(lolfed.com)

Was Kim Dotcom feeling a little left out, after Edward Snowden stole the spotlight? Because as he fights his extradition to the United States, he's kicking up a fresh ruckus down under.

During a recent interview with Australia's ABC News, Mr. Dotcom basically accused the prime minister of New Zealand of handing him over to the United States government, just so Warner Brothers wouldn't film The Hobbit somewhere else.

Like where? Burbank?

ABC reports:

"[Warner Brothers executives] came here they told [New Zealand prime minister John Key] - 'These Megaupload guys are really giving us a headache. The founder, you know, is moving to New Zealand. Can you help us?' And he did," Dotcom said.

He added, "They came here to New Zealand to negotiate with John Key about shooting The Hobbit movies here," and further claimed that "his website was offered up 'on a silver platter' as part of negotiations with executives."

Right.

(Photo: Reddit)

This year's Cat Video Festival will come to Brooklyn, because dreams do come true. [BBC]

"At some point, if it seems appropriate, I would like to explore the possibility of being reinstated." Henry Blodget is profiled in the New Yorker this week. [AllThingsD]

Bad news for the boy king Zuck: These days the kids are loving mobile messaging apps like Kik and Whatsapp. [Reuters]

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest file-sharing site, after Megaupload's shutdown upended the market. [TorrentFreak]

How are automakers supposed to integrate apps without causing a spike in distracted driving? [New York Times]

Roadrunner, which was the world's fastest supercomputer circa 2008, is now obsolete and headed for the scrap pile. [Ars Technica]

(Photo: Instagram)

Can you hear me now? It's a cardinal rule of working outside the office that you absolutely must learn to use your inside voice. But it seems a few people in Silicon Valley haven't quite mastered that particular trick. "Stopped by a Starbucks on Sand Hill Road to use Wifi," Slate's Farhad Manjoo recently tweeted. "Surrounded by indiscreet start-up guys preparing for VC meetings." Remember guys: The walls have ears.

Boys on Girls CollegeHumor founder Ricky Van Veen has been known to drag his girlfriend, HBO star Allison Williams, around to tech events, but she’s not afraid to give him a taste of his own medicine. In Sunday night's episode of Girls, Mr. Van Veen had a cameo appearance which even earned him a credit at the end under "Also Starring."

(Photo: Screenshot)

Clad in a plaid shirt and jeans, Mr. Van Veen was present in the startup party scene for Charlie's new app, Forbid. "We hit 20,000 MAU, and then everyone was just like, 'Ohhh fuck we did it,'" Charlie says earlier in the episode when explaining why they're throwing the party. (MAUs are monthly active users, duh.)

When Marnie grabs the mic and decides to turn the party into her own private karaoke sesh, Mr. Van Veen can be seen rolling his eyes at his real life girlfriend. Inside jokes! He also has a short scene with Shoshanna, where he tells her, "Restaurants are like my passion. Just going out to things is who I am." We've never met Mr. Van Veen in real life, but his Girls character was definitely insufferable.

As far as the accuracy of the scene when compared to an actual startup party? We'd give it a 7/10. Needed more neckbeards.

Spamalot Looks like even New York Times editors aren't immune to the occasional Twitter hack. Earlier this week, Times public editor fell pray to a little vanity when she clicked a spam link, which caused her profile to tweet out the same link:

(Photo: Twitter)

Ms. Sullivan seemed to take it all in stride. "Now I know I've had the complete Twitter experience, with account briefly hacked," she tweeted shortly after. "Thanks to all for help and sorry for the unintended spam!"

#freegooglereader Budding bloggers who rely heavily on RSS to find stuff to write about aren't the only people lamenting the imminent shuttering of Google Reader. Turns out ex-Today Show host Ann Curry was also a fan. Larry, can you hear her?

https://twitter.com/AnnCurry/status/312022545975111681

https://twitter.com/AnnCurry/status/312019199503523840

FYI Lo Bosworth would like the world to know that she finally, finally got Mailbox:

Your move! (Photos: Instagram/Kim_Dotcom; Vice)

It's confirmed: Antivirus pioneer John McAfee has made it out of Belize (his 20-year-old girlfriend and a couple of Vice yahoos in tow) and into Guatemala, where he is now petitioning for asylum. What's more, according to the latest post to his blog, he would like to please meet the prime minister of Belize on neutral ground to work through their supposed "mutual issues."

Which inspires us to wonder which techie ex-patriot is the bigger pain in the butt: McAfee, or Megaupload mastermind Kim Dotcom. If you were an immigration official required to admit one of these loudmouthed, trouble-making characters, who would you choose?

Let's break it down:

Social Media Presence

John McAfee: A blog and seemingly constant phone calls to American reporters, because he's just old-school like that.

Kim Dotcom: The double-barrel combo of Twitter and Instagram.

Vices

John McAfee: He likes the ladies. Evidence also seems to indicate this man is mightily fond of illicit substances, though it's possible he's just trollin' us all.

Kim Dotcom: Loudly family-oriented, this one gets his jollies with fast cars and large living.

Physical Appearance

John McAfee: Tanorexic porno kingpin chic.

Kim Dotcom: Supervillain cool by way of Big and Tall.

Alleged Offenses / Victims

John McAfee: Possibly implicated in the murder of his neighbor, but no one is quite sure because the cops can't seem to locate him for questioning. We also can't help but wonder about that 20-year-old woman in whose company he crossed the border.

Kim Doctom: Copyright violations, trumped up to include allegations of criminal racketeering. That affects mainly Hollywood and the RIAA, an organization the Internet loves to hate.

Who'll Direct Their Respective Biopics

John McAfee: Oliver Stone

Kim Dotcom: Judd Apatow

Resourcefulness in Evading Police

John McAfee: Let's give credit where credit is due. Thus far, Mr. McAfee seems to be doing a masterful job of eluding law enforcement by any means necessary. No disguise is too embarrassing, even if it involves stuffing tampons in his nose.

Kim Dotcom: Zero. The man is currently under house arrest, and he can't get access to his frozen assets to mount much of a legal defense, either. Then again, a SWAT team helicoptered into his driveway at the crack of dawn, armed like they were storming Omaha Beach. You'd've gotten caught, too.

Potential Allies

John McAfee: Uhh ... his 20-year-old girlfriend's lawyer uncle? Also, certain reporters who might or might not have fibbed to their readers to protect him.

Kim Dotcom: Ron Paul, Swizz Beatz, everyone who's ever downloaded something illegally (i.e., everyone).

Political Implications

John McAfee: It's hard to parse what's real and what's a flight of fancy from Mr. McAfee. He claims Belize's Gang Suppression Unit has a special animus for him, that they're out to get him. Now he's swanning about Guatemala City intimating that he won't be safe if he returns. However, the country's PM doesn't seem to take him too seriously, having called him--on the record!--"extremely paranoid, even bonkers."

Kim Dotcom: Somehow, without (allegedly!) killing anyone or hiring a shitload of sketchy security guards or anything, this lug appears to have created quite the political scandal for the poor Kiwi government. It turns out that the little spying operation set up to nail Mr. Dotcom was actually illegal, since he was a legal resident the whole time. Not to mention that paramilitary raids at (what looks like) the FBI's behest don't generally go over very well with your citizenry. The prime minister of New Zealand finally issued a personal apology to Mr. Dotcom, who despite his troubles recently donned a dorky Santa hat and assisted in Auckland's official Christmas lighting ceremony.

The Final Assessment: 

This McAfee story is turning into a Shitshow Without Borders, but we'd rather deal with an obvious nutjob than get caught between the entertainment business and the crazy-like-a-fox Kim Dotcom.

Who, me? (lolfed.com)

It's been a rough week in the roller coaster ride that Kim Dotcom calls life. The filesharing mogul plans to launch Me.ga, the next generation of the ill-fated Megaupload, in January. But TorrentFreak reports that Mr. Dotcom is now facing two new antagonists: The government of Gabon and a pack of hackers.  

