The HQ is Switzerland. Some servers are in Germany, which is why GEMA and RS have been in various legal fights there for a few years.
person: Bobby Chang
address: Teraspace GmbH
address: Benzstrasse 1
address: 79341 Kenzingen
address: DE
phone: +491772453933
Rapidshare R.I.P and goodriddance. Half the stuff they advertise doesn't exist anyway and loads of their torrents are riddled with "Little presents" for the downloaders.
If anybody users them now then they deserve what they get. Total Snitches -- in anycase users should mask their IP addresses if they are downlading "Questionable material".
Use Private trackers like the 'OID' if you must.
All this stuff does is drive it underground (won't make any of it go away) and force people to start using sophisticated encryption schemes and give their torrents totally meaningless names to people "Outside the know" -- imagine how much work this would cause for people like F.B I. (Federal Bureau of Incompetants) as they'd have to DOWNLOAD EVERY torrent on earth every day to see whether it was legal or not.
Imagine what a can of worms that would be -- can a Law enforcement agency Commit a crime in order to see if a crime is being / has been commited.
The US legal system will have great fun with that one I'm sure.
Cheers
jimbo
Huh?
Unfortunately, most of these sites have systems to detect proxies and a proxy that can go undetected is either overloaded and slow (Tor) or unreliable. The only way to be sure is to use a paid service or buy your own server, and both are just as likely to get hit with a court order as RS.If anybody users them now then they deserve what they get. Total Snitches -- in anycase users should mask their IP addresses if they are downlading "Questionable material".
'oid is hardly private.Use Private trackers like the 'OID' if you must.
Unfortunately, all encryption does is hide you from your ISP and man-in-the-middle spies. If these people can easily get personal data from the company at the other end (whether that be astranews, rapidshare or mediasentry) then frankly all the encryption in the world won't help....encryption...
.................
Not quite true because if the content of the torrent was itself encrypted (title etc etc) the organisations chasing down "Illegal stuff" would have to know WHAT to download and also decrypt it in order to find out whether it was legal or not.
If your torrent is called say €9gvetti-^755id-xxxghffhih££).dqj and you were the FBI
Would you download this, decrypt it and see what's in it.
Imagine doing this every day for 100,000's of torrents as these torrents would change their names and be moved around on underground sites.
If you have the resources of the US Federal Gov you probably could do something but the sheer volume of resources required would make what the Banks have received look like a few cents given to a "panhandler" under a Los Angeles Freeway bridge.
P2P networks are 100% legal -- don't forget. It's what you as a user do with them. Same as Guns, Rat Poison / dangerous chemicals / cars etc etc.
Cheers
jimbo
True, and to a certain extend that was actually happening on Rapidshare. Just about everything was Rared and passworded. However, chances are where ever you get the torrent, RS links or Nzb from also has all the information needed to access the files. You can try and make those sites as difficult as possible for copyright holders to access, but if you get too strict you end up losing your 'customers' too.
rapidshare is not going anyplace.
this raid must have been a lot of work to pull off. authorities would have first had to go to the RS HQ in Switzerland to get the uploader's IP, then to the ISP in Germany to get the name/address attached to that IP. it only happened because Metallica is so uptight about filesharing, and because the album leaked to the internet a day before it went retail.
i'd estimate that files on RS are 60% porn, 39% music/movies/apps, and 1% legit. they don't go after people's files unless that file is reported - then it gets deleted and they put an MD5 flag up so the file can't be reloaded as-is. RS puts up that notice about copyright just to save their own ass, but they are certainly not proactive about upholding the policy, otherwise they would be out of business.
even if they wanted to check files, it would be a logistical impossibility. i can't even guess how many TB of data are on RS servers. it's uncanny.
anway in spite of this incident, users are at minimal risk, especially ones who have premium accounts but just download - RS insists they only keep logs of bandwidth, not of files downloaded. as for uploads, well files are easy to track, they're sitting right there in a user's account and that account is associated with whatever IP uses it. just watch what you upload, or don't upload at all. it's not like torrents where you have to give in order to get...
further back down the hole everything shall go..... follow the bunny, Alice.
Torrents? Bad choice of words or you have no idea what you're talking about? Either way I stopped reading there, nice try though.
As for the whole deal about rapidshare giving out info, they can be forced to hand out info, even here in Belgium where we're "protected" by privacy laws. If you **** up, you'll pay the price, simple as that.
I have a premium account on rapidshare and have used it every time to download several different Windows 7 versions and I love it!
99% of the stuff I download there caps out my download speed unlike all the other stuff I tried before, I'm not going to bother with torrents if I can get it on rapidshare because I got a ****ty upload speed and I get hosed if I try.
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