Mega has launched

https://mega.co.nz/

by bavidar • 14 years ago

281 258 14 years ago

mega.co.nz

B0Z• 14 years ago

Last night I experienced 70% packet loss just trying to access the site. Hopefully it was just a launch hiccup.

thehodge• 14 years ago

Just signed up; was quick, smooth and has a nice interface.. was expecting it to get tonnes of visitors and be down for the next few hours but either noone is there yet or they've been very prepared

EDIT: Spoke too soon

schmrz• 14 years ago

Not really sure about the quick part. I'm still trying to get to the website. The loading animation on start up was incredibly slow and now the site isn't responding at all.

Edit: I'm trying to access it from EU if that makes any difference. Seems like http 500 error is returned for assets hosted on eu.static.mega.co.nz.

Kudos2• 14 years ago

They load everything from *.eu.mega.co.nz for me, so presumably everything is fairly close to you.

nextstep• 14 years ago

So far I'm impressed with how easy it is to sign up. This interface seems clean and polished.

xSwag• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if MegaConz is meant to be ironic or not.

sporney• 14 years ago

Defiantly ironic, have you seen his car number plates?

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Not sure if you meant 'definitely', but that works even better :)

aw3c23• 14 years ago

Judging by his history I would say it is not meant ironically but "super mega awesome gangsta kool".

hahla• 14 years ago

Site is getting completely hammered as of 15 minutes ago, Kim posted this on his twitter (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom): "Wow. I have never seen anything like this. From 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes."

eps• 14 years ago

I wonder if all this traffic is genuine or if it's a DDoS.

rplnt7• 14 years ago

See these comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5084145

colevscode• 14 years ago

Speedtest reports: 5 Mb/s upload speed

MEGA reports: 500 B/s upload speed

Kudos2• 14 years ago

They're not caching any of their static resources, that might explain the amount of bandwidth use Dotcom is apparently seeing.

Edit: They're not gzipping any of the 2.5MB in static resources either. I realise that probably doesn't impact their API calls that are failing, but it's still a big oversight.

csomar• 14 years ago

If you are opening their app for the first time, it doesn't matter since you are going to download the content anyway. He has only one page, so navigation doesn't reload the content.

Not using Gzip is obviously a big mistake.

kami88452• 14 years ago

>Not using Gzip is obviously a big part of his marketing plan.

I think this is the only time I would use the words "FTFY" on HN, but I do think it's obvious, that with kim's bragging about bandwidth usage, gzip has been disabled intentionally.

rikacomet• 14 years ago

The site is down for me, earlier, access was denied, to control the extra traffic.

alexqgb8• 14 years ago

The clean interface makes the tagline (lifted from Daft Punk w/o credit) that much more conspicuous. Clearly, some things haven't changed.

prezjordan• 14 years ago

I do not believe Daft Punk has exclusive rights to /\w+er\.? better\.? faster\.? stronger/, but I could be wrong.

alexqgb8• 14 years ago

Separate from the realm of rights, witholding credit is a dick move. I mean, the guy can afford a dozen cars and a helicopter, but he won't hire a decent copywriter?

Fucker.

kps• 14 years ago

I assume they paid six million dollars for it.

foobarqux2• 14 years ago

The Olympic motto, which is virtually identical, pre-dates Daft Punk.

kami88452• 14 years ago

You know, you could've just told us instead of making us look it up :)

>The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." These three Latin words mean "Swifter, Higher, Stronger."

kylebgorman• 14 years ago

Funny of you to name a crew of sample-based musicians as exemplars of copyright law...

alexqgb8• 14 years ago

Do you honestly think that any major artist works with unlicensed, uncleared samples? After "Paul's Boutique", I mean?

jtchang• 14 years ago

Regardless of what you may think about KimDotCom he certainly has persistence. You'd think anyone would quit after a FBI raid and being sued into oblivion.

