Dotcom starts new file-sharing site

[Bald Bouncer]

Mr Dotcom launched Mega early on Sunday

Megaupload boss Kim Dotcom has set up a new cloud storage and file-sharing site.

Mega, a web-based service that lets people upload and store files of any kind, is a sequel to the Megaupload system that was shut down last January.

Police raids on the offices and home of Kim Dotcom led to the closure of Megaupload.

The Mega site went online at dawn on Sunday, with Mr Dotcome due to hold a gala at his New Zealand mansion later.

Mr Dotcom has said the new site complies with the law and warned that attempts to take it down would be futile.

"This is not some kind of finger to the US government or to Hollywood," he told Reuters on Saturday.

"Legally, there's just nothing there that could be used to shut us down. This site is just as legitimate and has the right to exist as Dropbox, Boxnet and other competitors."

Extradition hearingHours after the site was launched, Mr Dotcom tweeted that it had received 250,000 user registrations, although limited server capacity meant Mega was unreachable to many.

In a series of earlier tweets Mr Dotcom said every customer would have 50 gigabytes of free storage - far more than is offered by rival services such as Dropbox or Microsoft's SkyDrive.



A gala will be held at Dotcom Mansion in Auckland later

Mega will be encrypted so only those who upload data have access to it.

Data is also being held in the cloud to make it easy for users to get and share files.

The 2012 raids on Megaupload were carried out because, said US law enforcement, many users of Megaupload were engaged in pirating content and illegally sharing it.
They accused Mr Dotcom and other managers at Megaupload had profited from the piracy.

Mr Dotcom has rebuffed the accusations and is fighting a legal battle to stay in New Zealand from where he ran Megaupload.

A hearing on whether he is can be extradited to the US is due to be held in March.

The case has generated controversy in New Zealand over the way the police and intelligence services gathered evidence before the raid and won an apology to Mr Dotcom from the country's prime minister.

Mr Dotcom has also won support from prominent technologists such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The raid on Megaupload put 25 petabytes of data uploaded to it by its 50 million members into a legal limbo.

In one message, Mr Dotcom said he was working with lawyers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns on digital rights issues, to get access to that seized data and return it to users.

BBC News Technology

[Clubber Lang]

I signed up earlier with 2 different email addresses. Haven't had the confirmation email on either yet.

[Bald Bouncer]

I signed up earlier with 2 different email addresses. Haven't had the confirmation email on either yet.

I got confirmation but seems a little unstable atm which is no real surprise as I expect demand is high and could also be attacks going on.

[BigBrand]

Kim Dotcom ‏@KimDotcom
If you are currently experiencing slow access to #Mega its because of the unbelievable demand. We are working on more capacity.

[Rick Sanchez]

Interesting

[SiE]

Can you share with it or is it just personal space?

[Zoots]

Yeah you can share, but the third party also needs their file manager.

Good article here: www.arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goes-hands-on-with-kim-dotcoms-cloud-storage-site/

Shame there's no mobile support. Hopefully that will come in time.



Nearly one year after Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload storage site was shuttered on criminal charges filed by the United States government, the big man is back with a new cloud storage service, called simply Mega.

Why host in New Zealand? The site answers that one straight-on: “Among other important reasons, New Zealand's native Māori name is ‘Aotearoa,’ which means ‘Land of the long white cloud.’”

Teased for months, Ars and other media outlets were given an embargoed look at the site—which was broken Friday morning by TechCrunch. The site will formally launch and open its doors to the public on Sunday in the United States, one year to the day following the raid of Dotcom's mansion by New Zealand authorities.

The site is surprisingly simple, and it works more or less like other cloud storage services, à la Dropbox, Google Drive, WeTransfer, or RapidShare. However, unlike Dropbox, you have to interact with Mega through a desktop Web browser (and not through a mobile device or client app).



The upload and download speeds appear to be comparable to rival sites—the main advantage being that Mega keeps end-to-end encrypted data under a 2048-bit RSA key (and theoretically away from the prying eyes of government authorities).

Once you create an account, the first thing the site does is generate that crypto key for you. As a Firefox user, Mega also warned me to switch to Google Chrome, as not doing so would “adversely affect [my] file transfer performance." A browser switch later, and I was faced with a blank “file manager,” which was practically begging me to upload files.



My first choice? My wife’s podcast (shameless plug!), “Break the Line.” It moved along at a fairly nice pace of around 100kbps, considering I was using the site from a public Wi-Fi cafe. Within a couple minutes, I had sent my first file to Kim Dotcom’s servers in New Zealand. Among several different tests, I hit around 250kbps as a maximum. On a dedicated, high-speed home connection, you may get faster speeds.

Free vs. Pro?

