Techcitement*

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) is here! Brainchild of such industries as the RIAA and MPAA, this new method to curtail illegal content sharing went live last week. An outline for the system began in July 2011, as the recording and movie businesses realized individual lawsuits weren’t accomplishing their goal of reducing or eliminating piracy. [...]

Did you store personal files or other legitimate content on Megaupload before the FBI seized the service and shut them down? It looks like your window of opportunity to recover it is now open! Carpathia hosting, one of two services formerly powering the Megaupload site, just created MegaRetrieval in partnership with the EFF. This site [...]

In the wake of law enforcement’s shutdown of file sharing site Megaupload, the competing service FileSonic decides to shut off public file sharing completely. Users can only download their own files at this time. Additionally, their rewards program was discontinued hours before the file sharing was disabled, leaving many users wondering if they’ll be compensated [...]

The hacker collective known as Anonymous claims “the largest attack ever” on ten government and music industry websites yesterday, in retaliation for the U.S. Justice Department’s shutdown of Megaupload. A second wave of attacks continue today, with Anonymous claiming responsibility for taking down MGM Studio’s online store and the New Zealand police’s website. Reportedly, the [...]

The U.S. Justice Department shut down commercial file hosting service Megaupload today, accusing them of copyright infringement in excess of one billion dollars. Founder of Megaupload, Kim Schmitz (known as “Kim Dot Com”), was taken into custody along with co-founder and CTO Mathias Ortmann, chief marketing officer Finn Batato, and programmer Bram van der Kolk. [...]

Are you an iPhone user who subscribes to a streaming music service and aren’t happy with your current provider? Then you might be in for some good news, with an old name — Kazaa has just released an app to the Apple App Store for the iPhone and iPad. Kazaa, we had such good times [...]

If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably seen at least a mention of bitcoin.  The latest was negative press about hackers compromising a major Bitcoin trading web site and plunging the value of the virtual coinage from around $17.50 per coin to around one cent.  But what’s the fascination with bitcoin and is [...]