RapidShare is a German owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is the 12th most visited website in the world from late April until now.[1]; Rapidshare.de is declining in rank, being 271st as of July 04, 2008.[2]
History
RapidShare has two different websites, but both sites claim to be entirely different organizations and entities. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland.[3]
On October 20, 2006, RapidShare announced that "Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de are full right now".[4] A new website, RapidShare.com was set up in an attempt to transfer usage from RapidShare.de to RapidShare.com.citation needed When the new Rapidshare.com was launched, holders of "Premium" accounts at the time on RapidShare.de were able to use both the RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, until their account expired. It is not possible, however, to use a RapidShare.com account on the German site.
Website update
On June 3, 2008, RapidShare redesigned their website. Premium users can now download up to 50 gigabytes of data within 5 days; doubling the quota from the original 25 gigabytes per 5 days.
On June 26, 2008, the maximum download per premium user was further changed from 50 gigabytes per 5 days to 10 gigabytes per day. At the same time Rapidshare limited the number of IP addresses that can download from one account to 1.
On July 2, 2008, the maximum download limit was modified yet again. Each premium user gets 10 gigabytes of download bandwidth per day but any unused bandwidth is saved or rolled over to the next day. There is a limit of 50 gigabytes total bandwidth that any premium user can have at any time.
Operation and services
The site allows any user to upload files of up to 200 MB (at rapidshare.com) and up to 300 MB (at rapidshare.de).[5]The user is then supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone, with whom the uploader shares it, to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL.
RapidShare states that they have 240 gigabit/s of Internet connectivity and 4.5 petabytes of storage for users.[6]
Non-paying users are required to wait, usually 25 to 90 seconds, before the download starts and their download-speed is also limited to 64 KByte/s.
Registration and payment allow benefits such as unlimited download-speed, download of several files simultaneously, queue-skipping, and the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 10 GBytes per day, but the user is allowed to "save" traffic up to a maximum of 50 GBytes and can then spend the saved traffic all at once.
Issues
Some ISPs intentionally block sharing sites like RapidShare so as to avoid legal issues due to the propagation of pirated copyrighted material.
On 19 January 2007, news broke that German collections agency GEMA had claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com. "The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion."[7] To date RapidShare has claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users and of not being in a position to control the content. Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne GEMA had now however made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator’s liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.
CAPTCHA
An example of an old RapidShare CAPTCHA
An example of the new CAPTCHAs used
RapidShare has used a lot of CAPTCHAs during its history.
Earlier version included of 4 letters and numbers distorted by wave filter. Users had to recognize and type all characters.
In the first half of 2008, an updated version of this CAPTCHA was in use. It consisted of up to 7 warped alphanumeric characters (though usually still 4), each with a dog or a cat printed over them. The user was instructed to type in the 4 letters (although technically some "letters" are actually numbers) with the cat on them.
On 22 June 2008, the site changed the CAPTCHA to consisting of a tri-dimensional grid, with symbols in bas-relief.[8]
After 3 failures to enter the CAPTCHA download access is blocked.
On July 2, 2008 Rapidshare has canceled the CAPTCHA completely. According to the site's info " By eliminating the captchas we simplified the use of RapidShare's free services significantly. In addition, free-users can now upload and download bigger files (up to 200 megabytes). Anyhow, to protect RapidShare from congestion caused by automated downloading, we limited the maximum download speed for free‐users to 500 kilobits per second. To compensate for that, they do not have to wait anymore until starting a succeeding download.Premium-users now profit from more flexibility regarding the download volume: It used to be limited to 10 gigabytes per day and can be "saved" now to a maximum of 50 gigabytes. As a consequence, the volume that was not used is transferred to the following day automatically, up to a maximum of 50 gigabytes. If the complete download capacity is used up during one day, the premium-user is able to save another 10 gigabytes the following day".
Happy Hours
Since April 17 2008, Rapidshare activates a 'happy hour'[9] which consists of no CAPTCHA codes and no waiting time if the servers have enough bandwidth to spare. Usually the Happy Hours are:
- Monday - Friday 00:00h - 18:00h (UTC+1)
- Saturday - Sunday 00:00h - 14:00h (UTC+1)
See also
References
External links
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