Leading the #Time100 poll with a 93% approval rating. I can die now (or enter politics). Eat this FBI. twitter.com/KimDotcom/stat…

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) April 8, 2013

He’s currently second on the list, with 82,336 positive votes, and first in terms of approval rating, with only 6,326 downvotes. First place for positive votes is Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi (no, I didn’t recognize the name either), but he also has 192,037 downvotes.

To say the list has been hijacked a little by the technorati and social media is to say that water is wet: North Korean dictator and nuclear warmonger Kim Jong Un currently sits in ninth place, and Beyoncé is 11th. South Korean pop star Psy sits in 13th, and Ben Affleck — Ben Affleck — is a few spots further back.

In other words, this is a gong show, and Time probably knows it.

But it’s all good for Dotcom, who has tweeted about the poll multiple times in the past day to his 293,278 Twitter followers. Dotcom, whose MegaUpload file sharing service was shut down by the FBI, and whose New Zealand house was searched illegally, is busy opening a new file-sharing service called Mega.

Naturally, any publicity for Dotcom is publicity for his new venture.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s new service Mega launched to a limited number of people today, revealing pricing tiers and features for the first time.

The Mega service is essentially a cloud storage locker that’s similar to Dropbox, according to TechCrunch. Mega offers 50GB of free storage to users to upload all their media files, documents, and other files. But there’s an indication that Mega will offer more than just the standard file locker storage, with features that include domain, website, and email hosting as well as a database of all your contacts, Google-docs style web apps, and instant messaging.

The only features that are really available at this time, according to TechCrunch’s report, is the file sharing functionality. Of course, most people who try to access the site will be met with a simple “Access Denied” message (including us), so it may be a while before you can actually check it out.

As for pricing, Mega has three premium tiers of service: 500GB of storage/1TB bandwidth for €9.99, 2TB of storage/4TB bandwidth for €19.99, and 4TB of storage/8TB bandwidth for €29.99.

Honestly, it seems like Mega is trying to do too much. The service wants to take on Yammer, Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, and others. It’s nice that you’ll get the 50GB of storage, but even if all the extra features (web document apps, etc.) are great, are you really going to entrust your data to a guy that made his money from looking the other way when people were committing acts of piracy? Sure, the U.S. and New Zealand governments ignored many privacy laws when going after him, and for that he’ll probably go down in history as someone of importance — meaning Kim Dotcom is sort of like the Larry Flynt of cloud storage.

Still, if you did gain early access to Mega, let us know your thoughts in the comment section below, especially if you liked using it.

Photo via home_of_chaos/Flickr

It seems that Kim Dotcom is already having problems with the next version of his Megaupload site, Me.ga.

Dotcom’s cloud service Megaupload was shut down back in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities due to allegedly enabling copyright infringement. Last week he revealed plans to revamp the cloud locker service under the Me.ga domain name, citing that a .com domain would easily be seized by U.S. authorities without substantial proof of wrongdoing.

However, the Communications Minister of Gabon, the African country that operates the .ga top-level domain, said he has no intention of allowing Dotcom to use the country as a safe haven for copyright infringement violations and plans to suspend it, according to TorrentFreak.

And if that weren’t enough, a group of hackers calling themselves “Omega” have taken over the Me.ga domain and have threatened to sell it to Dotcom’s adversaries. The group said its members are “true pirates” and told TorrentFreak that Dotcom “is a megalomaniac with lawyers … here to take advantage of us all, the nobodies, (and) the artists he wants to profit from.”

Dotcom has stated that Me.ga will launch as planned using a backup domain, which hasn’t yet been revealed.

Sure, he is a massive publicity hound, but he’s an interesting publicity hound. Fresh off rebranding his defunct MegaUpload service as a sparkling new file-sharing service called Me.ga — yes that’s Mega, but it’s also ME dot GA — Dotcom now wants to help build a new fat pipe to online content in the U.S.

Specifically, in fact, to Los Angeles, home of the Hollywood execs who instigated his MegaUpload mega takedown.

One way or another New Zealand needs Pacific Fibre. I think it is important to reboot efforts to make it happen.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) November 03, 2012

Pacific Fibre was an attempt to create a second link between Australia, New Zealand, and Los Angeles. However, the consortium failed to attracted the $400 million in investment required to lay the 10,500 kilometer (6500 mile) cable and closed its doors as of August.

Now Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand, is proposing rebooting the project — which would surely be helpful to his new file-sharing business, as it needs high-speed global connectivity.

But while Dotcom’s legal problems may be slowly clearing up as both the American and New Zealand governments have significantly fumbled the copyright infringement proceedings against him, he is almost certainly still persona non grata to officialdom and content czars in both countries.

