<story><title>Feds, Please Return My Personal Files Stored at MegaUpload</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/feds-please-return-my-personal-files-megaupload-120120/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsilence</author><text>&quot;Welcome to the cloud!(tm)&quot;&lt;p&gt;Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:&lt;p&gt;* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.&lt;p&gt;* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (&lt;a href=&quot;http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&amp;#38;submit=Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&amp;#38;submit=Search&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;* For files you&apos;d like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.&lt;p&gt;* distribute the shortened links&lt;p&gt;* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.&lt;p&gt;If you don&apos;t trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of &apos;How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone&apos; recipies out there. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone&lt;/a&gt;). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.&lt;p&gt;If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hackerspaces.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hackerspaces.org&lt;/a&gt; . Don&apos;t ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.&lt;p&gt;The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us.&lt;p&gt;I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.&lt;p&gt;/rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feralchimp</author><text>You&apos;re not wrong, Walter.&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker community is the prevalence of &quot;see I told you so&quot; and/or &quot;bad things wouldn&apos;t happen to you if you weren&apos;t such a dumbass&quot; culture.&lt;p&gt;The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching Moment.&lt;p&gt;The safety deposit box example is apt here.  If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our government in that case?&lt;p&gt;And if we&apos;re not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our realistic options for doing something about that?</text></comment>
<story><title>Feds, Please Return My Personal Files Stored at MegaUpload</title><url>http://torrentfreak.com/feds-please-return-my-personal-files-megaupload-120120/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsilence</author><text>&quot;Welcome to the cloud!(tm)&quot;&lt;p&gt;Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:&lt;p&gt;* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.&lt;p&gt;* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (&lt;a href=&quot;http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&amp;#38;submit=Search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&amp;#38;submit=Search&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;* For files you&apos;d like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.&lt;p&gt;* distribute the shortened links&lt;p&gt;* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.&lt;p&gt;If you don&apos;t trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of &apos;How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone&apos; recipies out there. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone&lt;/a&gt;). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.&lt;p&gt;If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hackerspaces.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.hackerspaces.org&lt;/a&gt; . Don&apos;t ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.&lt;p&gt;The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us.&lt;p&gt;I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.&lt;p&gt;/rant</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mapleoin</author><text>&lt;i&gt;And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I need to print T-shirts with this quote.</text></comment>