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"Anonymous" Brings Down FBI Website

One of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites was shut down on Thursday, and its founder and several company officials were accused of facilitating millions of illegal download of films, music and other content.

A federal indictment accused Megaupload.com of costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. The indictment was unsealed one day after websites including Wikipedia and Craigslist shut down in protest of two congressional proposals intended to make it easier for authorities to go after sites with pirated material, especially those with overseas headquarters and servers.of the FBI site.

The news of the shutdown seemed to bring retaliation from hackers who claimed credit for attacking the Justice Department’s website. Federal officials confirmed it was down on Thursday evening and that the disruption was being “treated as a malicious act.”

A loose affiliation of hackers known as “Anonymous” claimed credit for the attack. Also hacked was the site for the Motion Picture Association of America and perhaps others.

Megaupload is based in Hong Kong, but some of the alleged pirated content was hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va., which gave federal authorities jurisdiction, the indictment said.

The Justice Department said in a statement said that Kim Dotcom, 37, and three other employees were arrested on Thursday in New Zealand at the request of US officials. Three other defendants are at large.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends free speech and digital rights online, said in a statement that, “This kind of application of international criminal procedures to Internet policy issues sets a terrifying precedent. If the United States can seize a Dutch citizen in New Zealand over a copyright claim, what is next?”

Before Megaupload was taken down, it posted a statement saying allegations that it facilitated massive breaches of copyright laws were “grotesquely overblown.”

“The fact is that the vast majority of Mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, the DOJ said its web server for justice.gov was “experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service.” It was working to fix it and “investigate the origins of this activity, which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption,” the agency’s statement said.

A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said in an emailed statement that the group’s site had been hacked, although it appeared to be working later in the evening.

“The motion picture and television industry has always been a strong supporter of free speech,” the spokesman said. “We strongly condemn any attempts to silence any groups or individuals.”

Megaupload was unique not only because of its massive size and the volume of downloaded content, but also because it had high-profile support from celebrities, musicians and other content producers who are most often the victims of copyright infringement and piracy. Before the website was taken down, it contained endorsements from Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.

The company listed Swizz Beatz, a musician who married Keys in 2010, as its CEO. He was not named in the indictment and declined to comment through a representative.

According to the indictment, Megaupload was estimated at one point to be the 13th most frequently visited website on the Internet. Current estimates by companies that monitor Web traffic place it in the top 100.

The five-count indictment, which alleges copyright infringement as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering and racketeering, described a site designed specifically to reward users who uploaded pirated content for sharing, and turned a blind eye to requests from copyright holders to remove copyright-protected files.

For instance, users received cash bonuses if they uploaded content popular enough to generate massive numbers of downloads, according to the indictment. Such content was almost always copyright protected.

The site boasted 150 million registered users and about 50 million hits daily. The Justice Department said it was illegal for anyone to download pirated content, but their investigation focused on the leaders of the company, not end users who may have downloaded a few movies for personal viewing.

A lawyer who represented the company in a lawsuit last year declined comment Thursday. Efforts to reach an attorney representing Dotcom were unsuccessful.

Megaupload is considered a “cyberlocker,” in which users can upload and transfer files that are too large to send by email. Such sites can have perfectly legitimate uses. But the Motion Picture Association of America, which has campaigned for a crackdown on piracy, estimated that the vast majority of content being shared on Megaupload was in violation of copyright laws.

The website allowed users to download some content for free, but made money by charging subscriptions to people who wanted access to faster download speeds or extra content. The website also sold advertising.

The indictment was returned in the Eastern District of Virginia, which claimed jurisdiction in part because some of the alleged pirated materials were hosted on leased servers in Ashburn, Va. Prosecutors there have pursued multiple piracy investigations.

Steven T. Shelton, a copyright lawyer at the Cozen O’Connor firm in New York, said opponents of the legislation are worried the proposals lessen the burden for the government to target a wide variety of websites. Shelton said he expects to see the government engage in more enforcement in the future, as technology makes it easier to catch and target suspected pirates.

“I think we’ll be seeing more of this,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

Dotcom, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand, and a dual citizen of Finland and Germany, made more than $42 million from the site in 2010 alone, according to the indictment.

Dotcom had his name legally changed. He was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor. He is founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer of Megaupload.

Officials estimated it could be a year or more before Dotcom and the others arrested in New Zealand are formally extradited.

The others arrested were Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, the company’s chief marketing officer; Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director; and Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming.

Still at large are Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, the site’s graphic designer; Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, head of business development; and Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, head of the development software division.

Several sister sites were also shut down, including one dedicated to sharing pornography files.

Sexy Girls With Car Accidents

The Kingdom Tower: Worlds Tallest Building In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia unveiled plans to build the world's tallest tower — a mixed-use structure that will rise two-thirds of a mile high — in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah.Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal signed a $1.23 billion contract with Bin Laden Group for the proposed tower, which will take just over five years to complete. The building is the centerpiece of the planned Kingdom City development being built outside Jeddah by Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding. 





