Kim Dotcom's 'Mega' Storage Site Arrives 314
An anonymous reader writes "After months of hype riding the coattails of the MegaUpload controversy, Kim Dotcom's new cloud storage site, Mega, is finally going live. After being available to early adopters briefly, it's now open to the public with 50GB of free storage and end-to-end encryption. Several outlets have posted early hands-on reports for the service, including Ars Technica and The Next Web. In an interview, Dotcom spoke about how Mega's encryption scheme benefits both the users and the company: 'The Mega business plan will be a distributed model, with hundreds of companies large and small, around the world, hosting files. A hosting company can be huge or it can own just two or three servers Dotcom says—just as long as it's located outside the U.S. "Each file will be kept with at least two different hosters, [in] at least two different locations," said Dotcom. "That's a great added benefit for us because you can work with the smallest, most unreliable [hosting] companies. It doesn't matter because they can't do anything with that data." More than 1000 hosts answered a request for expressions of interest on the Mega home page. Dotcom says several hundred will be active partners within months.' On top of that, the way it's designed will protect Mega from legal problems: 'It's all about the plausible deniability. Mega doesn't know what you're uploading. ... Mega isn't so much securing your files for you as it is securing itself from your files. If Mega just takes down all the DMCAed links, it will have a 100 percent copyrighted material takedown record as far as its own knowledge is concerned. It literally can't know about cases that aren't actively pointed out to it, complete with file decryption keys.'"
Swiss Bank Accounts (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:...and this will make money how? (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course they don't. But you could. There are differences, but basically this is the value proposition they are offering.
I might make sense for some people, because, for example, you can't stuff 6 dvds in a smartphone. But for others, putting your stuff on a dvd is as good as putting it in the cloud. Perhaps more so, since you have control of it, and it not subject to legal scrutiny unless the police raid your house.
Deletion of duplicate files (Score:5, Interesting)
I have quite a lot of legitimate data (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let us remember... (Score:1, Interesting)
If you have no business interest and just want to consume shit, you don't really have skin in the game. Why should copyright be shortened just for entertainment purposes? That is insane.
I'll pay $80,000+ in PERSONAL taxes alone this year (nevermind the additional taxes as a small business part-owner).
I'm funding the military and diplomatic regime that asserts ever-expanding IP rents across the globe.
I got fucking skin in the game, it was peeled off me, asshole.
Re:Clever (Score:4, Interesting)
No, you are missing the GP's point.
The legal system doesn't fall for these lame attempts at "hack the law". They've been dealing with creative interpretations, weasel-wording, finding-of-loopholes and everything else we techies think we're masters of for more than two milennia. Ourt "brilliant hacks" are barely worth a yawn in the area of law.
GP is completely right. A judge will look at this and basically say "dude, seriously?". The prosecution will have to prove its case, sure. But Kim and most techies think that's a problem of mathematics, and by adding a tiny variable of unknown value to the equation, they can make it impossible to solve.
But that's not how the law works. At all.
Disclaimer: I'm a techie, not a lawyer. But through business I've had more then ample contact with the legal system, including many court cases.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
megaupload lets you share individual files or folders with others while still keeping the contents hidden from megaupload. SpiderOak uses one encryption key for everything, which only you hold and gives only you access to your data.
SpiderOak is zero-knowledge encrypted cloud backup/storage/remote disk, MegaUpload is a an encrypted Dropbox/fileshare/(future)collaboration tool. They occupy slightly different application spaces.
Re:Honeypot (Score:2, Interesting)