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.

(Image via buzzfeed.com)

Slick hot-tub dwelling playboy and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is currently out on bail awaiting an extradition hearing in August, much to the chagrin of the FBI. But despite the slew of piracy-loving groupies attempting to nab a piece of that sweet, sweet billionaire tail, Dotcom has his sights set on more noble ventures: stopping the federal government from deleting all Megaupload user data.

Dotcom told TorrentFreak that his legal team is in negotiations with the Department of Justice "to allow all Mega users to retrieve their data." The Electronic Frontier Foundation has also taken up the cause, launching the website MegaRetrieval. “When the United States Government shut down access to Megaupload, a multitude of innocent users who stored legitimate, non-infringing files on the cloud-storage service were left with no means to access their data,” reads the site. And according to Dotcom, some of those users—innocent or not—may actually be government officials.

“Guess what – we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak. Though no visible smirk was reported, we can just feel it emanating through that statement.

As The Register pointed out, the government will most likely claim that the Megaupload accounts are for "research purposes," much like how men read Playboy "for the articles."

Dotcom continued, “I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files.”

He then climbed upon one of his large giraffe statues and rode smugly into the sunset, his ankle bracelet beeping wildly.

Ouhhhhhh, burn. People in SOPA-supporting Hollywood giants should stop throwing stones. Using a new site called You Have Downloaded, a Russian-based service that says it tracks about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads, the fine folks at TorrentFreak took a look at IP addresses at entertainment conglomerates likes Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fox Entertainment and NBC Universal to see "whether these companies hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others."

As you might expect, that's a giant negative.

Using the IP ranges of those studios, TorrentFreak found evidence of music, movies, and TV shows downloaded via BitTorrent—and that's just the visible 20 percent.

And then there are the fine upstanding people at Fox Entertainment checking out the work of a competing studio. Perhaps downloading ‘Super 8′ can be branded as “market research,” but in this instance actually paying for the DVD might be more appropriate.

After all, when Fox notices that one of their own movies has leaked online they quickly contact the FBI to get the offender jailed. Ouch.

Yesterday, a Dutch blog called Geenstijl performed a similar stunt on Buma/Stemra, a local music royalty collecting agency that downloaded the video game Battlefied 3 and episodes of "Entourage." Buma/Stemra quickly claimed their IP addresses were spoofed. TorrentFreak calls bullshit, but welcomes the scam, writing, "After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders."

Betabeat is more concerned with why anyone would risk making their employer look like a big fat internet-destroying hypocrite (which, they are) for the 2011 version of "Conan the Barbarian." It was in 3D, for chrissakes!