"Building this tower in Jeddah sends a financial and economic message that should not be ignored," Prince Alwaleed told reporters. "It has a political depth to it to tell the world that we Saudis invest in our country despite what is happening around us from events, turmoil and revolutions even."

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, a Chicago architectural firm, has been selected to design the Kingdom Tower, which will feature a Four Seasons hotel, serviced apartments, Class A office space, luxury condominiums and the world's highest observatory.






When completed, the 1,000-meter-plus (3,280-foot-plus) tower would replace Gulf neighbor Dubai's 828-meter (2,716-foot) Burj Khalifa as the tallest tower in the world. The Burj Khalifa was built by Emaar Properties for a total cost of $1.5 billion.





The exact final height is still a closely guarded secret, though it will be at least 173 meters (568 feet) taller than Burj Khalifa.
"It is not 1,000 meters. It is more, could be more by many meters... The figure is secret, only a small number of people know," said Prince Alwaleed, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah.

Kingdom Tower will contain 59 elevators and 12 escalators.

The design for Kingdom Tower is highly technological and distinctly organic. "With its slender, subtly asymmetrical massing, the tower evokes a bundle of leaves shooting up from the ground - a burst of new life that heralds more growth all around it," Adrian Smith said in a press release.

The sleek, streamlined form of the tower was inspired by the folded fronds of young desert plant growth, Gordon Gill added in a statement. "The way the fronds sprout upward from the ground as a single form, then start separating from each other at the top, is an analogy of new growth fused with technology," he said.

Kingdom Tower will cost about $1.2 billion to construct, while the cost of the entire Kingdom City project is anticipated to be $20 billion.

The DC Avanti : Wannabe Indian Supercar?

"Every country which has written its name in the pantheon of automobile manufacturing has invariably distinguished itself with sports cars by its own nationals and I thought that India rightly needs to be in this exclusive club" said Dilip Chhabria as he unveiled his first, production-ready sports car.

Popularly known as DC, Dilip Chhabria has stunned the world with not just brilliant customization jobs on production vehicles, but also dramatic one-offs which would make anyone who owns them the envy of the entire automotive world. DC, and in particular his design firm, DC Design, has, over the course of the last several years, has developed unparalleled expertise in high-quality tooling and prototyping techniques to bring to life the most spectacular of automotive designs. And the car you see here, the Avanti, is the result of these skills.

The name, Avanti, is quite apt too, as not only as it reflects its Indian cultural roots, but in Italian, the language common to all the world-renowned automotive styling houses, means ‘to move forward’. And that’s exactly what DC is doing, moving forward from making mere one-offs, to making a proper production model. Yes, this absolutely stunning looking car, though only in the rolling sculpture stage at the moment, is slated for production. But this is only the half of it. The real shocking bit about the Avanti is that though it will only see a limited production run, like most supercars, it could be yours for a very un-supercar-like price of just Rs 30-lakh!

 

And don’t for one minute think that this is just a Toyota Corolla underneath with a slapped-on body kit – it’s a true-blue sports car with a two-seats at the front, an engine in the middle and the driven wheels at the back. The chassis itself is a spaceframe construction of square, rectangular and round sections to get the best structural rigidity not just from a concern of passenger safety, but to endow the car with great handling characteristics to match the sporty looks of the body shell as well. And in true sports car fashion, the Avanti will feature unequal length double wishbone suspension at all four corners with coil-over springs, ensuring that the sticky 255/45 section front and the 285/40 section rear tyres, shod on the massive 19-inch wheels, will make the optimal contact with the tarmac at all times.

My review:

What ever said and done, it is very evident from the pictures that they have implemented design features of other existing cars.

For example, the headlamp layout has a striking resemblance to the Ferrari 458 Italia. It looks like they've just switched the right and left headlamps and tilted it by 90 degrees. Take a closer look:

 

The tail-lamp layout also looks very similar to the new facelifted Mercedes CLS-series (2012).

  

The last similarity I spotted was the position of the fuel tank cap with that of the Bugatti Veyron.


  

Idiot wreaks Lamborghini Gallardo in illegal street race

You would be forgiven for thinking someone who owned a €180,000 Lamborghini would know how to drive it. This video proves that that's not always the case.

Racing a Lamborghini on a track can be a hairy experience and one not for the faint of heart. However, you can take solace in the fact that if you slip off the track you’re more than likely just going to end up in the gravel. That’s not the case if you’re racing on an open public motorway.

These goons decided an illegal street race on the public roads of somewhere in Asia, was a great idea to show how massive their… wallets were. Sadly, the driver of the green Gallardo forgot to bring his driving skills with him on the day and sent his car into the motorway’s concrete wall.

The green Gallardo overtakes the camera car but is then stuck behind another ‘civilian’ car travelling in the fast lane. It then attempts to undertake this civilian car at the same time that the orange Gallardo overtakes a car in the slow lane.

The two supercars come within inches of crashing into each other but the orange one manages to keep his cool and stay on the road, unlike the green one.

The €180,000 green machine is sent out of control and into the wall by the driver who stupidly overcorrected the spin.

It’s just another fail from an overzealous supercar driver, and a win for everyone else.