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.
It worked for YouTube. They got their start with pirated content and pivoted quite successfully.
RapidShare is Shutting down
31–40 of 146 posts
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#32When 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.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I'm not an Android user myself, but I will nevertheless suggest that optimally these things would be distributed as source on GitHub, with a deterministic build system guaranteed to be able to reproduce binaries in the future, and only secondarily as binaries.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#34Or maybe they just couldn't compete with Dropbox et al.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#35When 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…
Android has "regular old joe sixpack" users by the millions, but has the Android community actually benefited from that? The existing "desktop linux" community has their act together far more than the Android community, despite (or because of?) not having those legions of unskilled users.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The matching of Google's prices when they released was a good indicator of how much was profit though.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#37Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 why I have stopped believing that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" would even be a good thing. Android has "regular old joe sixpack" users by the millions, but has the Android community actually benefited from that? The existing "desktop linux" community has their act together far more than the Android community, despite (or because of?) not having those legions of unskilled users.
Re: RapidShare is Shutting down
#39man 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.