So what if the service falls flat? I don't really plan to use it until the kinks are hammered out anyway. The fact that he got it out there though is a statement on to itself.

zalew5• 14 years ago

> You'd think anyone would quit after a FBI raid and being sued into oblivion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigat...

d0m• 14 years ago

The interface is very slick.. almost feel like a native application. Just the fact of being able to resize the various section of the window is very cool. Congrats for the launch, this takes lot of guts to start a service like that.

Lisa2000• 14 years ago

The site claims safer but it doesn't feel safer. The first click opens my files for me to select one to upload, yet why am I going to upload a file to a completely unknown entity? Who is/are Mega? What gives user confidence to entrust (confidential / personal / business) file uploads to Mega? There are a few steps missing here, I would work on building customer confidence. Unless you are aiming for uploads within a network of people who know and trust you for other reasons. Good luck.

georgeorwell5• 14 years ago

If you don't hold the copyright over the files, who cares?

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

After signing up, MEGA suggested that I download Google Chrome to use the service (I was using Safari). I was expecting some affiliate link there, but there wasn't any.

frewsxcv• 14 years ago

Well, why do you use Safari?

nessus422• 14 years ago

I use Safari because in my experience Chrome is rather buggy on a Mac. Particularly with regard to Spaces. E.g., if I move a Chrome window to a different Space, all of my other Chrome windows will tag along for the ride. It makes using Chrome rather unbearable. Additionally, Safari's interface for managing bookmarks is much nicer.

archgrove• 14 years ago

I use it because it supports proper continuous zooming with pinch-to-zoom on a trackpad (exactly like Safari on iOS devices). Chrome does a weird step-by-step increment that seems to involve re-laying out the page at each step. The multi-touch interaction with Safari is just better in general, IMO.

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

I use iCloud to sync bookmarks and open tabs between my Mac and iDevices (Chrome is not nearly as good as Safari yet on iOS).

meh01• 14 years ago

Safari 6 is excellent. Faster than Chrome on OS X.

ooobo• 14 years ago

On visiting a download link in Firefox (latest) posted in this thread (https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudf...) I got the same message - however I can't click anywhere to hide the modal. If you are gonna have such a message at least let me close it!

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

Wonderful slick and clean interface. Hate him, Love him but you just can't ignore him.

thoughtcriminal• 14 years ago

I'm getting a paid account. Help the brother out.

glazskunrukitis2• 14 years ago

Much ado about nothing.

nullymcnull2• 14 years ago

He's claiming 100K registered users in less than one hour. That's nothing?

glazskunrukitis2• 14 years ago

100k users just confirm the fuss. Another question is if there is any real value to this service.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

So, it generated a key... which is being stored where? I can't seem to download it?

aw3c23• 14 years ago

If you could download it, what use would it have. ;)

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Huh? If I were keeping it truly completely private then only I would have the private key. So presumably it generated one with Javascript stored in my session so I would need to back it up in order to login later and access my data.

However, that's not how Mega works. They're still storing a symmetric key on their server. They're just encrypting before storing for deniability reasons. https://mega.co.nz/#developers

edwardy20• 14 years ago

There are a million cloud drives out there (some with advanced privacy features), what's different about Mega?

josephagoss• 14 years ago

Honestly? I think its the marketing, Kim kind of has his own brand going on here.

arrowgunz• 14 years ago

Guys, any idea if they have an iOS app?

ukd12• 14 years ago

My first upload: https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudf...

dexter3137• 14 years ago

It says, Temporarily unavailable

ukd12• 14 years ago

It should be the HN logo!

fredsted• 14 years ago

Perhaps he should have launched it like Gmail: Gradual launch with invites. Launching a file sharing site with this much media attention is surely going to crash it.

rplnt7• 14 years ago

No one would want an invite. You need huge amounts of users to successfully run a sharing portal.

lucb1e• 14 years ago

I think lots of people would actually want an invite, me included.

benologist2• 14 years ago

His theory appears to be that by sharing keys via links to access encrypted files, instead of before which was exactly the same except to access unencrypted files, he will somehow be immune from persecution this time even though he still has the ability to identify infringing material by the traffic sources and bandwidth usage of individual files.

