Kim Dotcom Begins New Fight to Avoid Extradition to United States
More than six years ago in January 2012, file-hosting site Megaupload was shut down by the United States government and founder Kim Dotcom and his associates were arrested in New Zealand. What followed was an epic legal battle to extradite Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Finn Batato, and Bram van der Kolk to the United States to face several counts including copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering. Dotcom has battled the...
US Online Piracy Lawsuits Skyrocket in the New Year
Since the turn of the last decade, numerous people have been sued for illegal file-sharing in US courts. Initially, these lawsuits targeted hundreds or thousands of BitTorrent users per case, but this practice has been rooted out since. Now, most file-sharing cases target a single person, up to a dozen or two at most. While there may be fewer defendants, there are still plenty of lawsuits filed every month. These generally come from a...
The Early Days of Mass Internet Piracy Were Awesome Yet Awful
While Napster certainly put the digital cats among the pigeons in 1999, the organized chaos of mass Internet file-sharing couldn’t be truly appreciated until the advent of decentralized P2P networks a year or so later. In the blink of an eye, everyone with a “shared folder” client became both a consumer and publisher, sucking in files from strangers and sharing them with like-minded individuals all around the planet....
MX Linux 17: An upgraded distro made for beginners
There are tons of operating systems coming out all the time, from free laptop systems like EasyPeasy to Manjaro, Mandriva, and Kubuntu. But all of them have their share of kinks. read...
An open source Instagram desktop photo uploader
One of my tasks at my new communications job is to re-activate and improve our social media channels. I’ve used Twitter and Facebook for many years, so that was easy. Now, I need to work on Instagram. read...
