Watch Police Raid Kim Dotcom’s House

Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload, was arrested by police in January after law enforcement staged an elaborate raid on his New Zealand home. For the first time, video of that siege has been posted online.

The footage shows a complex military-style operation that included semi-automatic weapons and at least one helicopter.

A New Zealand media outlet, 3NEWS, put together the report above.

Dotcom was arrested on a request from American authorities, who want him extradited to the United States to stand trial for copyright fraud on a massive scale.

However, a New Zealand judge recently ruled the police operation to detain Dotcom was illegal. The judge also called into question the legality of evidence submitted to the court against Dotcom and the FBI’s seizure of Megaupload’s data, throwing more monkey wrenches into an already complicated extradition process.

The fate of data stored on Megaupload’s servers remains unknown. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FBI to release it.

View As Slideshow »

Until recently, Kim Dotcom was the top Modern Warfare 3 player in the world. He even apparently posted a video to prove it. We imagine it's tough to maintain such a coveted position while being held in jail for multiple copyright violations.

The Megaupload kingpin claims to have paid $500,000 for the City of Auckland to put on a 2011 New Year's firework display. In case any Kiwi were to forget who was funding the awesomeness, he produced a video replete with on-screen identification of his whereabouts during the show. "Yeah, that's me in my personal helicopter!"

Dotcom stands 6 feet 7 inches tall, and tips the scales at 300 pounds, according to CNET. No one really knows his exact measurements though. All reports we've seen have him measured differently so whatever his exact height and weight are, it's easy to see that his physical size matches his personality and ego.

He legally changed his surname from Schmitz to Dotcom in homage to the beloved World Wide Web that made him famous.

5. Financial Bravado and a 9/11 Bounty

He once fancied himself an anti-terrorism fighter by offering a bounty of $10 million for Osama bin Laden after 9/11. He started a group called Young Intelligent Hackers Against Terrorism. He was so kind as to offer the authorities on the hunt a little of his own advice:

"Try Looking in Kandahar in Afghanistan. He visits his wife and daughter there at least once a month."

Image courtesy of iStock, Vesnaandjic

According to Vanity Fair, Dotcom is a "skilled and very fast driver" who raced in and won the Gumball 3000 in 2005. He bet that he would beat two of the female drivers. If they finished before him, he'd give them each $500,000. If he won, they had to join him in a threesome. No report on what came of that.

According to the Wall Street Journal, we do know that when he was arrested, police confiscated 21 luxury cars.

Even when the game seemed to be up, Mr. Dotcom orchestrated a flamboyant exit. Police had to cut their way through electronic locks to a saferoom, where they found him clutching a gun.

Image courtesy of iStock, zentilia

Dotcom generated a spectacle wherever he went, often surrounded by cars and women, and wearing his trademark black outfit. He was even known to jump into hot tubs fully clothed. He made movies about himself racing cars, flirting with women, and riding in helicopters and private jets.

According to The New York Times, in 2001 he reportedly made more than $1 million when he allegedly bought shares in a struggling website, then falsely announced he would make a major investment, only to then sell his shares once the price went up after his announcement. He then defended himself by appearing on a popular late-night show, claiming people hated him because they didn't like his lifestyle. He then fled to Thailand before ultimately being apprehended.

 

He commissioned this well-produced music video starring many celebrities supporting the site, ostensibly in part to rub Megaupload in the face of copyright holders. Much controversy ensued.

Read more >>

Tweet

Stamp of disapproval: House farm bill to gut nutrition program

By Tom Laskawy

Photo by Don O’Brien.

When the Senate passed its version of the farm bill, we at Grist had to admit that, for all the flaws, it “wasn’t all bad news.” Some of the worst aspects of the bill (like giveaways to the insurance industry and to big commodity farmers) were reined in by several late-breaking amendments, and federal nutrition programs (“food stamps”) were “only” cut by $4.5 billion over the next 10 years. That may not sound so great, but it’s all relative; farm bill analysts have been warning for months that the House version would be much worse.

In fact, later today, we’ll find out for sure just how much worse it can get. The House Agriculture Committee is scheduled to release its draft of the farm bill tonight — and according to Politico’s David Rogers, the House GOP has indeed forced far deeper (you might even say extreme) cuts to food stamps as the price for passage. According to Rogers’ sources, the House version of the farm bill will cut $16.5 billion over 10 years from food stamps alone.

(Update: Shortly after we published this post, the House released its draft. And that number was right.)

In a deep dive into the backroom fight over food stamps among House Republicans, Rogers reports that they have selected a set of “reforms” that will radically reduce the number of people eligible for the program. Close to 2 million people will be dropped from the food stamp program, Rogers estimates, if the House version becomes law. It doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans that these changes would also have to get through the Senate during the reconciliation process, which has rejected similar provisions in the past.

Distressingly, these are cuts that Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee seem willing to swallow. At a recent news conference, Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.), ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, admitted that the committee is expected to approve its version by voice vote next week and send it on to the full House for final passage — though he acknowledged that the draft will probably “make Democrats angry.”

“Angry” is probably an understatement. I would argue that the cuts to food stamps will be a non-starter for numerous House Democrats — many of whose votes will be needed to pass the bill, probably ending hopes for a new farm bill before the election. Yet it’s also possible that this process has simply devolved into empty pre-election posturing.

Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that the House leadership hasn’t even scheduled time to bring the farm bill up for a final vote. Politico’s Rogers speculated that House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (who bears a good part of the responsibility for setting the House schedule) never really believed the Senate would pass anything. Now he just wants the whole thing to go away.

With no guarantee of a floor vote on the House calendar, the prospect of an extension of the current bill (which expires in September) looms larger. But as Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition explains in the organization’s blog, there’s nothing simple about that either:

If we are headed to an extension of current law, here too there are at least three possible options. There could be a short term, 3-month extension, with the hope that Congress, during the “lame duck” session after the November elections could somehow find a way to finish the bill — even if the House version has never gone to the floor for debate (more on that option below).  There could also be a one-year extension, with both House and Senate starting the process all over again in the new two-year Congress starting in 2013.  Or there could be a one-year extension that could be superseded if a lame duck option materializes.

Substantively, there are also two options for an extension bill. One would be a clean extension, with no changes to current law during the time of the extension. The other, and perhaps more likely, would be an extension with a limited number of changes to current law, either to deal with several immediate problems that a simple extension would not address or to make a down payment on deficit reduction, or perhaps a combination of both.

And if the extension fails? Next stop, 1949.

We know the House GOP is happy to play chicken with the Senate as they just did with the federal transportation funding bill. In that fight, Senate Democrats showed a willingness to give up on many of their own priorities for the sake of getting a law passed that would keep federal funds flowing.

Further complicating matters, the House GOP has also made noise about demanding more cuts from commodity programs as well — a non-starter with Big Ag — though we’ll have to wait and see if those come to pass. Either way, Republicans have once again shown a willingness to take things to the brink. The question now is will they grab as many Democrats as they can and jump.

At the moment, the farm bill process is a Choose Your Own Adventure book full of tragic endings (and a slim chance of one or two reasonable ones). Hoefner couches the prospects for getting a new farm bill to the president’s desk about as hopefully as one can: “It’s a tall order, but not impossible.”

Indeed, I’m reminded of a comment Michael Pollan made during a visit to the Grist offices for a potluck lunch several years ago. At the time one of his ideas for improving food policy was to reform the House Agriculture Committee. As he put it, that committee is “where decent ag legislation goes to die.”

Of course, Pollan’s comment came before John Boehner and his Band of Merry Tea Partiers took control of the House in 2010. If the House Agriculture Committee of 2009 was where decent legislation went to die, then the current committee is where its corpse is trampled on, disemboweled, and paraded through the streets.

Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. His writing has also appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter.

var OB_langJS = 'http://widgets.outbrain.com/lang_en.js'; var OBITm = '1322003100161';var OB_raterMode = 'none';var OB_recMode = 'strip';var OutbrainPermaLink='http://www.grist.org//farm-bill/stamp-of-disapproval-house-farm-bill-to-gut-nutrition-program/';if ( typeof(OB_Script)!='undefined' )OutbrainStart(); else { var OB_Script = true; var str = unescape("%3Cscript src=\'http://widgets.outbrain.com/OutbrainRater.js\' type=\'text/javascript\'%3E%3C/script%3E"); document.write(str); }

Read more >>

Tweet

Diablo III down-time portends Real-Money Auction House launch

You may well be experiencing some heavy down-time on Diablo III today or over the past couple of days due to Blizzard’s newest security update that will in the end reveal the first release of the real-money auction house for the game. The update comes aside a key changed to the site’s Terms of Use which includes a brand new requirement for a Battle.NET authenticator attached to one’s account before they can use the auction house. This update will lead you into a world where you can both pay and earn real cash sums in exchange for digital goods, a service which did exist via eBay in the Diablo II iteration of the game, but never officially tied to Blizzard Entertainment itself.

This update will allow you to add cash to your Battle.NET balance which will then allow you to exchange that balance for in-house funds which in turn will allow you to purchase items for your characters to use inside the game. Battle.NET have updated their news feed with an alert that reads as follows:

“While we understand that this creates an extra step for players during the login process, we believe this added layer of account protection will help foster a safer auction house environment for all of our players.” – Battle.NET

This update will have separate sections which include hardcore-only auctions, auctions for gold-only (as we’ve seen already), and normal real-money auctions. We’ll be following this ecosystem closely to see what real cash money does to the world of Diablo this time around. Stay tuned!

Read more >>

Tweet

Diablo III Real-Money Auction House second launch date set

Its official: Blizzard and Battle.NET have announced that Diablo III’s new Real-Money Auction House will be launching on the 29th of May. This comes after a bit of a delay in which the auction house was going to be launched on the 22nd of this month but was pushed back due to unforeseen circumstances. Due to the extremely volatile nature of a real-money set of exchanges here in the next-level auction house for Diablo III in-game items, Blizzard has let the world know that they’re sparing no expense making sure the launch goes smoothly.

This in-game online auction house is set to have users inserting real cash with credit cards and PayPal for which they receive currency which essentially work like game tokens at an arcade. This currency lives inside the auction house only and is not carried in-game by characters so as to keep the whole system as controlled as humanly possible. This system was created in reaction to player requests during Diablo II that the system of trading items back and forth between players be streamlined.

Have a look at what underground “Greatest Paladin in the World” gamer Athene has to say about the Real-Money Auction House to gain a greater understanding of what’s going on here – NSFW for a couple of swear words, btw:

Players from the age of Diablo II will remember hacks, duplication techniques, and evil in many forms when it came to trading items between players. In Diablo III no such evil shall exist, or so Blizzard hopes. The success of the Real-Money Auction House will rely heavily on how hardcore the players of the game become, of course. If Diablo II is any indication, Blizzard can expect playing and trading straight through the next 15 years when they release another installment – Diablo IV on the way!

Read more >>

Tweet

The hidden costs of moving house

by Sian Meades on Apr 12,2012

I’m moving house next month and I already hate it. I’m trying to be excited, but it’s going to be more than a bit of a faff. And here’s the other thing I’m discovering – there are a lot of hidden costs. I’d made my peace with estate agent fees and a heck of a deposit. But there was a lot of sneaky expenses that I hadn’t even considered.

Or a man with a van. Or a buddy with a car. Unless you’ve already got four wheels, you’re going to need transport to get your stuff to your new home. At the very least it’s going to cost you £50 for the day (moving will take that long, you should always plan for two trips back and forth). Even if you have a friend who can help, you need to fork out for the petrol. And a pint after, that’s just polite.

You might not need a skip, but since everyone in my shared house is vacating at the same time, it’s down to us to make the place spotless. Meaning that we can’t really get away with leaving any rubbish furniture behind ‘just in case someone else wants it’ (yeah, that’s a line that doesn’t fool anyone)’ We need a skip. It’s the easiest way to get rid of everything, and the clearout will feel so good once we’re done. But it’s still about £90. We can split that, but it’s still money I hadn’t even considered.

Remember when you could just pick up boxes in Asda? Nope, they’re all about the Bag For Life now. That’s great, but not so helpful when you have to move house. I tried moving everything in Bags For Life once. It’s difficult, and your new housemates think you’re a bit weird. You can buy boxes online now and your boxes can cost you between £10 and £40 depending on how much stuff you have.

OK, so you’ve just sorted out your move and paid up your current bills. But what about the bills on the other side? If you’re unlucky you could find that your new council tax bill falls the day after you move in. Not much you can do about it, and it’s not exactly a hidden cost – you’d have paid it anyway. But it’s always worth factoring that into your budget and finding out from the landlord when they’re due. It’ll help you budget if you know to expect it.

Contributor

Sian is founding editor of the lifestyle blog Domestic Sluttery. She can also be found on Qype writing about London, and in bakeries looking for pecan pie.

Read more >>

Tweet