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Leaseweb has wiped all Megaupload servers
- showsover 13y agoWhy is "without warning" in quotes? Did he get a warning but chose to ignore it? Didn't they send a warning? I'm also pretty wary about believing wat mr. Dotcom says without a different side of the story.
- shared4you 13y agoI can't believe Kim Dotcom stored the data on only Leaseweb's servers. I hope he has backup copies or mirrors from another storage provider.
- gizmo 13y agoI was under the impression that the megaupload servers weren't paid for after Kim's assets got frozen. Leaseweb was forced to keep the data for the duration of the investigation, and had to eat the losses. My guess is that Leaseweb reached the point where they just want to cut their losses and move on. I highly doubt Leaseweb wiped the Megaupload servers "just because". This looks like an attempt by Kim to create outrage and bad PR for Leaseweb.
- kzrdude 13y agoThere shouldn't need to be any bad PR for leaseweb.. they need to do what they must do. The bad PR should be for the american operation to shut this down.. now evidence is lost in the case. Of course there doesn't seem to be a real case going, I think they are satisfied with the destruction caused already.
- s_henry_paulson 13y agoDisagree. Let's say you are accused of robbing a convenience store. The police take the security footage, review it, and then erase it. According to everyone that saw the tape, you did it, and perhaps they even retain a few seconds of footage that shows something like a coat that you own. Would you think it fair that one party gets to use evidence to convict you, that you yourself are not allowed to see, or use for your own defense?
- tehwalrus 13y agoIn this case, the videotape also contains a lot of peoples' personal files that they were hoping to get back one day, maybe. (Pre-emptive edit: I'm not saying the host should have to take losses for this; the investigators should have been responsible for paying for/backing up the 3rd party data.)
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoMore analogy, what if it was one of those storage space services and one customer rented half the storage units to store other people's stuff, then got arrested and no longer paid for the storage units. And the storage units were gold-plated and cooled and cost a fixed amount a minute they're used.
- av500 13y agothat's what you get when you store data "in the cloud"...
- MartinodF 13y agoWell, if you stop paying for the "cloud" storage you're using, I don't know what else you could expect...
- glesica 13y agoI think OP was referring to the people who used Megaupload to store data, not the company itself. But I could be wrong.
- MartinodF 13y agoYou may be right! In that case, that's the risk you take when you decide to store the only copy of your important data on a service which is known for offering tons of pirated content (Megaupload appeared among the top results when searching for movies, tv shows, cracks and so on), run by a man who "was convicted of 11 counts of computer fraud, 10 counts of data espionage, and an assortment of other charges" [1]. If you really don't want to have a secondary copy, you should at least inform yourself about the company you're trusting your data with. That said, I'm sorry for everyone that lost their data, but it's really not different than your hard drive failing without a backup. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom
- av500 13y agoI was referring to both, Megaupload and their customers. The customers could have read the ToS that contained no garantees whatsoever that their data would be "safe" in any wax. And for Megaupload using a 3rd party to provide most of their business, it's the same more or less.
- TallGuyShort 13y agoAnd the physical seizure is what you get when you store data "on bare metal"... I agree that cloud services have their risks, but it's hardly relevant here.
- piqufoh 13y ago"They informed us TODAY that servers were deleted on February 1st, 2013." https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347346908462841856 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347346908462841856
- tripzilch 13y agoHuh, so the evidence against Mega/Dotcom was already gone since February? Why didn't they say anything? How far was the case at that time? While LeaseWeb should've given some advance warning (that would've been reasonable, considering Mega was probably one of their biggest customers), the destruction of all this data is on the US gov's hand, obviously.
- technifreak 13y agoIsn't that tampering with evidence?
- andyjohnson0 13y agoDifferent jurisdictions. The court case is in the US but the servers are in the Netherlands.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoThat doesn't make it not "tampering with evidence" it just makes it unlikely to be legally actionable.
- richkuo 13y agoThe irony is that Leaseweb's slogan is "reliable hosting"
- jacquesm 13y agoAnd they are extremely reliable. If you pay your bills. Happy Leaseweb customer for over 5 years.
- mikeash 13y agoI doubt they guarantee reliability even after you stop paying for it.
- bdcravens 13y agoPretty sure the reliability applies only to paying customers. MegaUpload's account wasn't active - what were they to do? In a perfect world the US government would be compensating them, but like all businesses, they had to make the best decision given the circumstances (Mega's funds frozen, potential legal liability in giving data, daily cost to keep data)
- preinheimer 13y agoWhat were they supposed to do? They filed motions a long time ago that the cost of simply being forced to store a lot of data for a client who couldn't pay them (because their funds had been frozen) was incredibly high. The government wasn't going to let them sell the servers to dotcom, and they had a business to run.
- smackfu 13y agoAnd maybe at the end of all this, the government will get a conviction. Maybe.
- pheew 13y agoA very good friend of mine is high up the management tree at Ocom (parent company of Leaseweb) and told me they wiped the servers 2 weeks after he got arrested because there were no requests from the dutch government to seize the servers. It's standard policy for Leaseweb to wipe servers 2 weeks after the account is closed and my guess is that Mr. Dotcom knew this very well.
- philliphaydon 13y agoI don't believe you, I just spend the last 30 minutes looking through all the legal, privacy, terms etc of lease web and NO where does it warn you that data will be kept for 2 weeks after the closure of an account before its deleted. But apparently monthly backups are kept for 2 years. I bet Leaseweb wants to cover their ass incase they got in trouble for what ever was on the drives.
