ONTD

8:46 am - 01/20/2013

Welcome back, Megau̶p̶l̶o̶a̶d̶.



A year after file-storage site MegaUpload was brought down by U.S. law enforcement officials targeting piracy, flamboyant founder Kim DotCom has cut the ribbon on his new site, Mega.
"As of this minute one year ago #Megaupload was destroyed by the US Government. Welcome to http://Mega.co.nz," DotCom tweeted today.



Not long after, he followed up with a tweet trumpeting what he said was the site's immediate popularity: "Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE." And indeed, as of this writing the site was difficult to access at times, perhaps because of heavy traffic. DotCom tweeted last month that he'd be staging a "press conference like no other" on January 20 (New Zealand time). It's set to take place at his multimillion-dollar mansion in that country about 13 hours from now.

And on Thursday, DotCom said Mega users would get 50GB of storage for free and that his lawyers are working on giving former MegaUpload premium users their premium statuses on the new site.
On top of the free storage, Mega -- which offers encryption and is being touted as "an awesome cloud storage service that will help protect your privacy" -- offers three pricing plans with added storage space and bandwidth.


DotCom's earlier cyber storage locker, MegaUpload, was launched in 2005, only to be shuttered by U.S. federal agencies, which argued that it was a service pirates were using to facilitate copyright infringement. After being taken to court by U.S. officials for running an alleged "criminal enterprise," DotCom said he had "no intention" of reactivating MegaUpload, and furthermore would not establish any similar business while extradition proceedings were taking place.
The arrival of mega.co.nz as a cloud-based storage locker may have U.S. prosecutors in a tizzy, but MegaUpload's defense team says DotCom is "entitled to innovate and work in technology like any other innocent New Zealander" until he's found to be otherwise.

One of DotCom's lawyers, Ira Rothken, told Ars Technica during a recent interview with him and DotCom that anyone who tries to take down Mega will have no legal ground to stand on.

"You have companies like Dropbox and Google with Drive with materially similar technologies," Rothken said. "and they are in business and they're thriving -- and Mega adds encryption."
An extradition hearing has been scheduled for March as American authorities continue to try to remove the entrepreneur from New Zealand, though some reports have suggested it could be pushed back to July.

You and your data are practically safe from all prosecution this is why:

- Your data is sent through a secure SSL connection 128bit secure, meaning if it is intercepted it cant be read, and it is only partial data equating to nothing, they need all the pieces
- Once at MEGA the data is then encrypted with your custom key so if MEGA was ever intercepted or the data leaked its secured with the Key you generated during registration a 2048bit (would take a long time to crack) also bloating the file and making it in decipherable as a particular type or file.
- When you share your data with your friends or redownload it, its being decrypted from the 2048, to the 128, to real data once on your computer.


All in all from your computer to theirs its a bunch of numbers and letters that cant be linked to a particular type of file to then go after you for.

megasource
mistycreed 20th-Jan-2013 10:47 am (UTC)
It depends on the school. At mine you have to sign in with your user name and password to get on the internet or a computer; however, an student tech guy told me that they can only catch you torrenting.
vehiclesshockme 20th-Jan-2013 10:47 am (UTC)
You didn't have to at mine it was all totally open.
mistycreed 20th-Jan-2013 10:50 am (UTC)
I wish mine was like that. I can rarely sign on to the regular internet and always have to use the guest one (still have to sign in with an email, but it's a slower speed).
winniechili 20th-Jan-2013 01:43 pm (UTC)
Your school has public wifi for everyone?
vehiclesshockme 20th-Jan-2013 01:57 pm (UTC)
At least in the film building, yeah.
emofordino 21st-Jan-2013 02:23 am (UTC)
mine does too, you don't even need a student login or anything to use it. my school is super tiny though, so that's probably why.
vehiclesshockme 20th-Jan-2013 10:49 am (UTC)
Then again my first day of one of my classes our professor passed around a flash drive and gave us all an illegal copy of the latest version of Final Draft so maybe my school isn't the best example :-X
mistycreed 20th-Jan-2013 10:53 am (UTC)
LMAO.
Last semester, we'd spend the first 10-15 minutes of class discussing Parks and Rec and the Walking Dead, and this was with a professor who was also the chair of the department.

Then when that professor was in China for a few weeks, his grad student showed us where to streaming links for a movie we had to watch for class.
spiffynamehere 21st-Jan-2013 06:40 pm (UTC)
That's pretty awesome tbh.
fuckyess 21st-Jan-2013 09:45 pm (UTC)
my teacher who was also the chair of his department showed us the trailer for poultrygeist

it was part of the curriculum though (video art)
cabernet 20th-Jan-2013 05:05 pm (UTC)
omg he sounds wonderful
classic_mold137 20th-Jan-2013 03:29 pm (UTC)
Yeah we could sign into the internet from any computer with a username and password, but all the computers in the dorms and library were always just connected.

My college always told us that they'd do their best to protect us, but that they might ask us to stop.
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