Disclaimer: I was briefly involved in the management of 2ch.sc.

This summary is at least unfair if not quite inaccurate. Hiroyuki's claim back then was that he paid a substantial amount of money to cover the costs of the servers, but Jim demanded more. Also, there is no evidence that Hiroyuki sold user data. He was just selling the right to use publicly available data for data-mining.

It was rather sad to see that people are bashing Hiroyuki based mostly on FUD like this "summary." I lost much of my interest in anonymous discussion boards because they are full of paranoid thinking. I just wish Hiroyuki good luck.

Well, I don't think our immigration policies are particularly racist. We generally don't want immigrants regardless of their race or country of origin, period. Our strict immigration policies are necessary, IMO, to maintain our cultural identity and unique cultural values, and most of us like it that way.

If your country accepts immigrants from all over the world and take unfair advantage of their cheap labor under the hypocritical names of justice and freedom while they suffer tremendously from racism, that's fine with us. (I lived in the United States for 12 years and I know for a fact that racism against immigrants is rampant here.) But please, for Christ's sake, respect Japan's soverinty as an independent nation. You are being racist by calling us racist *just because* our values are different from yours.

Just for your information, Hiroyuki still lives in Japan without problems. There have been numerous civil lawsuits brought against him since 1999 and he lost almost all of them. However, since he basically has no assets in Japan, nobody was able to claim a monetary compensation from him. In one of the cases, it was disclosed that Hiroyuki had a bank account in Japan with a balance little over $1000. Hiroyuki must have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, through online advertisements on 2ch, but he just doesn't keep money in Japan.

Personally I am all in support for Hiroyuki. Here in Japan, we cannot have open discussions on many topics due not to government regulations but to social/cultural pressures, so anonymous discussion forums like 2ch.net definitely have a place in Japanese society.