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Kim Dotcom is a shit-ass grifter that earned millions by selling access to pirated media, then portrayed himself as a champion for information freedom. I wouldn't trust a word coming out of his mouth.
I mean I think he's pretty on the money with the "get given a secure phone by whatever security agency and still use your iPhone". It's a weird sort of status-symbol / rules are for the peasants thing I gues? It just genuinely seems to happen a lot.
Trump used an android phone as his personal and refused to switch over to an NSA phone. Truly the people’s president.
sadly that means it could've been just 2 years out of date because that's when most manufacturers stop updates.
Android OEM support annoys me. Always buy a phone you can root and put something like Graphene OS on
The obummer version was using a blackberry that had an encrypted mode.
I think Hillary Clinton just used a normal blackberry as secretary of state
I'm mostly thinking europe here honestly, the USA seems to take this stuff a lot more serious for their government
It’s a weird sort of status-symbol / rules are for the peasants thing I gues?
I'm willing to be it's as dumb as "It's too much hassle to move all my stuff over to a different (probably shittier) phone" most of the time
Selling access to pirated media, and going toe-to-toe with DMCA makes him the one free speech warrior I can get behind (well unless he's a pedo which I could definitely see being a thing).
If we truly had free speech then I should be a able to write down any sequence of 1s and 0s I want.
This is my one sovereign-citizen-type crazy legalese stance.
(well unless he’s a pedo which I could definitely see being a thing).
He does own a signed copy of Mein Kampf and you can google pictures of him wearing an SS helmet. Does that count?
a signed copy of Mein Kampf
As in... signed by Hitler himself?
Well that does not surprise me, the minecraft creator is also a nazi.
But i did find this which I feel like is a funny but not realistic excuse:
"I'm a Call of Duty player right... it's all about World War Two and how you play and I'm a big fan of that. I've bought memorabilia from Churchill, from Stalin, from Hitler."
But Mr Dotcom denied his ownership of the book meant he subscribed to Hitler's Nazi ideology.
"Well, let me make it absolutely clear, I'm not buying into the Nazi ideology. I'm totally against what the Nazis did."
"I did buy a cigar holder of Churchill and I did buy a pen of Stalin."
"I'm not a nazi, just a gamer who's into WW2 history" is an all time classic excuse
I don't see how basically saying "information doesn't need to be free, it's just the wrong people making money off it, it should go to me" can be constructed as serious activism. Yeah, maybe critical support for tying the copyright bullies up in lawsuits, but he's not Robin Hood, he's robbing the rich so he can live in a castle for himself.
How did his fighting in court have any implication on information not being free?
I only knew him as the Megaupload guy who got very sued, and reading his biography he clearly just happened to be on the cool side we might be able to critically support because of his specific grift.
But I'm not sure what he's fighting against would only be about him making money off stuff. If he somehow won his lawsuit (not happening) then wouldn't that ruling mean torrenting (peer-to-peer sharing, which is actually freeing information) would be protected too? And internet archive would probably be able to archive more stuff?
Yeah he's a guy who made money off a sketchy website that hosts shit behind sketchy ads that should've probably just been on torrent trackers, but that doesn't mean I won't root for him in his lawsuit and just hope he loses all his money at the same time in legal fees and fades to obscurity because of course he's also a nazi (thing that was just pointed to me on this website today because I didn't really follow him so don't want to go to bat for him too much)
Hence the critical support. His actions can definitely have positive effects (although it's very unlikely to succeed). But he's no champion of information freedom, and his posturing as such just rubs me the wrong way. He's fighting for his right to a mansion, not for the rights of internet archive.
Can't really imagine that an operation like that involves direct communication between a PM and another country's secretary of state. What, MI6 let's Truss know in an emergency briefing they just blew that shit up, and she offers to let the CIA know via Blinken herself?
Gonna need more than this, and a source that's less Grayzone-y
Yeah I feel like most of the prominent people are like 2 underlings removed from that sort of stuff.
At the same time, Liz Truss is generally regarded as incompetent - she was so business friendly she tanked the UK exonomy
I believe the US blew up the pipeline, but with the power of my brain, I can also tell that this is just a guy who goes on the internet telling lies doing exactly that.
High probability he is full of shit though, I think he is like mini q level of predictions
Why is the assumption that this was a state actor and not corporate sabotage? Main beneficiary was western oil companies, literally everybody else (Russian and NATO) loses here. These are the same companies that launched decades-long coverup campaign against global warming, they have the tech and motivation here.
because in the west there is no separation between state and corporate actors. the state only continues to exist to be used as an obfuscation of corporate power. the reason the US military and intelligence agencies exist is for when Exxon wants something blown up.