In other words: Dotcom agitating for a new intercontinental broadband cable may very well be the kiss of death to the project. That is, if it weren’t dead already.

At least one Internet user in New Zealand, however, who dubbed the effort megacable, pointed out the fatal flaw:

While I admire the @KimDotcom #megacable plan, there is a tiny flaw. US permission required to connect to USA m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/articl…

—
Rod Drury (@roddrury) November 03, 2012

Image credit: Pacific Fibre; Hat tip: Ars Technica

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is a very special kind of Internet celebrity.

Boastful and persistent, Dotcom’s ongoing legal troubles have made him a vocal, self-appointed hero of the digital age. But there’s one big problem: He’s not actually saying anything.

“They abused the wrong guy. Power to the people. Bye bye, Echelon. Hello, Freedom,” Dotcom said in an incomprehensible post on Twitter today.

The message was one of many tweets talking about Megaupload, which Dotcom says will reemerge in a big way later this year.

“I am going to turn this world upside down,” he predicted. For the Megaupload founder, this means creating what he calls a “massive global network” that will allow hosts outside the U.S. ”to connect servers and bandwidth.”

Better, Dotcom says that all of this will be highly secure. “The new Mega will offer one-click-encryption of ALL your data transfers, on the fly, easy to use, free of charge, TOTAL PRIVACY!,” he said on Twitter.

All of which makes Dotcom sound like less like a revolutionary and more like a late-night infomercial pitchman. Dotcom does a lot of talking, but so far, not much has come of it. And yet, we keep talking about him.

In addition to the return of Megaupload, Dotcom is also working on Megabox, a music service that he says will change the way musicians do business. And can you guess what the status of that service is? That’s right — not even launched.

It’s time to stop paying attention to Kim Dotcom. Maybe then he’ll get some actual work done.

U.S. authorities want to give alleged Megaupload kingpin Kim Dotcom access to just a single 40-page document out of 22 million e-mails before his extradition hearing, according to Stuff.co.nz.

Dotcom has become a bit of an Internet folk hero as of late and now is acting as a larger-than-life figure fighting overreaching government charges. His file-sharing service Megaupload was shut down in January by U.S. and New Zealand authorities as part of a massive sting operation against sites that enabled copyright infringement. The two governments had Dotcom arrested, seized his assets (illegally, according to a judge), and filed an extradition request to have him sent to the U.S. from New Zealand. Since that time, he has attracted the support of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who says the case against Dotcom is “weak.”

Now the FBI does not want to give Dotcom access to its large stores of evidence before his Aug. 6 extradition hearing. Instead, it wants to provide him and his team with a 40-page document that summarizes 22 million e-mails that the U.S. is using as evidence. The U.S. argues that Dotcom does not need to see all the evidence against him before he faces trial in U.S. courts.

Dotcom’s legal team said disclosure of all the evidence against Dotcom is necessary to defend him during the extradition hearing. Without all the evidence, his lawyers said, they would have “their hands tied behind their backs.”

Dotcom recently blamed U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for having authorities target Megaupload. He also blames MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) president and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd.

Next up in the case, a U.S. court will hear a motion from Dotcom’s lawyers on July 27 to dismiss all of his charges, according to New Zealand’s Times Live. We don’t expect anything to come of it.

Kim Dotcom photo illustration: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

And whether or not you believe that Kim Dotcom’s file-sharing business MegaUpload was a legal business or a thin front for profiteering from piracy, a New Zealand judge has just ruled that at least part of the search and seizure that resulted in the destruction of MegaUpload’s business and the arrest of Dotcom himself was illegal.

Oops.

One aspect of the search and seizure mission involved taking and cloning the hard drives of 135 computers in Dotcom’s $30 million mansion, under the authority of a general warrant. And that, says the judge, was over the line.

“These categories of items were defined in such a way that they would inevitably capture within them both relevant and irrelevant material. The police acted on this authorisation. The warrants could not authorise seizure of irrelevant material, and are therefore invalid.”

The current home page of MegaUpload.com

As has been well documented, American and New Zealand authorities arrested Dotcom, impounded his house, initiated an extradition request, and shut down MegaUpload.com. The site allegedly facilitated the piracy of more than $500 million of content through tactics like this.

The current legal wrinkle in the Dotcom case is not likely to end the MegaUpload founder’s legal woes. But it is one ray of sunshine for the embattled entrepreneur, arriving soon after Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak showed sympathy for his situation.

One thing is certain: Lawyers are making a lot of money off intellectual property cases. Dotcom will be lucky to have anything left of his considerable fortune by the time this legal mess is cleaned up.

Of course, if you’re a movie company executive, you’d say he’ll be lucky to have his freedom.

Image credit: ShutterStock

The blooming bromance between hirsute Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Kiwi bad boy Kim Dotcom is getting more serious by the day.

