Female Chinese worker: “I want them to know me, we put a lot of effort into this product and when they use it, please use it with care.”

Remember how the MegaUpload shutdown was supposed to make artists rich and give everyone a pony and a Rolls Royce? Well, it didn’t do either of those things. In fact, it didn’t do anything. Immediately after MegaUpload’s demise, other websites picked up the slack and things continued as they always had.

To illustrate this, here’s an Alexa traffic graph for some of the largest filesharing sites for the past three months:

And to make things even worse for the RIAA/MPAA, anyone can download a 90MB file containing all the torrents listed on The Pirate Bay and gain access to any of them even if the site disappears tomorrow.

So, um… good luck trying to kill piracy, guys.

First off, no, this teleconference isn’t even remotely similar to the way Hollywood portrays the FBI. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s as dumb as dull as it can get, and the only real thing “revealed” in it is that there’s a lot of bureaucratic time wasting going on.

The BBC has a meaty write-up on the subject if you’re into reading lots of words. If you don’t want to read too many words but are curious as to how Anonymous managed to gain access to the conference call, well, it was thanks to an email intercept containing the login information. Pretty nifty on Anon’s part, pretty dumb on FBI’s part. Although, considering how boring this call was, I think they could just make all their conference calls public because nobody would want to listen in.

Source: frugaldad.com

Just kidding. The money came from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“By supporting the Global Fund, we can help to change the fortunes of the poorest countries in the world,” Gates said in a statement. “I can’t think of more important work.”

If there was ever a Steve Jobs Foundation, its aim would have been to undermine the efforts of the Gates Foundation. Sort of a counter-philanthropy thing.

“What’s that, Bill? You want to reduce poverty and expand access to information technology? You leave me no choice but to outsource ten thousand jobs to this Chinese company where workers are treated like slaves.”

via edition.cnn.com

After the internet’s major victory against SOPA/PIPA yesterday, the US Government has decided to show everyone that it can already do whatever the [censored] it pleases.

And just like that, they’ve shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload and arrested its owners. They’ve also indicted all of the website’s staff.

This is how I reacted when I heard the news.