RapidShare Rumored To Have Been Shut Down

[Popcorned1]

RapidShare Rumored To Have Been Shut Down

There are rumors that Rapidshare.com, the German file sharing and data storage giant, has been shut down by the authorities after a court order.

German collections agency GEMA have reportedly won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, according to a report.

However no court records have revealed any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet.

Currently rapidshare.com is not working but rapidshare.de is.

Users have been experiencing errors such as: "The following error was encountered: * Connection Failed The system returned: connection refused"

A Wikipedia entry was made that read: "As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare AG?s servers were shutdown by anti-piracy authorities in Germany. More than hundreds of Rapidshare servers were seized from their offices in Berlin although no arrests were made. Sources said, authorities are contemplating pursuing legal action against users who distribute and download pirated copies of software and movies from these servers."

It was quickly removed.

Rapidshare.com, formerly Rapidshare.de, has been widely used as a vehicle for the transfer and sharing of pornography. Site such as HCMF.com commonly used the site as a means of perpetuating the illegal sharing of pornography.

A NSFW and EXTREMELY graphic example of its use (or abuse, depending on your view) can be found here. (you must be 18) As you can see, below the photo are the links to where the pieces needed to make one file exist (or existed) on Rapidshare.

Rapidshare.com, and Filefactory.com have also been abused by spammers, says Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee's Avert Labs.

The "official" word is that the downtime is said to have been caused by a server overload.

Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has reportedly commented on this issue - "There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)"

you can still view the site via IP - 80.239.151.250

They either got DOS attacked, and are having trouble getting there DNS working or they want it to at least appear that way. At the moment, it would appear that they where NOT taken down by any "anti-piracy orginizations"

Source

Note :

This relates to www.rapidshare.com.

www.rapidshare.de is a different company.

[x-scratch]

rumors false rapidshares still running

[mshepp]

rumors false rapidshares still running

Hope so otherwise i'll be wanting a refund.

[Slimy]

^ Doesn't work for me.

[Merter]

^ Same

[Nightwind Hawk]

It works fine for me... just because it went down for a bit doesn't mean the company was shot down =\

[(Spork)]

www.rapidshare.com

down for me

[Rappy Veteran]

You might mean rapidshare.de which is a different company.

[Colin-uk Veteran]

I assume its not been shut down since access via IP is still available.

i'd say a dns issue or something similar..

[zeroday]

Yeah, IP works for me as well, albeit it loads slow.

[Popcorned1]

^ I would be careful, it could of been a phising site setup in the spur of the moment.

[Rappy Veteran]

I assume its not been shut down since access via IP is still available.

i'd say a dns issue or something similar..

I was just chatting to someone who heard its a dos attack

[Zoom7000]

I certainly hope it hasn't gone down. Otherwise I'll be wanting a refund too!

[Hani]

it's down for me

[Yochanan]

It's been down all day for me. I was wondering what happened.

[Popcorned1]

Right,

Rapidshare is having DNS issues atm. You can download a hosts file which will allow you to regain access

Hosts File.

[aldago]

It seems to be a dns problem. There's a list of static ip's floating around that added to your hosts file makes rs work again

just wait for the dns to update or look for the static ip's list.

[ricksterto]

For the latest developments, there is a story that is being updated at:

http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original...212125521.shtml

[Simon Veteran]

Aww, I was almost hoping someone would have to make something better to replace RapidShare :(

[ricksterto]

Thanks for the hosts file; working like a charm!

[Pc_Madness]

Working for me?

[+Warwagon MVC]

Rapidshare works for me. I have it setup for direct download and I just tried a link and it worked.

[Rappy Veteran]

It's back now for me.

[dvb2000]

^ Doesn't work for me.

Works fine here - maybe your ISP is blocking it?

[roadgeek9]

It loads up for me.