Placebo megaupload

In many trials, no one—not even the research team—knows who gets the treatment, the placebo, or another intervention. Test and placebo groups are equally important, as shown by the results of numerous clinical trials.

For example, early research suggested that ginkgo biloba, an herbal supplement, might be effective in delaying dementia. To find out, the National Institutes of Health NIH sponsored a 6-year, Phase 3 clinical trial with more than 3, participants age 75 and older.

At the end of the trial, scientists reported that they had found no significant differences in effect on dementia in adults who received ginkgo biloba or the placebo. This result was disappointing, but scientists gained a wealth of information to inform future research. They also gained insights into the design and conduct of large dementia prevention trials in older adults. Many researchers think that treatment earlier in the disease process may help prevent or delay dementia.

In January , the FBI filed an indictment against the site and its founder, Kim Dotcom, and seized its servers, shutting down the site for good. Keen readers might notice that January is just around the time that the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act was making its way through the U. Although the bill, known as SOPA, was effectively killed by public opposition, there was no saving Megaupload from its demise.

This was no impediment to the FBI, though, as Dutch law enforcement helpfully confiscated a portion of the hardware and shipped it to the United States for analysis. The remaining servers owned by Leaseweb but containing files from Megaupload were kept in storage for a year before the company wiped them, citing lack of communication from Megaupload as the reason for doing so.

Although the case against Dotcom has stalled for close to a decade, Megaupload itself was irrevocably dismantled. However, given the name recognition of the website, a new service called MEGA. However, as of , the connection between MEGA.

By , he had no more connection to the file storage service, although he continues to promote MEGA on his website, kim. Unlike Megaupload, which functioned entirely as a file-sharing site, MEGA is a fully fledged cloud storage service. That means that while you can still use MEGA to share files, its primary focus is personal file storage, just like other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, pCloud or Sync. This includes the assertion that the company was forced into a hostile takeover by Chinese investors, and that the New Zealand government has since confiscated the shares from said investors, now exercising direct control over the service.

The claims get more outlandish from there, with perhaps the most eyebrow-raising one being that the service is run by a shadowy collection of Hollywood executives.

MEGA itself has repeatedly denied these allegations, and Dotcom has been unable to provide any proof. As we mentioned briefly in the last section, Kim Dotcom is the notorious founder of Megaupload. His first arrest in was a bit less glamorous — he was arrested and held in custody for a month for selling stolen phone numbers. Seemingly unfazed, Dotcom was arrested again in , this time for additional hacking charges and convicted on multiple counts of computer fraud and data espionage.

In , he again ran into legal trouble when he purchased a large number of stocks in a company called LetsBuyIt. Following his purchase, he announced that he planned to invest 50 million euros in the company, causing the stock price to soar and earning him a profit of 1.

To avoid prosecution for market manipulation, Dotcom fled to Thailand but was nonetheless arrested there and handed over to the German embassy.

After being transported back to his home country, he pled guilty to embezzlement and spent five months in jail before receiving yet another suspended sentence.

Probably fed up with the German authorities, he finally moved to Hong Kong in , where he incorporated various companies, including Megaupload. He eventually moved to New Zealand in , receiving residency status after investing 10 million New Zealand dollars in the economy.

While living in New Zealand, Dotcom got entangled in a political scandal revolving around his financial contributions to John Banks, the mayor of Auckland at the time. Banks was initially convicted for this, though he was later exonerated. Dotcom faced no legal consequences for his involvement in the scandal. When the January indictment from U. Nevertheless, local law enforcement raided his residence two weeks later and arrested Dotcom and several of his associates — including Mathias Ortmann, CTO and co-founder of Megaupload — though a judge quickly released them on bail.

Through all the legal twists and turns in the following decade, Kim Dotcom remained in New Zealand, making periodic public appearances and headlines, usually regarding his case or the successor to his file-sharing website, MEGA. The charges brought against Kim Dotcom are varied, but the main thrust boils down to the allegation that Megaupload was fully aware that the website was used for copyright infringement and chose to do nothing about it. In fact, the charges claim that the website actively encouraged such behavior by incentivizing users with popular downloads while removing files that received little attention.

The fact that the website was fully capable of policing the content it hosted is hard to dispute, seeing as it had systems in place to crack down on more nefarious file-sharing activities like child pornography. The said provision protects websites that host copyrighted content so long as the websites either have no knowledge of it or act to remove the content once aware of it. Aside from the general copyright infringement case, the U.

Since Dotcom resides in New Zealand, but the warrant for his arrest is in the U. It took three years before this extradition request even made it in front of a judge. The next major update came from the New Zealand high court, which upheld the previous decision that Dotcom could be extradited but with a pretty significant caveat.