My friend, corporations acting outside of the state is the next iteration of the dystopia. It was only a matter of time.
Because capital isn't as unified as you think it is. The state has basically, since the 70s, served only to mitigate the contradictions that arise from competing bourgeois interests and it's starting to fail at that.
I 100% agree and this has been the case for a LONG time (United Fruit Company, Halliburton, etc.) This seems different though because it's hard to see national (national capital) benefit here.
This action really doesn't seem beneficial at all to NATO goals and it's a big escalation risk if concrete NATO involvement can be proven. If anything, it's going to make Russia double-down on controlling Ukraine pipelines. Germany was already onboard with shuttering Nord pipeline so why do it?
I see it more as oil companies going rogue. There was a known recent meetup between Biden and oil execs. I bet the conversation went something like "what the heck - who did this?"
i personally am of the opinion that the current US strategy is to completely decouple eastern and western economies, completely de-industrialize the rest of the west, and reindustrialize the US itself. the nordstream incident is targeted at europe so as to ensure they have no way to save themselves should they become desperate and use the nordstream gas once shit really hits the fan over this winter.
i believe the american bourgeoisie has correctly assessed that their hegemony, and capitalism, is to collapse in the near future without a major war. however, they also correctly assess there will be nothing left to rule over after a war and as such are trying to replicate the economic destruction of the previous world wars without an actual war.
in short they want to replicate the global environment of america's post ww2 boom without a nuclear war.
I had a similar hypothesis like this back in 2019, when it seemed like the looming recession was going to hit like a bag of bricks, when I also thought that even a major depression would not create the conditions necessary, what would the bourgeoisie do to truly liquidate or tamp down on the revolutionary potential?
I then thought of biological and chemical warfare.
Why would a company do it when they can just make the government do it and have the public pay for part of it, and have even less accountability.
Absolutely no doubt an underwater demo team rigged that pipeline up and exploded it, US or UK, whomever, working in co-operation.
The sad thing is that if it ever comes out that the UK or US was involved in this, people's reactions will just basically be "oh you guys"; which basically describes people's reactions every time something horrific emerges about the actions of any three letter US agency.
My favorite Kim Dotcom moment was when he was able to connect Ninja (the wife guy streamer) with Drake and Travis Scott, but he was mostly ignored during the stream and eventually just left in the middle of it
My favorite Kim Dotcom moment was when he said, and I quote:
The best way to communicate privately is inside of video games. Gaming software is still largely untouched by spy agencies and almost every game has their own player chat implementation. Now you know why I play a lot of video games 😎
The saddest part is I don't think he's half wrong, either. When everyone says use method X because it's secure, scrutiny goes that way. What kind of politician is sending sensitives messages in world of warcraft guild chats? That said, this is awful advice.
I 100% agree and I find this area of 'spycraft' an interesting topic. Its true that video game chats are a decent way to communicate while hiding in plain site, though this method is not secure by any means; more security through obscurity. Its funny you reference World of Warcraft, as spy agencies compromised wow's chat service over a decade ago . So you're correct, Kim isn't half wrong in that agencies aren't looking at EVERY game, though he's full of shit when he says "now you know why I play a lot of video games." He just wants to come off as being a bad ass OpErAtOr because he's a manchild with CoD brain.
I don't think I've heard anything about him since his mansion was raided. I mostly just remember him looking like a giant baby, driving boring Mercedes far too fast, and making some of the world's worst techno music.
But he funded Mega, which is far cooler than anything Musk has ever funded, so on the sliding scale of rich people Dotcom gets the opportunity to be reeducated instead of going straight to the wall.
Mega was cool because back in the day you'd get 50GB for free (it's 20GB now) and it's actually not bad.
He made MegaUpload and didn't have anything to do with Mega (allegedly anyway) because he got arrested and his assets seized.
Mega is kind of a spiritual successor, not so much a direct one.
Wikipedia lists Kim as a founder, and I specifically remember him being the hype man behind Mega when it launched. Mega's entire shtick was being a better version of Megaupload, and was created by almost all of the same people.
You're probably right then. It's been many years since I've looked into it.
don't forget the the megaupload mega song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Wvn-9BXVc
And then when Blinken told her to go harvest gold she said "Yes m'lord" in a monotone voice, and when he contacted her repeatedly she said "Stop pokin' me" and sounded kind of annoyed and when he requested soldiers to be sent to a joint military exercise she told him he had to construct additional pylons. Truly awful foreign policy.
Well, she was right about one thing: "We require more vespine gas"
Dude owns (or owned) a signed copy of Mein Kampf and there's pictures of him wearing an SS helmet.
Take anything he says with enough salt to desiccate an elephant.
