I'm done for once the authorities know I have an account on HACKER News.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under their keyboard.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
... they only seemed to put a sign on it to say 'stop defaulting it' yet did zero oversight, so I'd just keep on walking over to the printer next to it, reset it, and keep on trucking.
Getting a CR48 from the Google Chromebook pilot program was my next trick to defeat their WRT shenanigans - that 200mb of free 3G every month actually went a long way back then in the halls, and a McJob paid for the rest of the wireless freedom ;)
1. Use of MEGA (it's apparently used to share CSAM)
2. Use of virtual machines
3. "Having Tor on my computer" (I had to put that in quotes because whilst it doesn't make sense, that's what they said).
They're fucking clueless, don't underestimate how little they understand. An explanation of how something is harmless likely sounds to them like an admission of guilt.
It was an eye opening experience. I (and many members of my extended family) have very much less respect for the competence of law enforcement as a direct result of this experience.
MEGA is indeed used to share CSAM and pirate stuff. That is its primary use actually but it's one of those institutions that maintains plausible deniability. Remember it was started after MegaUpload was shut down for being obviously designed to reward copyright infringement - the new one isn't obviously designed for that
There's also a large chasm separating copyright infringing material and CSAM, and putting them together as "the primary use" as you did is, in my opinion, questionable agenda pushing.
I agree with your first paragraph, but your second one leaves me wondering about your motivations for commenting in the first place; MEGA and Kim Dotcom embarrassed US law enforcement for a long, long time.
I happen to think that KDC is a piece of shit. But it seems that would make him perfect tech-bro material, except that his copyright infringement wasn't seen as 'US preferential' at the time.
Which is exactly the same as leading corporate secrets or international espionage or hosting a copy of The Satanic Verses, from a technical perspective.
It's also no different from hosting a blog or any other website from a technical perspective.