The tie in with web hosting companies adds an ounce of legitimacy to the affiliate program that originally led sites like the defunct tv-links.co.uk etc to throw traffic at their paywall last time but it won't be even close to enough if tomorrow there's millions of mega links on all the streaming and download indexing sites.

This will be very interesting to watch unfold.

DriesS2• 14 years ago

A lot of people say that megaupload is back, but if I'm not wrong this is totally something different then megaupload or do I make a mistake?

You can't share a link with the public anymore, only with an emailadres.

benologist2• 14 years ago

Gizmodo says you can share them with a link

http://gizmodo.com/5977265/how-megas-encryption-will-protect...

which makes it no different to before, except this time they're hoping deniability is better than openly facilating piracy in their internal communications.

Alphasite_• 14 years ago

How exactly does this work, if they don't have access to the original?

> 8. Our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload or give someone else access to where it determines that that data is an exact duplicate of original data already on our service. In that case, you will access that original data.

TruthElixirX• 14 years ago

I don't think it does. I think that is just there for legal reasons.

g_lined2• 14 years ago

They take a hash of every X MB of your data before upload. If the hash already exists, then they don't upload it. You just get added to the access list for that particular chunk along with the others who have uploaded it.

pyre2• 14 years ago

Seems unlikely that there would be many collisions though...

A1kmm2• 14 years ago

That can't be the whole story. If Megaupload gives you access to the ciphertext encrypted with a key that neither you nor Megaupload has access to, that is useless.

micheljansen3• 14 years ago

Does anyone understand how their implementation of client-side encryption is actually supposed to make my data safer? After logging in for the first time, a 2048-bit RSA key pair was generated, but it seems that every time I log in I just use a username (email) and password. Does that mean the RSA private key is stored on MEGA's servers? If so, doesn't that render the whole "client side encryption" bit moot? If MEGA has the private key, they can decrypt the data or am I missing something?

The service seems to have ground to a halt, and I am not able to upload anything, so perhaps this all becomes clear once one starts using the service, but I'm curious about how the encryption is used in practice.

Edit: Found a bit more detail in the developer documentation: https://mega.co.nz/#developers According to this, they use the symmetrical AES-128 to encrypt files, so why do I need an (asymmetrical) RSA key pair? It also says there that the private part of the RSA key is stored encrypted with the symmetrical AES key, but MEGA has that key, so what good does that do in case of an FBI raid?

One of the things that I was most curious about regarding MEGA was to see how they would manage to make encrypted file storage safe but user friendly. It seems like this is user friendly, but not safe at all, or am I wrong?

beala4• 14 years ago

According to the help page, no keys (except the public key) ever leave the client [1].

[1] https://mega.co.nz/#help_security

EDIT: The senario in the posts above sound more likely. The exact text of the help is "No usable encryption keys ever leave the client computers (with the exception of RSA public keys)." So they probably store an encrypted version of the keys server side.

dabeeeenster2• 14 years ago

In that case if I log in with a different browser, how do I access my stuff?

How do other people access my stuff?

Doesn't work...

pyre2• 14 years ago

  | Each user account uses a symmetric master key to ECB-
  | encrypt all keys of the nodes it keeps in its own trees.
  | This master key is stored on MEGA's servers, encrypted
  | with a hash derived from the user's login password.

The key is stored encrypted on their servers, but is unlocked with your password. Technically they could capture your password and unlock the key, gaining access to the files.

AhtiK3• 14 years ago

MEGA servers store the hash of the password, not the password itself.

Unlocking a key requires a real password but the server knows only the hashed version. This way they can't capture the real password to unlock. The trick would be to make sure server always gets only the hashed password. Even at website login, the password must be hashed before sending!

We used similar crypto for http://timegt.com product where everything is end-to-end encrypted with a keypair generated by the user yet stored at the server. But it's stored at the server in a locked form that can be opened with a password that user entered. But this password is never sent to the server, only the password hash is and is used only to make sure that it's ok to send this locked key to the user. Hopefully this didn't sound too confusing now...

decourl• 14 years ago

In my eyes, it's not secure because the AES key is stored, albeit encrypted by a password, on the server side along with a file of the password hashes. Even when best practices are followed, it's still relatively easy for an attacker to recover passwords from their hashes via a brute force attack.

