Exactly a year after his mansion in New Zealand was stormed by police, Kim Dotcom launched a new cloud service with a whopping 50 GB free storage. The difference between his previous venture MegaUpload and the new one is that encryption will now be enforced. You may remember that allegations were made against MegaUpload regarding online piracy. Mega may well be the cloud drive that offers the maximum privacy, while still being easily available for individuals and businesses.
And no wonder, the requests have come in like a flood. The launch was marked by a party and a re-enactment of the raid, replete with FBI choppers and girls in mini-military uniforms, gyrating to music.
There were some groans heard however, from people saying that they were experiencing down time on the site.
Dotcom tweeted that over 250,000 requests had been received and that the servers were maxed out in terms of load capacity. He even followed with an explanation that if anyone was facing speed problems it was because of the overload and that they were working on increasing the capacity.
While the DoJ may be furious at the maverick entrepreneur’s internet return, users are only too happy, and they are making a beeline for the unbelievable free storage being offered. 500 GB is way more than the free storage being currently offered by sites like Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive, it is still just 25% of the storage that was offered by the now defunct MegaUpload.
Interestingly Mega now offers file encryption, which is definitely a point in their favor. And the encryption is performed on the browser thru symmetric keys, and not on the server. Every single file will have its own key, generated from within your browsing session on your computer, and it will use your Mega passphrase to do so.
If you lose the passphrase, then God help you, because the site does not store it. So it seems Mega can wash their hands off anyone trying to share music or videos illegally. The only thing stored on their servers is going to be the encrypted versions of the files to which they have no access as they don’t keep a copy of your password. Smart.
The encryption also means that your files cannot be accessed by snoopers like internet service companies or Government agencies.
According to the company, if there are multiple copies of the same files, then they save server space by retaining only one copy. This is not a new phenomenon; it was first introduced by Streamload in 1998 and is used by Apple and Amazon. How they will identify identical files as they are encrypted and they don’t keep a copy of the passphrase has not been explained by the company.
Of course file sharing is still very much possible on Mega; you will need to share your URL and passphrase with your friend, or you could consider creating a URL with the passphrase embedded in it.
Author bio: Randy Collins likes writing articles related to Technology News, Gadget Reviews and How To. He also does guest posting for buycharter.com – a site that offers savings and current information on <a href=”http://www.pelikon.com/”>charter internet</a>.
About admin
Great.. interesting article..
This sounds interesting! Will try to check this out. Great share!!!
Great read! I find this very interesting and useful subject. Keep posting!
Well I’m not sure this new process will lead to the same process as Mega Upload, but it is interesting.