Gabon's opposition is fairly straightforward: “Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people,” said the country's communication minister, explaining his decision to suspend the domain.

It's safe to assume the U.S. role in the Megaupload fiasco was somewhere in the back of his mind.

That's not the only trouble with the domain, however. It seems it's been seized by a group of hackers calling themselves Omega, who told TorrentFreak:

“We’re pure in a diogenist way, we’re the true pirates, the true anarchists,” Omega told us. “Kim Dotcom is only taking advantage of us all, he is a megalomaniac with lawyers here to take advantage of us all, the nobodies, the artists he wants to profit from.”

They claim to be entertaining offers from all potential buyers, including Dotcom's arch-rivals in the entertainment industry.

We're starting to wonder whether this is all some sort of viral marketing campaign for the oeuvre of William Gibson.

(Photo: Ripten)

For competitive Call of Duty players like Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, the amount of time it takes for your local Internet signal to hit remote Xbox servers could actually cost you your title. Mr. Dotcom, he of lavish hot tub parties and trollish a Twitter account, wasn't about to let that happen.

Before the raid on his New Zealand mansion, Mr. Dotcom became the number one ranked player in the world on Modern Warfare 3. According to the New Zealand Herald, his handlers investigated his Internet connection during this time to make sure it was fast enough. Writes the Herald:

Information held by the Herald shows Gen-I studied data showing the amount of time it took information on the internet connection to reach the Xbox server. It went from 30 milliseconds to 180 milliseconds - a huge increase for online gamers.

The reason for the extra time emerged in a deeper inquiry, which saw a "Trace Route" search which tracks internet signals from their origin to their destinations. When the results were compared it showed the internet signal was being diverted inside New Zealand.

This means that Mr. Dotcom was illegally being spied upon by the Government Communications Security Bureau long before it copped to its shady dealings.

Of course, Reddit gamers aren't exactly convinced that his Internet connection would have had any bearing on Mr. Dotcom's MF3 performance. Quipped one: "Any excuse with these COD players... ANY."

A teaser of the service.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom sure seems to be keeping busy down in New Zealand. A series of late-night tweets suggests that his long-awaited music service, Megabox, is on track to launch sometime before the end of the year.

However, the way this story played out is a little wacky, as things involving Mr. Dotcom are wont to be.

Last night, Kim Dotcom tweeted a teasing message about an unidentified project in the works:

I know what you are all waiting for. It's coming. This year. Promise. Bigger. Better. Faster. 100% Safe & Unstoppable.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 13, 2012

The Next Web took this to be a hint regarding the timeline for Megabox, the new music project Mr. Dotcom has described as "a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings." He's also promised there'd be more updates on the project throughout 2012, making the assumption the tweet was Megabox-related a fair one.

But Mr. Dotcom proceeded to tweet the Next Web's article and add:

Yes... Megabox is also coming this year ;-)

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) August 13, 2012

So is Mr. Dotcom launching some other unnamed and heretofore un-hinted-at project besides Megabox?  if so, our money's on that “doomsday device” the FBI reportedly believed he had at the ready to nuke everything on Megaupload’s servers. 100% Safe & Unstoppable!

Someone called the cops. (Screencap)

No wonder Kim Dotcom spends so much time taunting the authorities from his Twitter account. A New Zealand news outfit has released the first footage of the January raid on the Megaupload mogul's mansion, and sounds like Mr. Dotcom's dealings with the authorities have been aggravating, to say the least.

The video opens with a helicopter landing and the deployment of the officers participating in the raid. The disgorging of black-clad SWAT-type officers and unfriendly-looking police dogs is pretty much the extent of the spectacle, and there's no footage from the goings-on inside the house. However, the video also includes radio communications exchanged during the raid, and Channel 3 has spliced that with testimony from Mr. Dotcom himself to create a pretty good play-by-play:

http://youtu.be/pMas0tWc0sg

Frankly, we'd suspected that the colorful Mr. Dotcom might've been exaggerating just a tad for effect, but the video attests that the raid was just as Hollywood-blockbuster as he makes it sound.

