Absolutely

I remember as it being great for sharing music.

I think they also had something else for streaming - Megavideo?

Very glad to hear of your success - God bless ^^

For real - the numbers are pretty boggling, but it always finds its way into the hands of users and loads of it into the hands of police.

My guess is that the uncertainty of the supply lines justify mass production since it’s understood massive busts like this are always going to happen.

Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload were each sentenced by a New Zealand court on Thursday to more than two years in prison.

The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering.

The men last year struck a deal with prosecutors from New Zealand and the U.S. in which they pleaded guilty to being part of a criminal group and causing artists to lose money by deception.

Meanwhile Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, is continuing to fight the U.S. charges and threat of extradition. He has said he expects his former colleagues to testify against him as part of the deal they struck.

U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.

Looks like things could come to a head for Kim.

I see how this could be really great if a site got up and we had a lot of consenting artists releasing their material for free. There’s a lot of potential. But I also see agree with @[email protected] – it’s a recipe for otherwise getting wrecked by legal problems as people upload copyrighted music.

I’pll consider putting some old podcast stuff I have done up there at some point, and if I ever do podcasting seriously again, definitely I would host it through the fediverse.

The American people.

I am full luddite: I just post from the Brave browser, lol.

I do agree with you. I was never a drug abuser but was a pretty hardcore alcoholic firmly ensconced in the punk rock / extreme music scene. I had a friend who was engaged in pimping and more than a few associates who were involved in prostitution -I became someone who knew this scene like the back of my hand, which led to knowing people who met very untimely ends due to substance abuse and suicide from despair…

And I understand how, in the USA, this is compounded by the super hardcore narcotics that are out there, which I imagine can make your life unravel in a second.

I have a distant cousin who became a meth head sometime in the late 90s and disappeared off the face of the earth to us not that long after. RIP, I imagine.

And, likewise, a RIP to all the poor folks who died here and didn’t get that chance to turn their life around… and, even if they never turned their life around, it’s safe to assume they were decent enough people who simply got the millstone of addiction around their neck and could never get out from under it.

The numbers are ridiculous:

The retailer estimated in its earnings release Wednesday that inventory shrinkage — mostly the theft of merchandise — would clip profits by a whopping $500 million this year. Factoring in an about $700 million profit hit from inventory shrinkage in 2022, Target is on pace to see $1.2 billion in profits go up in smoke, due primarily to organized retail crime.

That’s really eyepopping…

It’s almost hard to believe that this could just be people stealing stuff. I wonder if organized retail crime actually refers to something more complex than just people picking stuff up and walking away with it.

Target Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell says the problem is getting worse, is nationwide, and across various merchandise departments.

“The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry. And when products are stolen, simply put they are no longer available for guests who depend on them,” Cornell said on a call with reporters.

“Left unchecked, organized retail crime degrades the communities we call home. As we work to address this problem, the safety of our guests and our team members will always be our primary concern. Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results,” he said.

It does turn out that Organzied Retail Crime might be something more:

What Is Organized Retail Crime (ORC)?

Organized retail crime (ORC), also referred to as organized retail theft (ORT) or professional shoplifting, involves two or more people who conspire to steal retail merchandise with the intention of reselling the items at a profit. Unlike shoplifting, which involves an individual stealing something for their own personal use, ORC is usually a large-scale operation backed by a criminal enterprise that may also engage in other types of theft, fraud, and money laundering.12

ORC is one of the leading causes of retail shrinkage, or inventory loss. According to the 2022 National Retail Security Survey (NRSS), published by the National Retail Federation (NRF), shrinkage represented nearly $100 billion in losses for the retail industry in 2022. ORC is also a major cause of violence in retail environments, creating safety risks for retail workers and customers.3

It’s apparently divided into two parts:

Organized retail crime operations are typically divided into two parts: boosting and fencing. First, “boosters” steal goods, whether from retail stores or ecommerce sites. “Fences” or “fencing operations” are then responsible for purchasing or receiving the merchandise and reselling it to turn a profit. Historically, many of these goods have been fenced in flea markets and pawnshops; however, stolen merchandise is increasingly being resold in online marketplaces that facilitate the anonymous, large-scale, and fast-paced movement of goods.42

Investopedia

So it really does sound like this really is just in reference to the local guys coming in and snatching everything up.

Absolutely agreed - we need to actively be abandoning the platforms they hand to us.

I think the only goal is to point out that blacks are living in dangerous neighborhoods and not being helped by these policies at all

The surge in gun crimes in Minneapolis is claiming Black victims at a vastly disproportionate rate to the city’s demographics.

Last year, police counted one Black shooting victim for every 150 Black residents in Minneapolis, compared to one white victim for every 3,768 white residents, according to data presented to the City Council this week.

White people comprise about 60% of Minneapolis’ population, versus 19% Black or African people, according to census data. Yet only 9% of shooting victims are white so far in 2022, compared to 83% Black, the data from Minneapolis police show. Two-thirds of the victims also are under the age of 31, and a majority of shootings occurred in specific hotspot areas in north and south Minneapolis.

