Rate this:

A dear friend of mine was taken from this world tod–

You know what, I’m going to skip all of the false-lede stuff and skip right to the point: the government shut down Megaupload today. I’m sure everyone who’s ever been on the internet for more than an hour knows about Megaupload, and I’m sure at least half of you have used it before. For perfectly legitimate reasons, of course.

There’s no denying that a lot of people used the Megaupload service to obtain things that normally cost money, and for those people (I don’t know any of them personally, of course…) Megaupload shutting down is a terrible, earth-shattering event. But what about for the people who actually host legitimate files on the site, only to have them taken down in the blink of an eye. Hopefully, the FBI gave the files a dignified burial.

Dignity. Yep, that's what it looks like.

I had a few files on Megaupload at one point, and they were all legitimate files that I had created myself. They were .mp3s of my own music that I wanted to share with other internet acquaintances. Considering I made them in 8th grade, they weren’t that great, but that’s no reason to wipe them off the face of the planet forever!

Looking past my personal tragedy, I’m sure there are lots of other users with more important files on Megaupload’s servers. Hopefully they had backups of the files on their own computers so it won’t be too much of a loss…but it’s still an annoyance for people who had awesome things up for others to download. If they didn’t have their files uploaded to other similar sites, that’ll be really annoying.

I hope this mess gets sorted out soon. This debacle is costing me Anime Procrastination time…

Update:

Apparently the web-activist/terrorist group Anonymous shut down the websites for the U.S. Department of Justice as well as the websites for Universal Music, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). There’s a part of me that is screaming out of joy right now for the cruel wave of irony set forth by Anonymous. Then there’s the logical part of me that is thinking about the long-term ramifications of Anonymous’ actions. Their retaliation could move members of congress away from the anti-SOPA side. Hopefully every congressperson will realize that Anonymous is only one group and does not speak for the entire internet, but people have been greatly influenced by way less than these cyber attacks…

Thoughts?

Advertisement