Yeah, uhm...

I've been gone for quite some time, eh? Awkward.
Quite honestly, I simply didn't know what to post, nor did I feel like actually typing much. RL-stress got annoying and I decided to finish some books and watch anime instead.

With some books and anime off my lists, I'd like to discuss the filehoster-affair of the past week.

Megaupload is down, as you should know by now.
However, Megaupload got caught just when their service crossed US borders, while before they've always made sure to stay in areas of the world where they couldn't be touched by US laws etc while maintaining a rather fishy attitude in public.

Now even with SOPA off the table for quite some time (haha), that type of thing was absolutely vital to the US. This serves as an example that "piracy" can be fought, which somehow invalidates SOPA's necessity. However, it also threatens other Filehosters, and they're already bowing their heads and retreat.

Filesonic closed its reward program and disabled sharing of files - as a premium user, you may now only download the files you've uploaded onto your own account.
Fileserve and Uploadstation followed the same tactic.

Others completely closed their services from one day to the next, like x7.to, while others like FilePost started denying access to seemingly all users (this might be temporary). FileJungle goes the same way but also starts a deletion spree.

My favorite Hoster, Uploaded.to, which I've been happily using for years, now closed its availability to the USA. IPs from overseas won't be able to access files anymore.
While I still want to use UL.to, I don't know if it is going to be worth it.


No matter what, if you got hit by the wild panic of Filehosters and bascially lost your Premium services, contact support of the sites and request a refund. These rash actions are violating the terms under which you've purchased your account. If they won't refund your money, try the paypal route, customer protection's your friend.

So, with that said, I'm not quite sure what to expect of the near future. It certainly won't be armageddon, but it shakes the web right now, so it might be good to just wait and watch. One thing that interests me:
How many of you actually are from the US and used UL.to for downloads?

Might just as well get back to Rapidshare.com, I guess. They're sitting in switzerland and have never tried to dodge legal actions or anything. While they have no bonus program with rewards anymore due to some ruckus a few years back, they still are strong. I only really dropped RS back then due to them frequently changing their plans and site layouts and a lot of uploaders dropping the service due to the lack of rewards. However, RS still is fast as hell, even using Free downloads.

Anyway, here's hoping that the Hydra recovers as soon as possible.