"If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit"
Except that you will probably not put your money in a bank that's widely known for being a drug dealers haven, will you?
I also am not a big fan of the "see I told you" attitude, but it seems to me that no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload.
Of course there is not guarantee that services like icloud or dropbox will never get shut down, but they do look much more reliable than megaupload..
As others have said, "widely known" is an awfully big assumption to be granting yourself with no argument. There is a wide gulf between a user expected to competently interact with a web front end, per the features and cost/benefit directly expressed by that front end, and a user who is expected to evaluate (on what basis, exactly?) the probability with which a given Company/Ownership is likely to be obliterated by fiat.
What's worse, HN readership is arguably an upper-crust-of-savvy environment for making that sort of appeal, but imagine:
- two weeks ago, someone offers HN readers $100 bets that megaupload will get raided / shuttered / data frozen in the next two weeks
- if you take the bet, and you win (megaupload raided), you get $200 back
- if megaupload doesn't get raided, you get $90 back (i.e. you pay as much for losing the bet as a megaupload user pays to access to service)
Do you honestly think more than 10% of HN readership would have taken the bet and tried to double their money? Or would the "smart money" (and again, some of the smartest money available on the internet) been on megaupload staying up and available?
You're right, my apologies for going overboard with a non-justified argument. When I succeed in looking further than my tech-savvy like-minded friends, I fall into the trap of thinking about other people about my age.
I don't know about you, but my facebook stream has been polluted with dozens of messages crying over what happened to megaupload (and not because they had there work uploaded on it), which (wrongly, I know admit) let me to think that everybody knew about megaupload shadiness.
Now as you and others rightly pointed out, I forgot about the rest, maybe the majority of people who used in a totally legal way.
no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload
How do we explain to sane, but non-internet-savvy, people what rules they should use to tell "safe" places to store their data from "unsafe" ones.
Megaupload took pains to not show infringing content on their home page and they did not provide a search engine that would return it. I'd ended up at the site several times and, though it set off a few of my red flags, I can't really explain why.
This is what I usually tell non-tech-savy people to do. "Remember to make backups" seems to be too abstract and thus they tend to procrastinate the "make backup" topic away.
"Copy your important stuff to at least one other place, be it an external hard disk, a USB-Stick, a DVD or an online storage service."
And then I usually configure Dropbox for them and show them how to use it. And I tell them not to put sensitive information like online banking PINs on there. And tell them that I can also show them a way to further secure the data with TrueCrypt.
But some are even resistant to this. I don't bother pushing them, because I know they will lose data at some point. When that happens I "told you so" them once and after having a good laugh at their dangling unmentionables I help them setting up backup/redundant storage.
A great answer...but to a slightly different question.
Which, I think, confirms my suspicion that with both financial institutions and websites it's probably impossible to explain to nonexperts how to judge their credibility.
I think you overestimate the "common" knowledge that Megupload is used for illegal file sharing. I can bet you that 90% of my parents' friends have no idea.
Except that you will probably not put your money in a bank that's widely known for being a drug dealers haven, will you?
I also am not a big fan of the "see I told you" attitude, but it seems to me that no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload.
Of course there is not guarantee that services like icloud or dropbox will never get shut down, but they do look much more reliable than megaupload..