vrokolos

The rapidshare website allows users to upload files for free so that others can download them. Although rapidshare itself is a legitimate service, there are countless people out there who are abusing rapidshare for warez (Illegal movies, games and many other copyrighted files). The catch here is that rapidshare limits users to download 100mb per day or something like that but offers a subscription model for more demanding users with no download limit. This phenomenon is what I call "rapidshare crysis" and I find it completely ridiculous.

Let's take starcraft 2, a pretty popular game for example. It's not out yet but when it gets released these keywords: "rapidshare starcraft 2" will become very popular in google. People will prefer to spend their money buying rapidshare accounts in order to download starcraft 2 from rapidshare instead of giving the same amount of money to buy the original starcraft 2 game. In order to see how easy it is to download stuff from rapidshare, here's a trailer for starcraft 2 hosted on rapidshare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/.../StarCraft_Gameplay...part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/.../StarCraft_Gameplay...part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/.../StarCraft_Gameplay...part3.rar

And there's more. Some websites are offering rapidshare hacks. These hacks are supposed to generate free rapidshare accounts that everyone can use without paying a dime. Think about it: A hack that hacks a website that offers hacked material. Hilarious isn't it. Of course most of them are spyware and adware programs that naive people download and then complain about their antivirus software.

These days many web site administrators started using the word "rapidshare" in their sites to attract visitors who are looking to download free illegal files. Instead they get presented with a page that offers nothing at all apart from a few intentional spelling mistakes, like this page here :)