The data highlight the compartmentalization of how and where violent crime is surging, and, in turn, how residents are living starkly different daily realities based on demographics, said City Council Member LaTrisha Vetaw, chair of the Committee on Public Safety, who is Black and resides in the Jordan/Willard-Hay area of the North Side.

The chances of this not bleeding into ones regular life in society seem slimmer and slimmer if the Republicans don’t win the 2024 election.

Police in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville said May 23 they were looking for Meza in connection with the death of his roommate, 80-year-old Fraga. Officers found Fraga’s body May 20 while doing a wellness check after loved ones hadn’t heard from him for several days.

Austin police said Meza called them May 23 and confessed to killing Fraga. Police said he included details that had not been made public, although they did not disclose those details.

Police said Meza also implicated himself in the 2019 death of Lofton. He did not name her, but said the street name where she was killed.

Lofton, 66, was strangled to death.

Meza pleaded guilty in 1982 to raping and murdering 8-year-old Kendra Paige, whose body was found behind an Austin elementary school. He served over 10 years of his 30-year sentence and was released on parole in 1993, with credit for time served and good behavior.

At the time of the girl’s killing, Meza was on parole for robbing a convenience store and shooting a man, leaving him with permanent injuries, police said.

Eight to 10 cold cases going back to 1996 are being investigated as possibly connected to Meza, and the number could rise, Austin Police Department detective Katie Conner said in a news conference Tuesday. She said there appeared to be no immediate connections between the victims and that the cases “fit the circumstances” that they were looking at, but did not elaborate further on what those were.

Great observation:

In real life, however, if several people are involved in a crime and one of them offers to talk, detectives must make a judgment call. If they charge everyone with the maximum, everyone will lawyer up. So detectives work to “flip” the accomplice who seems less culpable. This horse-trading strikes many outsiders as ethically questionable, and criminals consider it betrayal (hence the saying “snitches get stitches”). Yet the law allows it so long as the police do not knowingly solicit perjury. Without deals like this, it would be impossible to solve cases in which the only (or best) eyewitnesses to a crime are involved in it. And those happen every day.

Attorneys for Lyle, 55 and Eric, 52, say testimony from Roy Rosselló, a one-time member of Latin boy band Menudo, that he was raped by Jose Menendez, a senior RCA Records executive, several years before the killings shows that the brothers acted in “imperfect self-defense” and were guilty only of manslaughter.

This is honestly an interesting twist.

Both men are inmates at Facility E – known as Echo Yard – in Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, a special unit where 700-plus prisoners have a relaxed regime after earning the right to be held there, many by giving up gang affiliations.

Echo Yard’s special status means prisoners can largely move freely between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. It also regularly attracts local television and documentary crews.

A member of a white nationalist group Patriot Front is facing up to 30 years behind bars after pleading guilty to child porn charges.

Utah native Jared M. Boyce, 28, was one of 31 members of the extremist group arrested last year after they were found in the rear of a U-Haul van, planning to disrupt and intimidate an LGBTQ pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

A month after his arrest, the FBI searched Boyce’s phone and found images of children performing sex acts, according to court documents obtained by Fox13.

Boyce admitted to possessing the images and to sending a photo of his genitals to a 16-year-old girl, according to the court documents.

He has been locked up at the Utah County jail since March 10, according to jail records.

He is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday.

A Nevada teen is accused of having sex with a schoolgirl who was so drunk she was “barely conscious” — and filmed by onlookers who laughed while she tearfully begged him to “stop,” according to cops.

Aiden Cicchetti, 17, initially denied having sex with the girl in the back of her car — but broke down in tears when confronted with three videos later sent to her, according to an arrest report obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The videos caught onlookers laughing as Cicchetti performed a sex act on the girl, who could be heard sobbing, “no, no, no,” the arrest report stated.

The short clips showed her “barely conscious” and telling Cicchetti to “stop,” police said.

Before seeing the clips, the girl had no memory of having sex with Cicchetti, whom she met on a “party bus” in Las Vegas, the documents said.

She told cops she’d been left “dizzy and nauseous” and with blurred vision after Cicchetti gave her booze — and woke up in his kitchen wrapped in a towel with her pants and underwear missing, the report said.

He later messaged her on social media and referred to them having sex — which she initially dismissed as a joke, the documents said.

But someone later sent her the videos, cruelly writing: “LMAO look what I found on my phone,” the report said.

El Salvador has accumulated 365 murder-free days since President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019, the Salvadoran leader announced on Thursday, having enjoyed just a single day without a registered homicide in the 15 years prior.

The precipitous drop in the homicide rate in one of the world’s most crime-ridden countries has been impressive and has been particularly prominent in the first five months of this year.

There have been 97 murder-free days so far this year up until May 13, up significantly from the 27 days recorded for the same period in 2022, and the three days in 2021. It is important to note that the government is not claiming the days were consecutive, but it still represents an unprecedented feat for a country that many experts said had the highest murder rate in the world before Bukele took power.