Live data from Hacker News

RapidShare is Shutting down

rapidshare.com

11–20 of 146 posts

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#11
post #4

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way…

>I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck.

This is something that has always sketched me out about the Android rooting and moding scene. "Download this suspect binary from rapid share and run it as root" seemed to be a cornerstone of it.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#12
man I had the most amazing time with Rapidshare during the 2007~2009 era. I remember being in an all you can eat candy store. Same with megaupload. Stuff you couldn't find anywhere were popping up, old vintage rare tv shows, games, magazines. The monetary incentive provided an explosion of content you couldn't get elsewhere.

I will really miss the golden era of filehosting services.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#13
post #4

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way…

I wish the Internet Archive had an embargo feature, where you could push data in and while it wouldn't be served, it would be stored until a later date when copyright issues could be worked out.

This is an interesting idea.

It would work kind of like an escrow, right? Where the "release/publish clause" could be tied to copyright expiration or other legal events like you say.

The problem I see is, how do you filter/reject the amount of stuff you would have to store without even being public? AFAIK, the IA has issues storing so much of the already-public data, so storing "dark" (non-public/unpublished) stuff would potentially mean lots of cruft and garbage so to speak.

However it does sound very interesting. I hope we can some day achieve truly permanent data storage systems were we could just dump all of this and not worry much about it again.

Edit: Thinking about it a bit more, how feasible does the following sound:

Anyone interested in helping the IA could buy a sort of Drobo/NAS that is able to store only IA stuff (ala Freenet). Everything is encrypted of course, and then only way to access the files is when the escrow trigger fires off, the private key is released at the IA archive and then every owner of the IA-box will have access to that particular part of the archive (as well as regular IA users through web).

It's kind of like an HDD preloaded full of torrents, and then the differences or new additions can be streamed to your local IA-box as needed. You could even filter what kind of stuff would you like to help the IA archive. For example, I'm a big fan of movies so I prioritize that category (up to a certain % so that no one category is forgotten).

Does anyone know if anything resembles this? I mean, I could very well leave a low-powered NAS to help the IA serve their content, store it for later use, etc. And I imagine (hope) that a lot of other people would too. It would be a way of donating electricity, space to a worthy cause.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the Internet Archive had an embargo feature, where you could push data in and while it wouldn't be served, it would be stored until a later date when copyright issues could be worked out.

This is an interesting idea. It would work kind of like an escrow, right? Where the "release/publish clause" could be tied to copyright expiration or other legal events like you say. The problem I see is, how do you filter/reject the amount of stuff you would have to store without even being public? AFAIK, the IA has issues storing so much of the already-public data, so storing "dark" (non-public/unpublished) stuff w…

Would tape storage, a la Amazon Glacier, be an efficient way to archive these, since they don't need to be accessed except with an offline process?

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#15
post #4

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way…

I wish the Internet Archive had an embargo feature, where you could push data in and while it wouldn't be served, it would be stored until a later date when copyright issues could be worked out.

[deleted]

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#17
post #4

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way…

I wish the Internet Archive had an embargo feature, where you could push data in and while it wouldn't be served, it would be stored until a later date when copyright issues could be worked out.

Isn't that already the case? I heard that they already download well-tagged music from private trackers like what.cd which could be published if its copyright expires eventually. There's a page on archive.org with "what_cd" in it's url and no public items: https://archive.org/details/what_cd

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#18
post #3

Torrentfreak has some good editorializing and context around this shutdown: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-... "Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things, the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while (re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage serv…

I don't see how this could have ever ended any other way. RapidShare was clearly only popular in the first place because of piracy. Once they started restricting that they became just another Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive competitor.

Nah. As mentioned before, they were a great place to store all manner of random files. During their golden age, having a place to put random "stuff", especially large files, was a killer feature.

The problem was their new model completely precluded sharing of any kind. Imagine Drive or Dropbox, but without the ability to give links to your files, and you can see how useless the service became. You don't out-dropbox Dropbox.

As usual, lawyers ruin everything.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#19
post #14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea. It would work kind of like an escrow, right? Where the "release/publish clause" could be tied to copyright expiration or other legal events like you say. The problem I see is, how do you filter/reject the amount of stuff you would have to store without even being public? AFAIK, the IA has issues storing so much of the already-public data, so storing "dark" (non-public/unpublished) stuff w…

Would tape storage, a la Amazon Glacier, be an efficient way to archive these, since they don't need to be accessed except with an offline process?

I certainly would hope so. However I'm not sure who is going to survive the longest: an organization focused on that specific goal, or a company that might change focus or go bankrupt altogether. Even though AWS is a pretty big part of Amazon (I'm guesstimating here, might be wrong), I would hope the IA would last for longer or have specific strategies to address different catastrophic scenarios that would overall make it more efficient/safe than AWS.
Post reply on HN