Megaupload shutdown

Megaupload, one of the internet's largest file-sharing sites, has been shut down by officials in the US.

The site's founders have been charged with violating piracy laws.

Federal prosecutors have accused it of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue. The firm says it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.

Police seized millions of pounds, a vast collection of luxury cars and sawn-off shotguns yesterday when they raided the mansion of a man accused of being one of the world’s biggest internet pirates.

Swooping on convicted fraudster Kim Dotcom’s £16million home outside Auckland by helicopter, officers had to cut their way in to arrest him after the founder of the MegaUpload website retreated into a fortified safe room.

Dotcom, 37 – nicknamed Dr Evil – has Finnish and German citizenship. He and six of his employees face charges by U.S. prosecutors in what they say is one of the biggest criminal copyright theft cases ever brought.

Filesonic.com stopped allowing people to download files that they had not uploaded themselves, while Uploaded.to blocked access from Internet locations in the United States.

However, just 3 percent of U.S. Internet users relied on digital lockers like Megaupload in the third quarter, according to NPD market research, compared with 9 percent who used peer-to-peer networks, which allow sharing of files among consumers' computers with little or no central organization.

Peer-to-peer systems, including BitTorrent and PirateBay, might gain more activity after the Megaupload charges, analysts said, while users may be afraid to upload content to lockers for fear they will lose access in a similar shutdown.

What Are Magnet Links, How To Use Them to Download Torrents?

Torrent Magnet Links

Soon, popular torrent site The Pirate Bay will no longer host torrent files. Instead, it will only offer magnet links. Magnet what now?You may have seen the term "magnet link" before, but if you haven't used one, here's the lowdown on what this change means for you as a BitTorrent user.

How Magnet Links Are Different From .Torrent Files

When you download a .torrent file, you're essentially downloading a small file that contains information on the larger files you want to download. The torrent file tells your torrent client the names of the files being shared, a URL for the tracker, and more. Your torrent client then calculates a hash code, which is a unique code that only that torrent has—kind of like an ISBN or catalog number. From there, it can use that code to find others uploading those files, so you can download from them.

A magnet link does away with the middleman. A magnet link is essentially a hyperlink containing the hash code for that torrent, which your torrent client can immediately use to start finding people sharing those files. Magnet links don't require a tracker (since it uses DHT), nor does it require you to download a separate file before starting the download, which is convenient.

How to Use Magnet Links

Magnet links are dead simple to use. If you head to the Pirate Bay now, you'll notice that magnet links are now the default, with the "Get Torrent File" link in parentheses next to it (a link which will disappear in a month or so). Just click on the magnet link, and your browser should automatically open up your default BitTorrent client and start downloading. It's that easy.

What This Ultimately Means for You

The short answer is nothing. In fact, it could mean that downloading torrents takes one or two fewer clicks, since all you have to do is click on the link to start the download. When magnet links first came out, not all torrent clients supported them, but now you can use magnet links with just about any semi-popular torrent client out there—including our favorites uTorrent, Transmission, and Deluge, among others, so you shouldn't notice a problem with that.

The main reason torrent sites are moving toward magnet links—apart from convenience to the user—is that these links (probably) free torrent sites like The Pirate Bay from legal trouble. Since The Pirate Bay won't be hosting files that link to copyrighted content—that is, the torrent files—it's more difficult to claim the site is directly enabling the downloading of copyrighted material. Whether this semantic leap actually protects torrent sites remains to be seen, but for now, you can sleep soundly knowing that the sites will stick around for awhile longer and that your torrents will take one less click to get started. Of course, if you're using a public site like The Pirate Bay, we highly recommend you set up a proxy and encryption service like BTGuard to protect your downloading from prying eyes. If you want to read more about magnet links, check out the Wikipedia page on the subject.

Wikipedia, Google protest Internet bills

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia speaks during the opening session at the London Cyberspace Conference in London. Wikipedia will black out the English language version of its website on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012.

Wikipedia shut down the English version of its online encyclopedia for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate version, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Google meanwhile placed a black redaction block over the logo on its much-visited US home page to draw attention to the bills while social news site reddit and the popular Cheezburger humor network planned blackouts.

If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.

Sure, we’d survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet.

But now we’re so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.

No email, Twitter or Facebook. No buying online. No stock trades. No just-in-time industrial shipping. No real-time tracking of diseases.


If bill passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," the Wikimedia foundation said.

The draft legislation has won the backing of Hollywood, the music industry, the Business Software Alliance, the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce.

SOPA and PIPA are real threats to the free and open Internet. Although recent media reports have suggested that the bills are losing support, they are not dead. On January 17th, SOPA's sponsor said the bill will be discussed and pushed forward in early February. PIPA could be debated in the U.S. Senate as soon as next week. There is a need to send a strong message that bills like SOPA and PIPA must not move forward: they will cause too much damage.

Although the bills have been amended since their introduction, they are still deeply problematic. Among other serious problems in the current draft of the bills, the requirement exists for US-based sites to actively police links to purported infringing sites. These kinds of self-policing activities are non-sustainable for large, global sites - including ones like Wikipedia. The legislative language is ambiguous and overly broad, even though it touches on protected speech. Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is worse than the disease.

The founders of Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and other Internet giants said in an open letter last month the legislation would give the US government censorship powers “similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran.”