Phoenix drive megaupload

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KiMi Robinson Arizona Republic. That depends. You can store whatever files you want on your MEGA account. MEGA also boasts better security and privacy than many of its competitors. The website was founded in , with its headquarters located in Hong Kong. Throughout its seven years of existence, more than million people registered an account, and the site received over a billion page views.

At its peak, Megaupload was the 13th most visited website in the world and stored roughly 25 petabytes or 25, terabytes of data on its servers. Multiple countries blocked access to the site over the years, including Malaysia, India and — somewhat strangely — Hong Kong, where the company incorporated. Aside from the main sharing site, Megaupload also ran a number of other services, such as Megakey.

For years, Megaupload was one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world, as it required no account to either upload or download files.

Obviously, this made it a popular spot for copyright infringement and piracy, with all sorts of copyrighted material like movies, music, TV shows, books and other video content being shared. This made it similar to torrenting as an avenue for internet piracy, but without the decentralized structure to keep it safe from government interference.

Inevitably, the U. In January , the FBI filed an indictment against the site and its founder, Kim Dotcom, and seized its servers, shutting down the site for good. Keen readers might notice that January is just around the time that the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act was making its way through the U. Although the bill, known as SOPA, was effectively killed by public opposition, there was no saving Megaupload from its demise.

This was no impediment to the FBI, though, as Dutch law enforcement helpfully confiscated a portion of the hardware and shipped it to the United States for analysis. The remaining servers owned by Leaseweb but containing files from Megaupload were kept in storage for a year before the company wiped them, citing lack of communication from Megaupload as the reason for doing so.

Although the case against Dotcom has stalled for close to a decade, Megaupload itself was irrevocably dismantled. However, given the name recognition of the website, a new service called MEGA. However, as of , the connection between MEGA. By , he had no more connection to the file storage service, although he continues to promote MEGA on his website, kim. Unlike Megaupload, which functioned entirely as a file-sharing site, MEGA is a fully fledged cloud storage service.

That means that while you can still use MEGA to share files, its primary focus is personal file storage, just like other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, pCloud or Sync. This includes the assertion that the company was forced into a hostile takeover by Chinese investors, and that the New Zealand government has since confiscated the shares from said investors, now exercising direct control over the service.

The claims get more outlandish from there, with perhaps the most eyebrow-raising one being that the service is run by a shadowy collection of Hollywood executives. MEGA itself has repeatedly denied these allegations, and Dotcom has been unable to provide any proof. As we mentioned briefly in the last section, Kim Dotcom is the notorious founder of Megaupload.

His first arrest in was a bit less glamorous — he was arrested and held in custody for a month for selling stolen phone numbers. Seemingly unfazed, Dotcom was arrested again in , this time for additional hacking charges and convicted on multiple counts of computer fraud and data espionage.

In , he again ran into legal trouble when he purchased a large number of stocks in a company called LetsBuyIt. Following his purchase, he announced that he planned to invest 50 million euros in the company, causing the stock price to soar and earning him a profit of 1.

To avoid prosecution for market manipulation, Dotcom fled to Thailand but was nonetheless arrested there and handed over to the German embassy. After being transported back to his home country, he pled guilty to embezzlement and spent five months in jail before receiving yet another suspended sentence. Probably fed up with the German authorities, he finally moved to Hong Kong in , where he incorporated various companies, including Megaupload.

He eventually moved to New Zealand in , receiving residency status after investing 10 million New Zealand dollars in the economy. While living in New Zealand, Dotcom got entangled in a political scandal revolving around his financial contributions to John Banks, the mayor of Auckland at the time.

Banks was initially convicted for this, though he was later exonerated.