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RapidShare is Shutting down

rapidshare.com

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Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#21

Post by dajohnson89 »

curiously wrote: post #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.

There should be a public list of cool stuff on RapidShare. That way, people can sift through all the pr0n/Disney movies and start archiving this stuff in a distributed sense. That way, the artifacts aren't lost forever.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#22

Post by yablak »

stusmall wrote: post #11
nezza-_- wrote: 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…

This is generally taken care of using checksums, assuming you trust the source. Of course, trusting the source is the hard part. CyanogenMod, for example, has a chain of trust for their releases; though they host their own binaries.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#23

Post by res0nat0r »

Karunamon wrote: post #18
DangerousPie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 D…

Lawyers didn't really ruin this, RapidShare banking on piracy to sustain their business model ruined their business.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#24

Post by bigbugbag »

DangerousPie wrote: post #7
mmastrac wrote: 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.

Well a file sharing platform got popular due to file sharing taking place, sort of obvious isn't it. Then those who built an industry out of controlling distribution who are threatened by these new ways use their acquired power to shut down the threat by claiming copyright infringement, stuttering history (see 17th century french button makers, 19th century theatrophone, and so on).

Thing is sharing is a human trait, a trait required to live in a social group. The internet is about sharing and either the copyright industry will adapt/disappear or the internet will disappear (probable eaten alive by fecesbookians and politicians).

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#25

Post by lightbritefight »

saganus wrote: post #19
btown wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

I recall some article that said that AWS was about 3% of Amazons income, but it was basically pure profit.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#26

Post by DanBC »

nezza-_- wrote: 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 have fond memories of Rapidshare. Even the cats.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#27

Post by bryanlarsen »

DangerousPie wrote: post #7
mmastrac wrote: 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.

It worked for YouTube. They got their start with pirated content and pivoted quite successfully.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#29

Post by caractacus »

throwaway75394 wrote: post #9

I've interviewed an ex rapidshare employee some time ago. Might have been just one disgruntled ex employee, but they told me the CEO wouldn't hand out access to the servers to anyone and insisted on keep doing that himself and other stuff. They weren't competent though, so maybe he just didn't want to give that employee access. I asked them what they did at Rapidshare and the only answer I got was "multicore stuff" (…

They also refused to change their name. The founder wouldn't rebrand. They had a decent chance, if you think about it: storage know-how, a bunch of servers, some good techies, and - which could have been the killer - a Swiss location with Swiss data privacy laws, right in the Snowden era. Forget Dropbox and google drive and amazon with the NSA tapping into them here and wherever. Could have been a great selling point. But the owner couldn't face 'swissshare' or 'swissbox' or something else... had to keep Rapidshare with all that implied.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#30

Post by e12e »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
nezza-_- wrote: 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.

Would be more interesting if copyright on anything created after Mickey Mouse would ever expire -- and unfortunately it doesn't look like it ever will.
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