[Mononokay]

> He's just some creep who got rich off of deliberately running a site that facilitated piracy

He actually got rich off of the Dot Com bubble years before, which is why he changed his name to Kim Dotcom.

He embodies a lot of the stereotypical hacker image that people have - overweight, hacked the Pentagon+NASA+Citibank before he was old enough to drink in the US, a touch dramatic, etc. It's only natural that he's given a bit of attention.

Not to mention he really didn't break any law - Section 230 made site-owners not responsible for content posted to their site unless they failed to remove it, and MegaUpload complied with DMCA requests all the time.

[wpietri]

I don't believe Section 230 is a sufficient defense here. If you have a site that is used for a lot of things but has the occasional bad actor, then Section 230 means that bad actor is the legal publisher of the content, not the site.

Megaupload, though, was not that. They paid people who uploaded popular content, which was of course mostly other people's property. They they sold ads against it. If you look at the structure of the business and compare it with a a real cloud storage provider, it's pretty obvious they are no Dropbox:

https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/Virginia_Eastern_District_...

The indictment has a clear claim that Section 230 doesn't apply, as well as a lot of detail. Dotcom was pretty clearly running a criminal conspiracy, and just thought he was clever enough to avoid getting arrested for it. Had he stayed small, he might have managed.

[lawnchair_larry]

He didn’t hack anything nor get rich off of the bubble. He was always a fraud.

[Mononokay]

> nor get rich off of the bubble.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/jan/26/internetn...

> He didn’t hack anything

He claims to have, and I'm fairly sure he's convicted of doing so in his home country, but I'm not going to contest it because I'm not incredibly familiar with that part of the issue. I was going off of his Wikipedia page, which as always can be innaccurate.

[lawnchair_larry]

He was well known to folks in the security scene in the late 90s/early 2000s. He had many bold claims, but knew nothing about security and generally bragged about his fictional transgressions for attention. It's not that it's difficult to believe that someone of even low to moderate skill could have hacked such targets during that time, it's just that he was a big talker that could never back up what he was saying.

He initially got rich off of a blatant pump and dump engineered by himself, followed by some Ponzi schemes, and a lot of credit card fraud, most of which he probably wasn't busted for. It wasn't what we typically think of as Dot Com Bubble money, it just happened to take advantage of that investment climate.

Megaupload was the closest thing to legitimate he has done.

[ebbv]

> He embodies a lot of the stereotypical hacker image that people have - overweight, hacked the Pentagon+NASA+Citibank before he was old enough to drink in the US, a touch dramatic, etc. It's only natural that he's given a bit of attention.

Bullllllcrap.