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Mega has launched
- samwillis 14y agoTo 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 14y agoWasn'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)?
- samwillis 14y agoYes, 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.
- kzahel 14y agoThe MediaSource APIs will make this possible
- ubercow13 14y agoThat 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.
- samwillis 14y agoOf course. And have people use it legitimately is essential to them. People also used megaupload legitimately too.
- B0Z 14y agoLast night I experienced 70% packet loss just trying to access the site. Hopefully it was just a launch hiccup.
- thehodge 14y agoJust 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 14y agoNot 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.
- Kudos 14y agoThey load everything from *.eu.mega.co.nz for me, so presumably everything is fairly close to you.
- nextstep 14y agoSo far I'm impressed with how easy it is to sign up. This interface seems clean and polished.
- xSwag 14y agoI'm not sure if MegaConz is meant to be ironic or not.
- sporney 14y agoDefiantly ironic, have you seen his car number plates?
- ricardobeat 14y agoNot sure if you meant 'definitely', but that works even better :)
- aw3c2 14y agoJudging by his history I would say it is not meant ironically but "super mega awesome gangsta kool".
- hahla 14y agoSite is getting completely hammered as of 15 minutes ago, Kim posted this on his twitter (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom https://twitter.com/KimDotcom): "Wow. I have never seen anything like this. From 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- colevscode 14y agoSpeedtest reports: 5 Mb/s upload speed MEGA reports: 500 B/s upload speed :/
- Kudos 14y agoThey'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 14y agoIf 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.
- kami8845 14y 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.
- melvex 14y agoWhat a ridiculous statement. He could just as easily make up a fake bandwidth usage number for marketing purposes rather than actually put unnecessary load on his servers by not using Gzip. It's most likely down to him hiring sloppy developers. And judging by the source code on the site this is exactly the reason.
- bluegate010 14y agoAgreed. Very sloppy code.
- borplk 14y agowhere are you looking at the source code? I'd like to see too
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- rikacomet 14y agoThe site is down for me, earlier, access was denied, to control the extra traffic.
- alexqgb 14y agoThe clean interface makes the tagline (lifted from Daft Punk w/o credit) that much more conspicuous. