Kim Dotcom says the shutdown of his Megaupload filesharing service was ordered by the White House after Hollywood studio executives met with US Vice President Joe Biden.
The meetings are revealed in publicly released White House logs which show some of the most powerful figures in Hollywood met with studio bosses about six months before the January raids which led to the arrest of Dotcom and three of his Megaupload colleagues.
Online activist group Anonymous hacked New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully's private email account and used it to send messages mocking him, it was reported Wednesday.
The group breached McCully's email account last April after New Zealand passed laws cracking down on illegal file-sharing and threatening to disconnect repeat offenders from the Internet, the Dominion Post reported.
Megaupload.com founder Kim Dotcom is awaiting extradition to the US after the country requested New Zealand authorities detain him, pending a formal extradition request.
Dotcom, a dual citizen of Germany and Finland who changed his name from Schmitz, was detained on charges of copyright infringement conspiracy, according to Bloomberg.
A leading data security assessment company says that New Zealand businesses are becoming "soft targets" for malicious hackers because they are lagging significantly behind the US and UK in achieving compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) introduced by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC).
