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Cloud Data Storage Encryption

Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours 211

Kim Dotcom's new "Mega" cloud service appears to be a hit. According to Dotcom over 1 million have signed up for their free 50 gigabytes of storage. Although that is about 1% of the Dropbox user base, it's not a bad start. From the article: "Mega quickly jumped up to around 100,000 users within an hour or so of the site's official launch. A few hours after that, Mega had ballooned up to approximately a quarter of a million users. Demand was great enough to knock Mega offline for a number of users attempting to either connect up or sign up for new accounts, and Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."
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Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours

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  • Considering the reputation that megaupload had, I don't think he'll have any problems getting users. I think, like so many other websites, he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.

    I'm sure adblock will deal with the obnoxious ads ...
    • by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Sunday January 20, 2013 @08:19PM (#42643245) Homepage Journal

      I'm sure adblock will deal with the obnoxious ads ...

      But isn't that their monitizing plan? To you mega you will need to run their ad blocker which replaces normal advertisments with ads from mega.

      • Interesting. Mega seeks to achieve profitability by sharing revenue with participating artists - creating a channel with as little rent-taking as possible. As opposed to the super-rent-seekers: today's media and telecom conglomerates.

        Kim says Megaupload was killed by the Obama administration, as a gimme to the media cartels - in return for financing and as a replacement for failing with SOPA. I'd add that Megaupload was SPECIFICALLY targeted over Eastern European hosters for enforceability, and over othe

      • I thought their monetizing plan would probably be more akin to dropbox's monetizing plan. I'm not sure what that would be, and I haven't been able to actually start using mega, but it sounds like dropbox, only a lot more secure.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        I signed up and there is no requirement to install anything.

        Their business plan revolves around paid accounts. Like Google Drive, Dropbox, Skydrive and all the rest the basic free account is maybe ad and data-mining supported but otherwise really free. If you want to share links though you will quickly hit the bandwidth limits unless you get a paid account, and presumably in future there will be other benefits like integration with other sites and apps.

        Lots of people seem willing to pay for extra storage as

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya.gmail@com> on Sunday January 20, 2013 @08:51PM (#42643381)

      I think, like so many other websites, he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.

      I assume he may be going for paid premium accounts

      When I use a free (valuable) service, I always consider (and sometimes purchase) the premium account. Seems fair.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Sunday January 20, 2013 @09:18PM (#42643511)

      Links in the summary... NONE of them to the actual service. Brilliant!

      Here is the actual site: https://mega.co.nz/ [mega.co.nz]

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by beckett ( 27524 )
        1 million users within 24 hours = i can 'register', but can't do anything, like upload my own files. this seems to be one of those features we take for granted on most cloud services.
      • Mega Conz?

        Is that supposed to be a reference to the founders as convicts? Or the users becoming future convicts?
  • Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing

    ...but it's sure better than the current state of megavideo.

  • Teething Problems (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 20, 2013 @08:07PM (#42643183)

    The patchy availability will be resolved soon I hope, but there's a major flaw I ran into, which is that when you sign up it doesn't ask you to confirm your password by typing it twice. This means you can make typos without realising it. Because the password is also an encryption key, you can't reset it. You can't delete the account either, nor can you register two accounts to one email address. I made a typo in my password. Net result: I permanently can't access my account, nor can I register a new one with my preferred email address.

    • Try an E-mail multiplier, such as SpamGourmet [spamgourmet.com].

      You can set up any number of separate E-mail addresses which get forwarded to your main E-mail, and if you set mega as the "exclusive sender" there's no limit count on that address.

      • Alternatively use Gmail. Any dots before the @ are ignored by Gmail, so mygmailaccount@gmail.com, mygmailaccoun.t@gmail.com and my.acc.oun.t.@gmail.com are all essentially aliases of each other. I use the dots as a binary counter to keep track of which address is used for what.
        • But, if you get spam at one of those addresses with added periods, there is no way to turn it off.

          And, unless you have a really large email address, it's going to be hard to keep track of more than about 20 or 30 different variations. I just checked spamgroumet.com, and I currently have 650 disposable addresses. I easily can tell what each address is for, based on what words are in the address.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Lesson from this: write your password in clear text in a terminal window or notepad or something else that is local to your computer, write it down and then cut/paste it into the password dialogue. Then unless you have issues using cut-n-paste, you should know exactly what the password is, even with a "enter once" system.

