It was a historic, very political week on the web, with Wednesday's largest online protest in history to stop SOPA and PIPA and then on Thursday the Department of Justice shut down file sharing and online hosting service Megaupload and arrested seven employees of the company, also seizing several assets. Then hacking group went on a tear attacking several sites including the DoJ's, Universal Music Group, and the Recording Industry Association of America. So, some thoughts.
Megaupload is one of the services I included in my roundup of how to send large files for free. It was one of the most-used services, and not just for pirated movies or music, but for people and companies sharing photos and large files. There are still alternatives like YouSendIt and MediaFire (see the article for a brief comparison).
The Megaupload drama does bring up again important concerns about storing your files in the cloud. It's really important to have an off-site backup, but you can't rely on it as your sole backup. In case the service goes down (not because of legal problems like this, per say, but maybe bankruptcy or even just temporary disruption), you need to have another backup elsewhere besides on your own computer.
The second issue is one of privacy. Make sure any sensitive data you're uploading is encrypted. TrueCrypt is a free program to password-protect your most important files and it's easy to use.
Comments
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