For starters, Mr. Dotcom didn't suspect anything from just the chopper noise—as his guests often arrived early—but when he began hearing mysterious "pinging" sounds, he pressed a button to alert the entire household (via SMS) that something was up. From there he ducked to the "red room," how he apparently refers to the supposed "panic room" where the authorities found him. The door wasn't locked, he claims. "I thought, you know, I'd better wait for them to come to me," he told the court, "rather than me popping out of that secret door and maybe, you know, scaring someone who might shoot me."

That's probably the most commonsense thing Mr. Dotcom has ever said.

The room itself is a tad disappointing, though—just a chamber tucked behind a secret door in a hall closet. We were hoping for something a little more high-tech, not just an enormous empty room with tacky red carpeting. If you're going to bother with a hidden room, at least put some bookshelves and a liquor cabinet in there, you know?

Mr. Dotcom also reports that he got a little roughed up: "I had a punch to the face, I had boots kicking me down to the floor, I had a knee into the ribs."

One also gets the sense that the tide of opinion in New Zealand might be drifting to Mr. Dotcom. The anchor's voice-over drolly notes that, "If it all seems slightly ... American ... the FBI were there on the day and during the planning period leading up to it."

Subtext: Leave it to a bunch of Americans to turn the arrest of a suspected copyright violator into Live Free or Die Even Harder.

(Photo: TorrentFreak)

Earlier this week, Kim Dotcom offered TorrentFreak some "insider information," about why U.S. authorities were so aggressive in going after his file-sharing company, Megaupload, pointing the finger at none other than Vice President Joe Biden.

“I do know from a credible source that it was Joe Biden, the best friend of former Senator and MPAA boss Chris Dodd, who ordered his former lawyer and now state attorney Neil MacBride to take Mega down,” Mr. Dotcom told TorrentFreak. As evidence, he offered up scans of the White House visitor log, which shows visits from Mr. Dodd, and the CEOs of Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures, as well as the chairman of Walt Disney Studios and the president of Universal Studios all coinciding on July 27, 2011.

White House records, which are public, also show Mike Ellis, former superintendent of the Hong Kong police and currently an exec with MPAA's Asia division, showing up on the same date. Mr. Dotcom claims that Mr. Ellis is also an "extradition expert." Add in the fact that the MPAA has invested in lobbying Mr. Biden's office and--voila!--you have the makings of a high-level conspiracy theory.

But today CNET reports that the film industry is "laughing" at those allegations. The MPAA doesn't deny that those players were present, but tells CNET the purpose of that meeting was to help Mr. Biden prepare for a trip to China. The MPAA also "flatly denied," claims that Mr. Ellis was an extradition expert.

"The purpose of this meeting with the Vice President was to discuss his upcoming trip to China last August and the importance of reaching a settlement with the Chinese government of the United States World Trade Organization complaint against China, which would increase the number of foreign films permitted into that country and provide a better share of box office revenues," the MPAA said in a statement to CNET.

We're not what to make of the MPAA's decision to respond. If the theory was so outrageous, why even entertain it? That might have something to do with Mr. Dotcom's facility with generating headlines, a skill he recently promised to tone down.

I agree @brianedwardsmed - I need to take a step back & chill. But I'm no PR guru. This is just raw, unfiltered, transparent & honest me.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 4, 2012

Contrite claims of truth-telling wrapped up in a #humblebrag--a PR pro couldn't have written it any better.

Kim Dotcom, however, is not like the rest of us. He wouldn't know how to make himself inconspicuous if someone pirated a how-to video and uploaded it to MegaUpload for him. And so it's no surprise that, as he waits in New Zealand for a court decision on whether he'll be extradited to the U.S. and tried for criminal copyright infringement, Mr. Dotcom is using his brand-new Twitter account as a distribution channel for Instagram pics and sly wisecracks about his present legal difficulties.

Our hearts go out to this man's legal representation.