If the goal was actually to create something very secure, I would say that the keys would need to stay entirely on the client side, but this of course has its own usability problems. As it is, I'm curious as to how password resets can be carried out.

That being said, it's probably relatively secure as long as the cloud provider isn't raided or coerced to act badly. They can reasonably say that the data is encrypted and that they don't have access to the key.

I would be interested to see what the crypto looks like when the site is used for file sharing (e.g. I upload once, then post a link for many to download). Or am I just assuming that there's an option for this use case?

egeozcan• 14 years ago

Trying to access from Germany: http://i.imgur.com/Iw70r1U.png

gjulianm4• 14 years ago

I just found a weird things on they ToS [1] ...

8. Our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload or give someone else access to where it determines that that data is an exact duplicate of original data already on our service. In that case, you will access that original data.

Duplicate check, I get that. But, how do they do it? They say the files are encrypted on the browser, so if I upload file X and other user uploads X too, they can't know they're the same because both uploads are encrypted. So, they can check only for duplicates of the encrypted outcome of each file. But, wouldn't that be inefficient? Probability of collision in encrypted files is (AFAIK) really low, something like 2^(-N), N being the size of the file on bits... If I did it well, it'd be a collision probability of 7.458E-155 for a file of 1MB.

[1] https://mega.co.nz/#terms

EDIT: Added example.

arankine• 14 years ago

This is exactly how megaupload used to work. They use file hashes, i heard reports of some hash collisions meaning entirely different files were identified as duplicates...that was gamed though i believe, real life collisions less likely

dabeeeenster2• 14 years ago

Something doesn't smell right regarding the browser-based private key encryption. What I think is happening is that they could theoretically decrypt all your content, but the fact that they dont, and would have to jump through some technical hoops to do so, is maybe enough for them to argue that they don't know what is being uploaded?

dexter3137• 14 years ago

The user's javascript that encrypted the file can also make a hash send it to mega, and then they check if they already have that.

EDIT: They never get to see your key or what is in the file.

gjulianm4• 14 years ago

Ok, so I try to upload a.exe to Mega. They make a hash, detect someone has already uploaded it. They don't upload my file, and instead they place a link in my account to that "a.exe" of some other user. How can I access it then? Because it's encrypted with a key which is not mine.

politician4• 14 years ago

In that case wouldn't decrypt(encrypt(F, K1), K2) produce garbage?

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

Possibly convergent encryption, basically when you encrypt the file you use a hash of the file as the key. This key can then be encrypted with several different passwords meaning that several people can decrypt this file.

gjulianm4• 14 years ago

This? http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/729/is-convergent-... http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/storer-storagess08.pdf

It seems really interesting, so they can check for duplicates while keeping files secure. Thanks!

cryptox2• 14 years ago

Wouldn't this allow MEGA to also get a copy of the key so they can decrypt your data?

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

This means that if there's a commonly available plaintext version of a file, then you can encrypt it, compute the hash of the encrypted version and then serve it to Mega along with a DMCA takedown notice.

They wouldn't really want that, would they? So as clever as it is, I doubt they do it this way.

Sander_Marechal• 14 years ago

Convergent encryption sounds great. But if Mega is using this, do they have any way of finding out which users have a specific file?

Example: Alice and Bob both upload the same file to Mega. Alice is raided by the MAFIAA. They get a court order telling Mega to list all users having a copy of that file. Can Mega comply? Or does not even Mega know that Bob has the same file too?

Related question: Is there any way for Bob to share his uploaded file with friends?

tommoor• 14 years ago

Got to wonder if this is a bit of copy and paste from the old terms, although you would think they would have checked this quite thoroughly! Good spot.

caw• 14 years ago

Maybe they use block deduplication on the storage arrays? Particularly looking at the "our service may automatically delete a piece of data you upload". In other words, you already uploaded it encrypted and they're just serving out the de-duplicated bits.

dexter3137• 14 years ago

Piece is the keyword here.

bchallenor• 14 years ago

There wouldn't be much point in doing that.

Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, so it is incompressible. The chances of finding anything significant to deduplicate are so low that it's not worth trying.

politician4• 14 years ago

"A node token ("magic cookie") grants access to a subtree of the issuing user's filesystem. An associated symmetric key is required to decrypt and/or store decryptable data."

https://mega.co.nz/#developers

Apparently, they use unsalted symmetric key encryption which allows them to discover [hash(file), password] duplicates. By comparison, the old Megaupload would apparently deduplicate based on [hash(file)] matches.

Suppose Alice and Bob have files [D, E, F] and [F, G, H], respectively. If MEGA discovers that Alice and Bob share a duplicate file F and Alice to reveals her password (through password frequency analysis or to the Government), then all of Bob's files are compromised.

I would personally feel unsafe storing private documents on Mega due to the lack of public/private key encryption, but that's me.

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

I'm not entirely sure what they mean by a "magic cookie" here.

The document does say it uses public/private keys for data transfer. You would not usually use public/private for data storage because of the huge keysizes required.

jlgreco6• 14 years ago

> I would personally feel unsafe storing private documents on Mega due to the lack of public/private key encryption, but that's me.

It is probably worth pointing out that all of this encryption stuff is only for them. Nomatter how they brand it, the purpose is to give them plausible deniability, which they lacked with the previous Mega.

If you want encryption meant for you, then you should probably just encrypt your files yourself before you let Mega touch them.

htf• 14 years ago

To be fair, if there's any chance that your password is the same as someone else's, then you have a terrible password.

AhtiK3• 14 years ago

From dev docs it looks like file integrity (and thereby duplicate check) is done with CBC-MAC:

"File integrity is verified using chunked CBC-MAC. Chunk sizes start at 128 KB and increase to 1 MB, which is a reasonable balance between space required to store the chunk MACs and the average overhead for integrity-checking partial reads."

jiggy20118• 14 years ago

"Each file and each folder node uses its own randomly generated 128 bit key. File nodes use the same key for the attribute block and the file data, plus a 64 bit random counter start value and a 64 bit meta MAC to verify the file's integrity."

Not sure I understand this, how can you deduplicate if every file is encrypted via a random key?

kbaker• 14 years ago

Maybe on file upload, they encrypt it with the file hash then chunk those encrypted files and store those with dedup.

Then, on the user side, they store an per-user encrypted index (random, counter, MAC) to those individual chunks to represent the file.

That way, they can only see giant encrypted blocks of data, and per-user encrypted indexes to data. But it is all encrypted.

They would need to hack into accounts by keylogging passwords to decrypt the indexes and see what files users can actually access.

Public links could be shared by giving out a key in the URL that is a file containing indexes to other blocks. So whoever knows the URL, knows the index, and can get the data.

That is the way I'd design it, at least... :)

edit:typo

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

Perhaps they de-duplicate using smaller block sizes? Something like 256 bytes.

Also, if you believe Microsoft Outlook, there's something called "compressible encryption", which implies there are encryption schemes that aren't exactly random, meaning in turn that not all N-bit blocks are equally likely.

lubos• 14 years ago

even 256 bytes block is big enough to make collisions so rare that it's not even worth.

not to mention metadata associated with such a small block would be probably more than the size of the block itself.

doe88• 14 years ago

It could be achieved through convergent encryption see this presentation from last week http://crypto.stanford.edu/RealWorldCrypto/slides/tom.pdf

tlogan• 14 years ago

I guess that is generally done using "convergent encryption". There are many variations and they were done by some peer-to-peer DHT filesystem (I was kinda involved in some "skunk" projects developing it).