I poked around some of the option pages and noticed that Dotcom was nice enough (at first) to give Ars a “Pro II” account, which comes with 100GB of storage. That’s double what the unwashed masses will get (50GB) but still a far cry from what he had originally promised (200GB). However, when I logged in a second time on Friday morning, this dropped back to 50GB with no explanation.

Another thing I noticed when I logged in earlier that has since disappeared is mention of “vouchers,” “purchase history,” and “transaction history,” which seems to suggest that users will be able to control downloaded files through a purchase mechanism. Subsequently, I have been downgraded to a Free account and I no longer have that option.



A quick glance at the “Pro” page suggests that a Pro I account corresponds with 500GB of storage and 1TB of transfers for €9.99 ($13.30) per month, while Pro II yields 2TB of storage with 4TB of transfers for €19.99 ($26.63) per month. Pro III serves up 4TB of storage with 8TB of transfers for €29.99 ($39.95) per month. (It is curious that Mega’s prices are denominated in euros when it is based entirely in New Zealand.)

I was also able to generate download links for individual files, but when I tried to pass them along to a co-worker who was not yet a Mega member, he received an “access denied” error message.



However, that may change as Mega opens up to the public.

After all, on the site it specifically mentions sharing links to Mega-hosted files.

“First of all, a word of caution: The cryptographic security of your files depends on the confidentiality of the associated encryption keys,” the site states. “Make sure that you transmit them via protected channels only! Standard e-mail, for example, is not good enough. With that in mind, select one or multiple files in your file manager, then right-click and use ‘Get link.’ A dialog with the public link(s) to the file(s) you have selected will open. You can choose to export each link and key separately or as a single combo link.”

I was able to easily share files with fellow Ars editor Joe Mullin (who also received an invite.) I shared some of my wife’s podcasts with him, and they showed up on his file manager, instantly, with no notification. (I seemed unable to share entire folders with him, however, and could only do so with single files.)

Ars will be covering the launch from the Dotcom mansion in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday (US time) and hopefully we'll learn more details about how the site works and what Dotcom’s plans are for it then.

[Bald Bouncer]

[Zoots]

Thanks for editing my post BB.
It almost always goes tits up from Tapatalk on a phone.

[SiE]

So we will not be able to use it with ice films

[Bald Bouncer]

It's down for me atm but not surprised

[B B Leo]

i grab 2 got email for my gmail right away for the hotmail im still waiting

[liveseytowers]

My email went into my outlook.com junk mail folder so those missing confirmation emails should check in there. I love the audacity of the guy and cant wait to see how this develops ove the next year.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk 2

[Zoots]

I've tried umpteen times to register using 3 different browsers. All the site works fine but clicking the register button just locks up the screen. It doesn't feel overloaded, just flaky as hell.
Access to the site via a mobile device isn't possible unless you change the user agent. A message is displayed saying an app is on it's way.

Edit: got a confirmation email just now.
Browser window still frozen though.
*shrug*

[braymond]

Got an account no prob but upload speeds are sub dial up at the mo

[Zoots]

I know.. I know it's getting hammered. And it was [probably] expected. Maybe it's half orchestrated.
But if it's not and I had put THIS much effort and money into a project as massive as this, I'd be pretty pissed off if it was as shit as this 48 hrs later. Using Chrome I registered last night, but today my account was invalid. Then I was in some file manager without being logged in at all, then I could log in again (after being told my password was wrong and the right one was unrecoverable). Now I can get in, but nothing works. Click on a created folder and it appears for a second before booting you back to root/parent directory. Uploads, just don't. It's currently telling me 7 1/2 hours for a 70mb file.
wtf.
I suppose they have to test it in the real World with a real amount of users before they can see what's potentially going to go wrong. I bet there's some sweating going on though.

261kb - 'pending'. pmfsl.

[CzarJunkie]

Registered on the 2nd attempt and at 7am this morning, while the yanks slept, upload and downloads speeds were ok.

[DJ OD]

I signed up earlier with 2 different email addresses. Haven't had the confirmation email on either yet.

Same as that. Wasn't a hotmail.co.uk address was it? Wondering if they are not accepting them...


DJ OD

[BigBrand]

Load of fucking shite this site is so far.

Signed up yesterday. Tried to upload a 1MB file 21:00 GMT and then tried again at 07.30 GMT today and the site doesn't upload it, just shows as pending. I'm on a 5MB ADSL line at home and a T1 connection at work.

Surly the fat fuck knew his site was doing to attract a crazy amount of interest, so why not be ready for this?

Instead of spending cash on dancers to pretend to want to fuck his chubby pale body and reenact FBI climbing down his $12m mansion he should have bought some extra servers or at least rented them.

The fat fuck.

[Mystical_2K]

site wont load for me, agree with BigBrand maybe if he spent more time getting the site running with more servers and less time stuffing his face he might get it working!