A year has passed since the takedown of the one of the largest file sharing sites in the world – MegaUpload. Ever since then, Kim Dotcom, the head of the company, has been looking for a way to resurrect the site – and today, he has unveiled the service to select members of the media. It seems that Kim has learned from the mistakes of the past, and has made the new site, simply named Mega – stronger, faster and almost invulnerable to copyright claims.
At first glance, Mega resembles other similar cloud services like Dropbox, for example. When you upload anything up to Mega’s servers, your data is encrypted in your client first, which means whatever you’re uploading will be encrypted in your PC before being sent off the Mega’s servers. Once there, you can send a download link to anyone you want, although it seems that you will still have to hand them your encryption key for them to actually access your file, either though the file sharing URL that you can include with your file, or through other, secure means.
This file encryption and decryption is what makes Mega infinitely more resistant to copyright takedown than it’s previous incarnation. Mega’s servers will only be hosting encrypted files – there is no way for them to know what’s in your file. Even if the authorities asked for a particular file (if it’s a copyright takedown, for example) they will only be handing over an encrypted file, encrypted with an 2048-bit RSA key. No way for anyone (including the feds) to open it without a lot of effort (and a buttload of computing time).
Early reviews from sites that were granted access seems positive, and it seems that the UI of the service is pretty easy to use compared to its previous incarnation. Just like before, Mega will have different user tiers – free users are granted 50GB of storage space, while people willing to pay €9.99 a month get 500GB of storage a month and 1TB bandwith. People who fork over €19.99 a month get 2TB of storage and 4TB of bandwith while high rollers who fork over €29.99 a month get 4TB of storage per month with 8TB of bandwith.
You can check out the site at http://kim.com/mega/#/ if you want to see it for yourself.
Source: The Next Web, TechCrunch