The idea is simple: if you have data, then you can generate the key from data itself to encrypt and decrypt than data. Then you use hash of encrypted data to look up if server (or just other side) has the same data. If hash exists, no need to send to server - just tell server to bump references. If hash does not exists, just upload data. The key derived from data needs to be stored locally - if you lose it, you will lose data too.

cryptox2• 14 years ago

And deduplication would work since the 2nd person would derive the same key for the data and thus can decrypt it?

mrb• 14 years ago

Perhaps, a much simpler possibility than the other proposed in this thread, is that, in addition to uploading the encrypted file, the service uploads hashes of chunks of plaintext data. That way the service can just compares hashes of data, just like a regular dedup implementation.

Giszmo• 14 years ago

maybe they store a hash along your strongly encrypted file. this way they could go after copy-righted files accross the system once reported at the cost of quasi-decrypting some of your files. your really unique files would still be save although you might not want them to be able to timestamp proof your possession of these neither.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Here's one solution: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2461713

However given a file Mega would be able to tell whether they stored that file, eliminating the plausible deniability they're aiming for.

Sami_Lehtinen4• 14 years ago

Read Freenet documentation. They encrypt everything, yet they use very efficient deduplication. I really like Freenet's design. Encryption key is based on the payload, so if you don't know what he payload is, you can't decrypt the packet. Of course decryption keys can be delivered using different encrypted tree of keys, which is used when you deliver download link.

For that reason, when ever I'm sharing anything I usually encrypt files with my recipients public keys before sending those out. Just to make sure that data is really private and keys are known only to my selected peers. In some cases when I want to make stuff even more private, I encrypt data separately with each recipients public key, so you can't even see list of public key ID's which are required to decrypt the data.

I also have 'secure work station' which is hardened and not connected to internet. That's the workstation I use to decrypt, handle and encrypt data. Only encrypted and signed data is allowed to come and go to that workstation.

markshead• 14 years ago

It appears you can upload a file without creating an account. So without generating a key first. Or at least without generating a key that is somehow protected by a password.

zalew5• 14 years ago

"Warning: You are using an outdated browser, which adversely affects your file transfer performance. Please upgrade to Google Chrome."

is this a joke? I'm on FF19

gee_totes• 14 years ago

Really? I'm on FF3 and I didn't get a notice, which was quite surprising.

File upload didn't work though....

zalew5• 14 years ago

wow, that's even weirder.

btw thanks for the downvote, whoever that was.

rplnt7• 14 years ago

In Opera 11.x you don't get a warning, but the site never loads.

joering2• 14 years ago

If you been using both browsers for a while, you could (at least IMHO) feel the increasing slowness of FF comparing to Chrome, at lest within last 2 years.

Further, the site looks very much polished in Chrome and its hard to find anything to blame for. If they did benchmark testing and realized Chrome works the best for decryption/encrypting/etc, I don't blame them for giving up on other browsers.

derleth• 14 years ago

> If you been using both browsers for a while, you could (at least IMHO) feel the increasing slowness of FF comparing to Chrome, at lest within last 2 years.

Chrome starts a lot slower for me. It seems to really hit the disk a lot more than Firefox.

zxtang• 14 years ago

Here's what they have to say regarding browsers: https://mega.co.nz/#blog_1

Basically, only Chrome seems to be supported because it is "the most advanced browser currently in existence"

zalew5• 14 years ago

[built for IE6]

doublec• 14 years ago

Mega uses features from a draft W3C spec called "file-system-api": http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/

Chrome supports this, Firefox does not. See my comments in the Mozilla bugzilla bug about this:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704128#c22

vitobcn• 14 years ago

According to Kim, over a 100,000 users registered in under an hour (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292702999078387712). Pretty impressive, and it explains the slow responsiveness of the site.

rplnt7• 14 years ago

Much ado about nothing. He's pretty clever.

rorrr• 14 years ago

It freezes during the registration process in both FF and Chrome.

EDIT:

It's because AJAX return "500 server too busy" error.

dexter3137• 14 years ago

woot!?

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292707119424229376/phot...

jordanbaucke• 14 years ago

registered. confirmed. nothing after that.

xanadohnt• 14 years ago

Same.