Dotcom, for those of you unfamiliar, is the founder of the now-shuttered Hong Kong-based  file-hosting service Megaupload, which the US Department of Justice shut down in January. The self-proclaimed victim of that high-profile police raid and seizure, which also landed him a month in jail, is facing not only extradition to the US but charges of money laundering and racketeering as well.

Wozniak isn’t fond of the situation. “It’s just kind of ridiculous what they did to his life,” he told the Associated Press.

For Woz, the case against Dotcom and Megaupload is a weak one. After all, plenty of people used the service entirely legally before it was shut down, he points out.

As a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wozniak says he’s intent on helping Megaupload’s users get their legitimate and legal files back from the US government, which aims to destroy the data.

“You don’t just shut down the whole street because somebody is speeding,” he told the AP.

Fortunately, Woz also recognizes the very real possibility that Dotcom, for all his smooth talk and charm, is pulling wool over his eyes. ”If I hear details that have credibility, I could totally turn against him,” he said, noting that little of what he’s seen has given him any reason to do that.

But Wozniak isn’t the only one who’s joined the Cult of Kim. Days after starting a personal Twitter account, Dotcom has accrued over 40,000 followers. Clearly, the man is an empathetic character to a lot of people.

Image: Shutterstock

For someone who’s had his assets seized and his business shut down, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is doing all right for himself.

Founder of one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Dotcom was on top of the world before authorities intervened and ended the whole operation.

Now, Dotcom is bouncing back, starting with MegaBox, the cloud-based music service he was working on before Megaupload was shut down.

“The major Record Labels thought Megabox is dead. Artists rejoice. It is coming and it will unchain you,” Dotcom teased on Twitter Wednesday alongside the screenshot posted below.

In a guest post on TorrentFreak last December, Dotcom said that MegaBox will let artists sell their work directly to consumers, allowing them to keep most of the profit from the sales.

The service will work alongside Megakey, a program that will allow artists to profit even from users who download their work for free. How that part of the effort works isn’t at all clear, but Dotcom is confident the project will be a success.

“The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users, and it works. You can expect several MegaBox announcements next year, including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models,” he wrote.

In an unlikely twist, Dotcom’s efforts have attracted the attention of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who flew all the way to New Zealand to visit the Megaupload founder. Dotcom, who was on house arrest at the time, told TorrentFreak that Wozniak was intent on helping Megaupload users get their seized files back from the U.S. government.

Not bad for a guy who’s facing charges of Internet piracy, racketeering, and money laundering.

New Zealand authorities seized Dotcom’s $4.3 million Coatesville home today, according to The New Zealand Herald. The property, not previously seized in a January raid that took $16 million in assets, is currently occupied by the alleged crime-ring leader’s pregnant (with twins, no less) wife and three children.

Dotcom faces up to 20 years in prison for the supposed criminal activities of his file-sharing service Megaupload. Charges include conspiracy to commit racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering. The maligned kingpin continues to insist on his innocence but was recently denied bail in a New Zealand court and deemed a flight risk.

The home seized Wednesday is not the extravagant $30 million residence Dotcom was leasing at the time of his arrest.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that Dotcom’s family will not be evicted from the seized residence. “We’ll set up a property inspections to make sure there’s no damage, but other than that, the family can still enjoy it,” Official Assignee Guy Sayers told The New Zealand Herald.

[via CNET]

Photo credit: The New Zealand Heard

For those of your who haven’t been following, Megaupload is/was a cloud storage company that encouraged users to upload personal files and share them with the outside world (and in some cases, it took a commission fee for doing so). However, U.S. federal prosecutors accused the company of piracy and proceeded to arrest several of Megaupload’s employees and freeze millions of dollars in assets. Without a way to pay the operating costs of running the business and with a letter from government authorities stating that third-party hosting companies could begin deleting Megaupload’s data, it was thought that the personal files stores by Megaupload users could be lost by the end of the week, as VentureBeat previously reported.

However, Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken confirmed via Twitter yesterday that the user data has a temporary stay of execution for at least two weeks. And while the U.S. government doesn’t seem very interested in sorting out the copyright infringing files from the rest, the move does buy the two parties a bit more time to sort out the issue.

Carpathia Hosting has released the following statement about Megaupload’s user data:

In reference to the letter filed by the U.S. Department of Justice with the Eastern District of Virginia on Jan. 27, 2012, Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on MegaUpload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to MegaUpload’s customers.  The reference to the Feb. 2, 2012 date in the Department of Justice letter for the deletion of content is not based on any information provided by Carpathia to the U.S. Government. We would recommend that anyone who believes that they have content on MegaUpload servers contact MegaUpload. Please do not contact Carpathia Hosting.