Ryushare

» see ryushare.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nobody chose a cyberlocker. You found a forum thread, the thread had five links in it, and whichever host the uploader happened to have an account with was the host you used that afternoon. I cannot tell you whether I ever pulled a file off Ryushare, and that is not modesty. In 2012 and 2013 the host was a detail you read past on your way to the download button, and the only reason any of these names stuck was that one of them would be slow and one of them would want you to wait ninety seconds.

Ryushare.com was registered in March 2012 by Nguyễn Đức Nhật, who ran a small company under his own name in Bình Dương province in southern Vietnam. It was a paid file host of the ordinary kind. You uploaded and you got a link, and anybody who wanted that file quickly paid for the privilege. By the turn of 2013 it was ranked somewhere near 500 on Alexa, which put a file locker run out of Bình Dương among the most visited sites on the internet.

The numbers the police read out later are the clearest picture anyone has of what the thing actually was. Nearly 13.4 million files uploaded. More than 803,000 registered members, of whom about 77,500 were paying for premium access at ten euros a month or sixty euros a year. Somewhere between 500 and 700 servers, all of them rented from providers in France and the Netherlands, at a monthly bill of around 4 billion dong. About 230,000 dollars had already been paid out to four of its most productive uploaders.

The site disappeared in the first days of April 2014 with no notice and no goodbye page. On 13 April a lieutenant colonel with the investigative police in Thừa Thiên Huế province confirmed that his unit, working with the Ministry of Public Security's high-tech crime bureau, had arrested four men. Two cars and three motorcycles were seized, along with five savings books holding 7.5 billion dong.

~ the case file ~

~ what the money looked like ~

The charge was distributing obscene cultural material, not copyright infringement. Vietnamese law in 2014 had a sharp and well-used instrument for pornography and very little to offer a film studio in Los Angeles, so the case that got built was the case that could be built. Megaupload and Hotfile were taken apart by rights holders in American courts. Ryushare was taken apart by a provincial police unit over the adult films on its servers, and the outcome was custodial in a way the copyright cases mostly were not.

What made it easy was the payment rail. Onepay, a domestic Vietnamese processor, transferred about 132 billion dong to Nhật's company between 1 January 2013 and 10 March 2014. Foreign hosts of this era went to great lengths to keep their revenue offshore and untraceable. This one banked at home, through a normal company, into an account with his name on it.

~ the thirteenth of april ~

Sentencing came in March 2015, eleven months after the arrests. Five men were convicted. The terms ran from nine months up to three and a half years, with the maximum going to Nhật as the founder and operator. The fines attached to the sentences came to a few thousand dollars, against roughly 7 million the site was calculated to have earned across its life.

The four uploaders who had collected the 230,000 dollars were not the ones in the dock. That money had already left the country in small pieces, to people whose only relationship with Ryushare was an affiliate dashboard and a payout threshold. The rewards program worked exactly as designed right up until the day the servers stopped answering.

~ the servers nobody owned ~

Everything load-bearing about Ryushare sat in French and Dutch data centers under somebody else's contract, which meant the whole site could be ended by a prosecutor in Huế who never touched a single machine. Today ryushare.com still answers with a 200. What it serves is a five-kilobyte page that says Loading... and then posts you off to a parking network, the same network holding a dozen other dead file hosts on the same template. The domain outlived both the company and the prison term, and it is now worth exactly what a redirect is worth.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »