raid

LAPD faces off with Call of Duty statue in game studio raid

In this day and age, perhaps it's not the best idea to erect a life-size statue of a gunman and place it in the front window of your office.

Yet this is precisely what the Los Angeles Police Department confronted late Thursday night when officers stormed the building of game studio Robotoki. The LAPD, guns drawn, faced off with a gun-wielding, very human-like replica of soldier Simon "Ghost" Riley from Robotoki's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 -- that and a very startled Robert Bowling, the company's president, who happened to be working late that night. … Read more

MegaUpload's DotCom gets a peek at government spy records

In what looks like another blow in the U.S. case against MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom, New Zealand's spy agency is forced to turn over records of its illegal surveillance and raid of DotCom's home.

According to Reuters, New Zealand's high court ordered the agency to reveal the records to DotCom, which could possibly aid him in his battle to fight U.S. extradition. The court also ruled that DotCom and his company managers could seek damages from the government because of the agency's unlawful actions.

DotCom's saga has played out over the past year … Read more

Pirate Bay ditches servers and switches to the cloud

In the midst of threats of a possible police raid, the Pirate Bay decided to armor itself and become literally raid-proof. It's ditched its servers and moved to several cloud-hosting providers in different countries around the world.

"Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud," the Pirate Bay wrote in a blog post. "Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into … Read more

Swedish ISP confirms police raid targeted illegal file-sharing

Swedish police raided Web host PRQ earlier this week but it wasn't clear what they were after. Now, the ISP's owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing.

According to TorrentFreak, police took three servers -- one belonged to one of Sweden's popular torrent sites called Tankafetast, another to an alleged Android app piracy site called Appbucket. It's unclear what was on the third server.

On Monday, the authorities targeted PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet. Former … Read more

Video released of police raiding Kim DotCom's mansion

When Megaupload's founder Kim DotCom's mansion was raided in January, he claimed far too much force was used with unnecessary helicopters circling and elite forces arriving armed to the teeth. Now there's video to prove it.

Released by New Zealand's 3News, the video starts with a helicopter flying over DotCom's compound and landing directly in front of the massive mansion. Four armed officials jump out and run toward the house. As the helicopter takes off, ground forces are seen coming in through the gates.

DotCom's New Zealand home was reportedly worth $30 million. During the raids, … Read more

Police intercept online threat, raid wrong house

The occasional program on the Food Network can be quite frightening.

There's "Outrageous Food", for example, where you can watch people build a 105-pound burger in Clinton, N.J.

However, please place yourself inside the stomach of 18-year-old Stephanie Milan as she sat at home watching the Food Network and was overtaken by a harsh queasiness.

For her door was broken down and in walked a SWAT team, which was not in the mood to make her a burrito.

The Evansville Courier-Press offers that the ingredients of this raid were somewhat confused.

The SWAT team was looking … Read more

G-RAID with Thunderbolt review: Top performance for a price

When it comes to Thunderbolt storage devices, generally the more internal drives it has, the faster performance it offers. This is because the Thunderbolt standard offers 10Gbps speed, while the fastest internal drive, be it a regular hard drive or a solid-state drive, is limited by the SATA 3 standard that caps at just 6Gbps.

The more drives means the vendor can aggregate the performance of each drive into a total throughput that's faster than the top speed of each drive. For this reason, Promise's Pegasus R6, a six-bay Thunderbolt drive has always been the fastest. Now, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive can challenge the Pegasus.… Read more

Officials seize $42 million in MegaUpload assets

In a further setback for MegaUpload, Hong Kong Customs officials have frozen $42 million in assets held by the beleaguered file-swapping site during raids on offices, homes, and hotel suites.

The raids, which involved 100 officers, yielded a large amount of digital evidence and $42 million in suspected criminal proceeds, the Customs agency said in a statement. High-speed servers believed to be connected to the cases were found in expensive hotel rooms.

"The assets have been frozen in accordance with related ordinances. The operation is ongoing," the agency said in a statement.

The U.S. Justice Department and … Read more

LaCie one-ups itself with dual-drive Thunderbolt storage

LaCie, one of the first companies out of the gate last year with storage using Intel's fast Thunderbolt interface, introduced a dual-drive system called the 2big today at CES.

The 2big can be configured with two drives paired for high performance and capacity (RAID 0) or for high reliability by mirroring (RAID 1). Some people will appreciate fast backups, no doubt, but it seems likely that those willing to spring for Thunderbolt will be more inclined to take the performance route.

In addition, LaCie introduced its eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series. eSATA is an external version of the usual internal … Read more

Thunderbolt strikes LaCie anew, this time 2big

LAS VEGAS--If LaCie's Little Big Disk Thunderbolt is, well, too little for you, get ready for this!

LaCie announced today at CES 2012 that its new LaCie 2big external hard drive now features a Thunderbolt connection. Originally, the 2big series only offered USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA for Macs. There's also a version that offers USB 3.0, which is geared toward Windows users.

The fact that the LaCie 2big features dual-volume, allowing for RAID 1 and RAID 0, means that Mac users now have another option, other than the Promise Pegasus, to have a fast external storage device that also offers data security. LaCie's other Thunderbolt drive, the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt, only comes with a single internal drive, hence it's susceptible to disk failure.… Read more