Megaupload’s digital doors may have been closed due to the presence of pirated materials, but there’s still the matter of all that legal content residing on its servers. Naturally, folks want their files back, but now that the government’s gotten what it needs, the hosting companies no longer need to keep the data around because Megaupload’s no longer paying them to do so. Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, however, have decided to preserve the data for another two weeks while a deal is brokered with the DOJ for its release. In the meantime, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has teamed up with Carpathia to create a website that puts folks in touch with EFF attorneys so users can try to retrieve their data. No word as to what legal wrangling the EFF can do to make it happen, but those affected can get the wheels of justice started at the source below.

SOURCE via MegaRetrieval.com

Facebook could file papers for its IPO, or initial public offering of company stock, as early as next Wednesday. This according to the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Facebook itself has not commented, nor have Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, which have been vying to handle the offering. The Journal said Morgan Stanley was in the lead, and cautioned that the filing for the IPO may not come for a few weeks.

Jonathan Thaw of Facebook sent an email to ABC News: “Our position on this is that we don’t participate in IPO-related speculation.”

Reports before today said Facebook would likely be valued at $75-100 billion.

“If it comes to pass, this will be the largest tech IPO in history, yielding around $10 billion for the social network,” wrote Chris Taylor of Mashable. “Google’s 2005 IPO, as big a deal as it was, didn’t even reach the $2 billion mark.”

To put it blandly, an IPO would not be a surprise. It has been talked about for months. There is a secondary market for Facebook shares among the investors who have backed the company up to now, and it has been widely reported that trading in privately-held shares has been halted.

You know the story by now: Facebook began in 2004 with Mark Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard, who joined with a couple of friends (some of them now ex-friends) to find a way for schoolmates to connect online. The idea caught on. Facebook now claims more than 800 million active users worldwide.

SOURCE via ABC News

Things went icky when the Federal Bureau of Investigation took down one of the largest file sharing sites on the internet – MegaUpload – just before the Chinese New Year break. The Feds also shut down 18 other sites in the Mega network, and put the site’s founder Kim Dot Com behind bars.

But up till today, the true nature of the massive swoop is still vague to laymen like you and I. While it would be easy to blame everything solely on the recent heat around SOPA, it seems that the FBI’s operations went deeper than the proposed (and subsequently overturned) legislation had us believing.

According to the folk over at TorrentFreak who took a closer look at the incidents surrounding the recent swoop and the 72-page indictment which followed, it seems that the authorities had already planned this operation months ago.

Story continues after the jump. Read more…

Well that didn’t take long. Pirate Parties International is assembling a list of users who had lost data in MU’s shutdown last week as it builds a case for an upcoming lawsuit against the Feds.

The gist of the lawsuit is that users who had been using the file-storage service of legitimate reasons were unfairly denied access to their personal files due to the FBI’s actions. “The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended,” said Pirates of Catalonia in a press statement.

PPI is currently setting up a complaint submission system and is also looking into whether the FBI’s actions potentially violated US law (though you’d figure the FBI would have checked on that first).

While Facebook’s Open Graph might have exposed you as a Belieber way back in September, you couldn’t chat and stream that questionable musical taste to your friends, Turntable.fm style, until now. Listening to tunes on music services that integrate with Facebook’s API — like Spotify and presumably Rdio, amongst others — populates the ticker adjacent to the news feed and the chat overlay with clickable “Listen with” buttons (as seen above). Upon clicking those, you’re slung into a group chat window whereupon you can listen and discuss those beats with your friends. Don’t fret if you can’t see it just yet, as it’ll roll out in the following weeks, but while you wait a link explaining all awaits at the source.

SOURCE via Facebook

On Thursday, ICANN opened up the doors for companies to step up and apply for a domain that replaces the typical .com, .org, .info, .gov or other extension with their actual company name. ICANN expects to see up to 2000 applications within the small three-month window it’s currently permitting, and will likely not take additional .yournamehere domain applications for years to come.

The first wave of applications will probably come from big-name brand owners who are currently struggling to keep their names out of the .xxx domain. A brand-based domain like .kraft, .burgerking, and .macys would boost brand awareness online for the owners. Yet said companies may be forced to reserve their domain — even if there are no plans to use it — just to keep them out of the hands of cyber-squatters or other questionable parties.

According to Reuters, an application for the new domain isn’t cheap, costing $185,000 per entry. The estimated start-up costs will be around $500,000 and annual costs will be around $100,000. For the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google, that’s pocket change. Other companies down the totem pole of popularity might not have the additional funds to support a specialized domain, thus could lose their “space” to someone less “qualified.”

In addition to brand holders, ICANN expects to see applications from well-known cities or regions like .london or .newyork or .lasvegas. There may even be community identifies like .gay, .eco and perhaps even .gamer. There may also be applications received from companies aiming to build a business based on new domains.

Stuart Durham, the European sales director for Melbourne IT, claims that the consultancy firm is currently preparing 100 applications for its customers who are looking at the domain opportunity as a second weapon. “Banks are looking at it for online authentication, to prevent fraud and build trust, while consumer goods makers believe they can use this to become more effective in their online marketing and consumer engagement,” he told Reuters.

So far only a handful of companies have made their application known including Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi. Others are keeping quiet in fear of unwanted competition. ICANN said it will disclose the full list when the application window closes in April. To qualify, applicants must demonstrate that they have relevant intellectual property rights, and detail how they will operate the domain.

To learn more about the new domain, read the full story from Reuters here.

On Friday, News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch admitted on Twitter that he and his company killed MySpace. In fact, his very words were that “we screwed up in every possible way.” He added that News Corp walked away from the destruction having learned “lots of valuable expensive lessons.”

Expensive is a pretty accurate description. News Corp purchased MySpace back in 2005 for $580 million as it was growing in popularity — that time period before the Internet halted and gave birth to Facebook, the current center of the social world. Having lost a good chunk of business to Zuckerberg and Co., Murdoch sold MySpace for $35 million last year, taking a 94-percent loss.

Quite an expensive lesson.

Murdoch reportedly joined Twitter at the start of the year, but this is the first time he’s tweeted about MySpace and the difficult six years before its sale. His current topics outside the MySpace blunder have centered on the show in Las Vegas.

“Big three, Apple, Google and Amazon, and maybe Facebook dominant now and growing,” he said in one tweet, referring to the show. “Plenty of others good, but not in same league.” Eventually he reports that it seemed like more innovation than ever, “some great, all disruptive.”

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

“I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith (R-Texas) said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.”

Smith also released the following statement on Friday:

“We need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products. “The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60% of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.”

“The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.

“The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”

The move comes after widespread protest on the Internet on Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit and others. The sites signaled their displeasure with the bill by going dark. That day, several Congressmen dropped their support for SOPA and its Senate counterpart, PIPA. The latter bill has also been taken off the table for now.

“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a statement Friday morning.

Smith’s stance comes just two days after he told The Wall Street Journal that he didn’t plan to back down on SOPA, telling the newspaper he expected to “move forward” with the bill in February.

Wednesday in a blog, Red Hat offered its two cents concerning the drama surrounding SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate). The company points out that now isn’t really the time to introduce the bills, as corporations, small independent companies and even the government itself is working hard to rebuild confidence in the American economy. Red Hat — along with most of America — worries that these two bills, if passed, could effect jobs and innovation nationwide. Not only could they break the Internet, they could break a fragile economy trying to recover.

“As America’s – and the world’s – largest and most successful provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, Red Hat is proud to be headquartered in Raleigh,” Red Hat said. “Our high-quality, affordable technology solutions are found throughout the mission-critical IT architecture of the financial, defense, transportation, telecommunications and most other industry sectors.
Our success and, increasingly, the economic success of our state is the product of the encouragement of open innovation and collaboration. A vital ingredient of this success involves leveraging the tremendous gains that the Internet has brought through online collaboration, software development and sharing of ideas.”

“In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted,” Red Hat continues. “It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies. The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.”

Red Hat hits the nail on the head. The bills would seemingly launch a virtual dictatorship that would allow enforcers to shoot first and ask questions later. However the good news is that there’s growing opposition from all corners of the Web. The White House itself has even expressed serious concerns over the language used in the bills that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

“Six prominent Senators, including the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who previously supported the bill called for delay in consideration of PIPA due to a variety of unresolved, outstanding issues,” Red Hat reports. “On the House side, the Majority Leader has dashed the momentum of SOPA by delaying consideration until consensus is reached. SOPA and PIPA remain on the Congressional agenda, despite these developments. Even as legislators work to address the problems of ‘rogue’ web sites, Congress owes us a solution that addresses those concerns without killing the web’s economic engine and shutting down the future of innovation. SOPA and PIPA aren’t that solution.”

“We all need to remain vigilant as work on these bills continues,” the company concludes. “The momentum has slowed, but supporters of SOPA and PIPA continue to push hard. Opponents should make sure their representatives hear their voices.”

On Blackout Day, Facebook hasn’t grown dark, it hasn’t posted links to external information, and it hasn’t thrown up an image shooting Washington the middle finger. Instead, Facebook has posted its stance on the whole SOPA debate. In a nutshell, Facebook doesn’t think the legislation currently being considered by Congress is the right solution to defeating piracy.

“PROTECT IP and SOPA could create very real problems for Internet companies like ours that are a primary driver of innovation, growth, and job creation in the 21st century economy,” Facebook states. “The bills contain overly broad definitions and create a new private cause of action against companies on the basis of those expansive definitions, which could seriously hamper the innovation, growth, and investment in new companies that have been the hallmarks of the Internet. In addition, we are concerned about provisions in the bills that could chill free expression or weaken the Internet’s architecture.”

The Facebook entity goes on to say that it’s been engaging in a constructive dialogue with content creators and trademark owners on the most effective ways to combat piracy. The public address also offers a way for users to report IP infringement, or rather, to tattle on someone who might be using copyrighted material incorrectly. However Facebook Mark Zuckerberg actually posted a statement on his profile page, a two-paragraph message that briefly outlines Facebook’s stance.

“The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world,” he writes. “We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.”

He goes on to say that the world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. “We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals,” he added. “I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.”

For more information on Facebook’s situation of the SOPA and PIPA drama, head here.