- uxp 13y agoKim DotCom seems to agree that they were wiped a while ago: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347346908462841856 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347346908462841856
- tripzilch 13y agoHuh, what's the Dutch government have to do with this case? Did I miss something?
- VaucGiaps 13y agoLeaseweb is a Dutch company. They must listen to Dutch police.
- will118 13y agoI haven't been following his case in too much detail; I understand that some people used Megaupload for genuine cloud storage, even though it was a small fraction. I have noticed Kim is always talking about wanting his data back, can anybody tell me why? I thought some of the evidence was conversations essentially about enticing people to upload more (pirated) content, what exactly was on the Leaseweb servers that would help Kim out? I'd always thought he would have wanted them wiped?
- rsofaer 13y agoHe would have liked to use all the non-infringing content that was there as evidence that Megaupload was a genuine cloud storage company.
- versk 13y agocompletely uninformed here, but wouldn't having the servers wiped be better for the defense? no evidence for him, but none for the prosecutor either.
- Deathmax 13y agoThe prosecutors already had copied whatever evidence they needed from the servers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Avenger42 13y agoAnd he's now unable to prove that the "evidence" isn't faked, since he can't access the servers himself and verify the contents. At the very least it should make a good case for an appeal.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
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- codesuela 13y agoAren't the Leaseweb servers just a mirror of the US servers? Being an international hoster it wouldn't make much sense to host individual files on just one server. Also while this sure sucks for people who had files hosted there what was Leaseweb supposed to do? Can't really fault them for wiping servers that nobody paid for. Also this prevents them getting dragged into any legal proceedings like when the proscuter decides he needs more data for his case.
- codeoclock 13y agoLooks like it was the only place European users data was stored. https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347373843767238658 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/347373843767238658
- downandout 13y agoI can't imagine that this is a big deal, even though Kim Dotcom is trying to make it one. His lawyers have had ample time to copy anything they needed, and for trial purposes a backup of every file is not necessary. A copy of their database containing names and descriptions of files, along with their actual code for the site, should be more than adequate to present a defense that they aren't criminally liable for copyright infringement. He may have had dreams of resurrecting MegaUpload as a business, but any hope of that was gone within a few days of the domain seizure. That's why they seize domains - it doesn't matter whether they win or lose at trial or drop the charges. They get to give target sites the death penalty long before the owners ever set foot in a courtroom.
- trothamel 13y agoThis is a big deal, though - not for MegaUpload, but for the many people who used MegaUpload to host their files. I can point to many computer games that were distributed through MegaUpload - perfectly legal games - that have now disappeared, at least from public view. (This might have been a bad idea - it was - but many of these games were made by inexperienced creators, and what's done is done.)
- kamjam 13y agoI can point to many computer games that were distributed through MegaUpload - perfectly legal games - that have now disappeared, at least from public view. So they should just upload it somewhere else now, or through bittorrent. They certainly shouldn't have been using MU as a source control repository or as their only copy.
- kamjam 13y agoHe may have had dreams of resurrecting MegaUpload as a business, but any hope of that was gone within a few days of the domain seizure. That's why they seize domains - it doesn't matter whether they win or lose at trial or drop the charges. They get to give target sites the death penalty long before the owners ever set foot in a courtroom. You don't seriously believe that do you? PirateBay domain has been blocked from the UK but it it still accessible if you know how or through a different domain names. KickAssTorrent (kat.ph) domain name was recently seized by Phillipine authorities but it was back up within hours. A simple Google search will point you to the new domain name, in this modern age the domain name really doesn't mean that much once you have the brand established. http://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-domain-seized-after-music-industry-complaint-130614/ http://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-domain-seized-after-...
- Avenger42 13y agoSounds like spoliation to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoliation_of_evidence > The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding: the finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party.
- mtgx 13y agoSo will the case simply be dismissed now, like Daniel Ellsberg case was dismissed when the court found out the government was illegally wiretapping him?
- stephengillie 13y agoApparently Carpathia just shoved Mega's HDD's (or maybe full racks?) into a warehouse instead of wiping them. http://inagist.com/all/347346225932165120/ http://inagist.com/all/347346225932165120/
- mark-r 13y agoSo how much trouble would it have been to spin the disks down, take them out and store them in a closet somewhere and tell Kim "We know you're having financial difficulties now but you can have them back for $X when some of your funds get unlocked"? It's not like his troubles were a secret. That would eliminate the majority of the daily cost of keeping the data online.
- preinheimer 13y agoA lot. They're undoubtedly in some sort of raid, so they're going to need to un-rack every device, pull every single drive, label its position within the raid set, pack them properly, then store in a temperature controlled environment. Then follow along, slotting new drives they purchased in every single slot, then re-rack the whole device. All in the hope that one day Kim will 1) Win and 2) decide it's worth it to get the data back for a business model & product he's left behind.
- X-Istence 13y agoYou don't need to store the hard drives in a temperature controlled environment. Look at the range they can exist in when turned off... Not only that, but I imagine that even if a couple drives died in the mean time, it wouldn't be a big loss.
- danielweber 13y agoBut, encryption!
- EugeneOZ 13y agoSuch big service without backups? Can't believe.
- Apreche 13y agoNo backups?
- wmf 13y agoDo CDNs back up customer data?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thesmileyone 13y agoI firsthandedly had dealings with Kimdotcom and I hope he gets everything he deserves. He is pondscum. Was partly my own fault (for being naive) however he still broke his word!