GowGuy47• 14 years ago

How much storage does the free version allow is my question... Couldn't find it any where

ditojim• 14 years ago

50gb - It has been mentioned in a few articles but I did not readily find the info on the site.

icebraining5• 14 years ago

It's in Help center: Account. https://mega.co.nz/#help_account

samwillis3• 14 years ago

To everyone asking about the encryption, it isn't really about protecting your data its about protecting themselves. They have created a service that is billed as a drop box competitor but it's not. This is megaupload2, they just need it to not look like they are marketing it as that.

They needed a way to deny any knolage of file sharing and have found a two pronged attack. The encryption means they can deny any knowledge of what they are serving, and marketing it as a drop box type tool means that they aren't marketing it as a blatant tool for illegal file sharing.

b1n• 14 years ago

Wasn't MegaUpload popularity due to streaming video content?

Doesn't the encryption make video streaming impossible in the way it was being done before (i.e. to a large psudononymous userbase)?

samwillis3• 14 years ago

Yes, megavideo was a large part of their platform. I think it is only a matter of time before we see them build a video player on top of mega. I suspect there are technical hurdles to over come with decrypting and then playing the video using javascript though.

ubercow13• 14 years ago

That doesn't mean you can't use it like a Dropbox service with more free space, surely? Dropbox also doesn't encrypt your data to any meaningful degree AFAIK.

samwillis3• 14 years ago

Of course. And have people use it legitimately is essential to them. People also used megaupload legitimately too.

georgeorwell5• 14 years ago

I see Kim Dotcom as a stereotypical gangster who makes money by delivering illegal products. He has the narcissistic personality and lifestyle trappings to go with it. He even wants to buy protection from New Zealand itself by bringing free fibre optic cable to the island!

It's just hard for me to respect the man, because he's not fighting for information freedom, he's fighting for as much cash, status, and power as he can get his hands on.

dexter3137• 14 years ago

What illegal products are you talking about?

watty• 14 years ago

The previous website Kim owned was http://www.megaupload.com which got shut down last year due to hosting illegal content.

andypants• 14 years ago

Megaupload was basically the pirate bay if it were run as a business.

x3sphere• 14 years ago

How are his products illegal? It's not like Skydrive and Google Drive are devoid of pirated content. Also Megaupload was a very valuable service back in the day when there wasn't many upload providers around..

rplnt7• 14 years ago

Megaupload was selling access to content, not ability to store data. The users who downloaded data were the ones that had to pay. Only way this type of service is profitable is when it has "stuff" that is wanted by masses of people. And since Megaupload didn't produce/resell anything, illegal content is the only other option.

Also, during the time megauplaod existed, there always were upload providers. Megaupload came quite late into the game.

gscott• 14 years ago

Eventually everyone wants to eat more than Top Ramen...

freshhawk3• 14 years ago

Don't have to respect him (I would have a lot of questions for someone who did) to mostly take his side in the whole mega upload situation.

meshugga• 14 years ago

I don't take his side in making money off of intellectual property that doesn't belong to him.

Torrent sharing is one thing. Selling access to downloadable material that doesn't belong to you quite another.

aquadrop• 14 years ago

Totally agree. He just makes money from other people's work. And manipulate public mind by acting like martyr (for freedom). He is basically a swindler.

andrewbaron• 14 years ago

Seems like people who care about encryption when using the service are essentially putting their faith in Kim Dotcom's hands. If the FBI, e.g. were to break the encryption, people would probably lose trust in the service. Dotcom is carrying a lot of weight on his shoulders in acting as the security agent.

