker that you know is mostly used for infringement is ok or I'm a hypocrite. Especially when you look at from a "what should be legal" point of view where you have to consider enforceability rather than a hypothetical ethical question.

Re: Mega has launched

#222

Post by danenania »

soup10 wrote: post #217
jlgreco wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, in the same way that manufacturing syringes that will be used to mainline illegal narcotics should not be "encouraged or tolerated"?

It takes some twisted logic to think thats a valid analogy. Dropbox is a perfectly valid filehosting service because they take reasonable measures to prevent copyright infringement. Megaupload(and mega) is not, because it's run by a person who has no real interest in preventing copyright infringement, and has shown that he's more than willing to profit off it, while he pretends that he doesn't know it's occurring or…

Define 'reasonable measures'. People use Dropbox to share copyrighted material all the time. Ditto S3, gmail, external hard drives, and any file storage method in existence.

Enforcement of the standard you're promoting would require pervasive surveillance of every data storage and transfer method in the world, and backdoor access for all forms of encryption.

Freedom of information and communication is orders of magnitude more important for a healthy and free society than copyright of digital goods, and you can't have both--they are fundamentally incompatible.

Re: Mega has launched

#223

Post by soup10 »

danenania wrote: post #222
soup10 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes some twisted logic to think thats a valid analogy. Dropbox is a perfectly valid filehosting service because they take reasonable measures to prevent copyright infringement. Megaupload(and mega) is not, because it's run by a person who has no real interest in preventing copyright infringement, and has shown that he's more than willing to profit off it, while he pretends that he doesn't know it's occurring or…

Define 'reasonable measures'. People use Dropbox to share copyrighted material all the time. Ditto S3, gmail, external hard drives, and any file storage method in existence. Enforcement of the standard you're promoting would require pervasive surveillance of every data storage and transfer method in the world, and backdoor access for all forms of encryption. Freedom of information and communication is orders of magni…

Arguing against piracy on the internet is a giant waste of my time because if you have it in your head that piracy is "good" or "ok" then you will rationalize bad arguments all day defending an incorrect position.

To address your latest spurious post, dropbox, gmail, etc. Facilitate file sharing on a small scale. Public links to megaupload listed on public aggregating websites that list the latest 'releases' are an entirely different matter. You obviously know that but are willfully blind to it to make stupid arguments.

Re: Mega has launched

#225

Post by ghshephard »

jlgreco wrote: post #198
jakejake wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as a file goes public and anybody can get it, then it seems to me irrelevant that its encrypted on mega servers. They'll have to respond to takedown requests because the contents are known. And if mega is de-duping content then that could technically eliminate "whack a mole" for the copyright holders (except for people re-encoding the file and re-uploading). I had heard in the past that mega would only take d…

> They'll have to respond to takedown requests because the contents are known. And presumably, unless they think they can legally get away with ignoring it, they will. What they won't be able to do is respond to a request that says "Delete all copies of [Big movie of the year], and continue to delete all of our movies as they pop back up."

As long as it's the same file, they will be able to do precisely that.

Re: Mega has launched

#227

Post by batgaijin »

soup10 wrote: post #223
danenania wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define 'reasonable measures'. People use Dropbox to share copyrighted material all the time. Ditto S3, gmail, external hard drives, and any file storage method in existence. Enforcement of the standard you're promoting would require pervasive surveillance of every data storage and transfer method in the world, and backdoor access for all forms of encryption. Freedom of information and communication is orders of magni…

Arguing against piracy on the internet is a giant waste of my time because if you have it in your head that piracy is "good" or "ok" then you will rationalize bad arguments all day defending an incorrect position. To address your latest spurious post, dropbox, gmail, etc. Facilitate file sharing on a small scale. Public links to megaupload listed on public aggregating websites that list the latest 'releases' are an e…

No, you are taking a childish view of the defenders of piracy.

Let's say you are right. Explain to me how you would justify the pricing scheme we have for digital media to the average person on this planet, who most likely is Indian/Chinese/Nigerian and makes less that $5 a day.

How much should we charge this individual? Do you think they have the same right as westerners to challenging themselves and experiencing other cultures?

No, you assume that piracy is only white people that don't have a large allowance, which is a childish view perpetuated by the media. Most people don't have a computer, and if they are lucky enough to get one they should be able to have access to a large variety of the same digital goods.

tl;dr show some goddamn empathy.

Re: Mega has launched

#228

Post by neya »

The big red button is beautiful. But adding just a

    cursor:pointer;
would have made a HUGE difference to the button itself and to the User's experience, clicking on it. Sigh, when will start-ups start paying attention to UX?

Re: Mega has launched

#229

Post by borplk »

bluegate010 wrote: post #174
melvex wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous statement. He could just as easily make up a fake bandwidth usage number for marketing purposes rather than actually put unnecessary load on his servers by not using Gzip. It's most likely down to him hiring sloppy developers. And judging by the source code on the site this is exactly the reason.

Agreed. Very sloppy code.

where are you looking at the source code? I'd like to see too

Re: Mega has launched

#230

Post by Too »

melvex wrote: post #140
kami8845 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not using Gzip is obviously a big part of his marketing plan. I think this is the only time I would use the words "FTFY" on HN, but I do think it's obvious, that with kim's bragging about bandwidth usage, gzip has been disabled intentionally.

What a ridiculous statement. He could just as easily make up a fake bandwidth usage number for marketing purposes rather than actually put unnecessary load on his servers by not using Gzip. It's most likely down to him hiring sloppy developers. And judging by the source code on the site this is exactly the reason.

I thought these top bandwidth usage lists are compiled by ISPs, not site owners themselves.

In any case i don't think climbing those lists would be reason to disable gzip. In that case an easier method would be to just add lots of not rendered junk at the end of your html to beef up the data usage.

Post reply on HN