The successor, mega.nz, is genuinely a great service. I know doctors who use it for (legally) sending patient scans, with the key sent OOB, for example. It has a nice linux CLI, mega-cmd, and is intelligently made, cheap, and widely available.
The peak for warez communities was right around 2006. I distinctly remember how popular those forums and other sites were. There were ridiculous amounts of pirated software and media being shared, and most of that content was in fact hosted on Megaupload or RapidShare.<p>If you knew people (from IRC) you could get invited to scene torrent sites which was a much more efficient way of getting what you want. I mean, everything posted on warez forums was coming from scene FTPs anyway, it was just a matter of who had access to them.<p>EDIT: Hmm, this actually got me thinking. Did OVH ever get in trouble for how much illegal traffic they processed back in those days? If my memory serves, OVH was a very popular choice because of their reliable connectivity and really good upload/download speeds.
I don't understand why we taxpayers decide to pool our money to pay for a staff of employees to ensure that we can't have free music and movies. I would prefer free music and movies over more federal payroll. It's like we all pitched in to ensure Kim Kardashian can have more money.
My parents live relatively close to Kim’s mansion in Auckland and every now and then I’d see his car driving around (instantly recognisable with his “KIM.COM” personalised number plate).<p>New Zealand, at least back then, wasn’t known for fast (residential) internet. I thought it amusing such a global file-sharing juggernaut was headquartered so close to home.
and the internet died a little bit that day, we saw a glimpse of what it could be and it was glorious... however the socio-economic and political realities disallow such a grand, free, widespread accessibility of all kinds of media.
And mediafire.com was wiped of nearly everything on the same day, which was also devastating for a lot of niche music scenes that had uploaded an unprecedented amount of material there.
I refuse to invest any time, energy, or money in MEGA. The reason? The brand has reputation issues. They could've dropped `Mega` from the service's name, but determined researchers would find out it's by the MegaUpload crowd and blow the whistle on that, so there's no recourse from the raids, just tarnished reputation, encrypted files or not.