ForFreedom• 14 years ago

I like the web design. But its a wait and see how far they will get along. Any idea where their servers are hosted? server farm?

dud3z• 14 years ago

It looks like debug can be activated in the javascript console: type "d=true", navigate, look at your console.

attheodo• 14 years ago

And embraces flat design apparently :p

rplnt7• 14 years ago

Horrible site. Ignoring the fact it doesn't work in older versions of Opera, it's like early 00's and full-flash sites all over again.

guessWhy• 14 years ago

It looks fine to me ?! Flash is not used at all and the design shows some taste.

rplnt7• 14 years ago

It's not "not nice", I like the design. What I didn't like was the loading and that reminded me the era of full-flash sites. Maybe the loading took much longer because the site is overloaded and it will be OK later.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Heh, interesting that the site so proudly says "Made in New Zealand" despite the fact that New Zealand raided his home.

navs2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, he seems to be well liked here in Auckland. They even made him Santa: http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/whats-on/8073823/Kim-Dotcom-...

vyrotek• 14 years ago

That loading/cloud symbol reminds me of something... (https://stripe.com)

nwh• 14 years ago

Comparison (http://i.imgur.com/BZeGm1H.png)

Definitely a rip-off, and not a particularly well executed one.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

It is a super generic icon in any case.

alternize• 14 years ago

hum, is it just me or is there really no way to change the email address and/or the account password?

Corrado• 14 years ago

Someone needs to make a "Mega" adapter for OpenPhoto. Mega's prices are pretty good; better than S3 and Dropbox and in-line with Box.net.

69_years_and• 14 years ago

I think maybe Kim is a little smarter this time by not having his servers easily accessible by the US authorities, exactly where those servers are remains to be seen.

For me, mega.co.nz is at 154.53.224.166, which is Africa allocated, administered by afrinic.net who seem to be on a small island off the coast of Madagascar.

bluegate0102• 14 years ago

The Javascript for Mega looks very messy; all resources loaded via XHR, loading jQuery but using `document.getElementById` all over the place, using client-side Javascript to validate the integrity of all these XHR-loaded resources...

They say that this is their first Javascript coding; they should really get some talent on board to clean this up.

orionblastar• 14 years ago

SSL Poor error, cannot connect to server.

Is it down, or is my ISP blocking the SSL certificates so I cannot use it?

I am using Google Chrome.

I assume the site was DDOS'ed or failed under heavy bandwidth.

phyalow• 14 years ago

Me too.

cwoebker• 14 years ago

I had to type the url exactly like this:

http://mega.co.nz/

Other links just failed for me. They definitely messed something up. Or I am missing something central here.

zeynalov• 14 years ago

For now, upload doesn't work.

navs2• 14 years ago

I'm curious about the 'made in new zealand' line in the footer. Was there an NZ dev team involved? I'd love to know who.

dennisgorelik• 14 years ago

I'm getting "This webpage is not available"

cgio• 14 years ago

Reading the comments about de-duping,I think one can identify a very attractive monetisation path for mega. The largest percentage of traffic mega achieves, which is largely supported by the huge free space, the biggest the incentive for ISPs to resort to a service from mega for de-duping and caching mega traffic. It would not be unexpected if a "mega appliance" comes up in a few months for "distributed", high-performance mega usage. I do not remember the statistics exactly, but megaupload used to have a significant percentage of global traffic. Albeit, anyone could cache that traffic. Now, mega holds the keys to that. Some strategic and gradual approach is required, though, before ISPs take notice of that and pro-actively degrade mega's services (the other article about Google paying Orange for preferential QoS is relevant) before it gets the required momentum. Just a thought. What do you think? Is mega really holding a lock on this kind of information?

brianbreslin• 14 years ago

completely not intelligent comment, but i read the url as Mega CONS. as in mega con-artist. never before had a NZ domain triggered that reaction in my mind.

neya• 14 years ago

The big red button is beautiful. But adding just a

    cursor:pointer;

would have made a HUGE difference to the button itself and to the User's experience, clicking on it. Sigh, when will start-ups start paying attention to UX?

arunoda• 14 years ago

I can access their web app. But I cannot upload anything. even a 10 kb files. it says pending.

Seems like they can't handle the load.

fredgrott• 14 years ago

I have a question..maybe it has already been answered. From what I know of security we have hash and other collisions in Virtual Machine systems and obviously that can be used to gain access. with Mega using always two hosts for a a piece of data assuming that they might be using some cloud structure how would this type of attack be prevented?

apathetic• 14 years ago

and... it's down.

Mega has launched

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