      • I usually do something simiar. Generate a key with PasswordSafe, and then paste it into the password box. I do this with all services regardless of whether or not there is a single, or multiple password boxes. For many accounts, I have absolutely no idea what my password is, because it's store in my password safe.
    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      You're also in trouble if you mistype your e-mail address.. you'll have to register all over again.... Personally I use a password manager to generate and save a secure strong password, anyways, so I don't type it in the first place.... :)

    • by OhANameWhatName ( 2688401 ) on Sunday January 20, 2013 @09:22PM (#42643537)
      Send an e-mail for password recovery: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
    • Re:Teething Problems (Score:5, Informative)

      by X.25 ( 255792 ) on Monday January 21, 2013 @02:04AM (#42644761)

      The patchy availability will be resolved soon I hope, but there's a major flaw I ran into, which is that when you sign up it doesn't ask you to confirm your password by typing it twice. This means you can make typos without realising it. Because the password is also an encryption key, you can't reset it. You can't delete the account either, nor can you register two accounts to one email address. I made a typo in my password. Net result: I permanently can't access my account, nor can I register a new one with my preferred email address.

      That is incorrect.

      You can not 'confirm' the account unless you type your password (when clicking on confirmation link). So in order to create the account, you had to type the 'mistyped' password again.

      If account has not been confirmed, you can just register using same email/etc.

      I know because I did it myself (had a very similar scenario to yours).

    • "The patchy availability will be resolved soon I hope..."

      So, I got this buddy in New Zealand and he calls me up this morning and just starts yakking away like he's in the same room. After about 10 minutes, I asked him if he got a free pre-paid phone or something, and he says "Nope, calls are free now, Mate." I ask him what the hell he was talking about and he says "This bloke from the Tele company knocks on me door and says that if we give them permission to put this device on our land-line they won't charg

    • I discovered the same password problem today, so you're not the only one. Pretty sure I did write the correct password though.

      So there might be that some/several accounts got corrupted somehow, and are thus dead. Noticed the same problem you had, no way to reset or delete the account, so I had to use another of my ~30 standard emails... But yeah, looks like a real problem.

  • while the feds tap in.

  • Kim versus Google (Score:4, Informative)

    by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Sunday January 20, 2013 @09:53PM (#42643713)

    I'm pretty sure everyone loves to hate the RIAA/MPAA so Kim Dotcom had little trouble rounding up support when they moved to shut down MegaUpload.

    Unfortunately, he's now picking a fight with bigger opponent [stuff.co.nz] and possible a mass of small website owners who rely on their Adsense revenues to help pay the bills.

    Kicking the RIAA/MPAA for their sins is one thing, taking money out of the mouths of independent content creators (by hijacking their ad-revenues to fund his Mega-services) is something altogether different.

    I admire KD for what he's doing with the MegaKey service but I really wonder if he's got an oar out of the water in picking a fight with Google and the many websites who rely on that company's ad-revenue sharing.

    BTW: I'm one of those sites and I'll be mighty pissed if Kim starts replacing the ads on *my* webpages that should be generating money to pay for *my* efforts -- because I have *nothing* to do with MegaKey so why should *I* be paying for it?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      He won't be showing ads on your pages. You don't even have pages. You just have HTML that my browser fetches from your server. My browser will show his ads, which I chose to see.

      Are you pissed at me when I walk to the fridge during the commercials on TV? Is someone suing Coca Cola for luring me to it?

      Here's a hint: if you don't want your ads filtered, be it by Mega or anyone else, integrate them into your content. That's right, serve them from your own server and give them filenames that don't scream "ad".

    • by X.25 ( 255792 )

      I'm pretty sure everyone loves to hate the RIAA/MPAA so Kim Dotcom had little trouble rounding up support when they moved to shut down MegaUpload.

      Unfortunately, he's now picking a fight with bigger opponent and possible a mass of small website owners who rely on their Adsense revenues to help pay the bills.

      Kicking the RIAA/MPAA for their sins is one thing, taking money out of the mouths of independent content creators (by hijacking their ad-revenues to fund his Mega-services) is something altogether different.

      I admire KD for what he's doing with the MegaKey service but I really wonder if he's got an oar out of the water in picking a fight with Google and the many websites who rely on that company's ad-revenue sharing.

      BTW: I'm one of those sites and I'll be mighty pissed if Kim starts replacing the ads on *my* webpages that should be generating money to pay for *my* efforts -- because I have *nothing* to do with MegaKey so why should *I* be paying for it?

      Are you also very angry at AdBlock authors/users?

      You wouldn't be using it yourself, would you?

  • Look what happened to data of the last people who trusted him for cloud storage.
  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Monday January 21, 2013 @12:03AM (#42644307)

    Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."

    So it's only partly Cloudy.

  • I registered , but when I tried to upload something as a test, it just stalled.
    Well, it's beta, but still, you do expect the most important functionality to work.

    Hope they fix it soon.

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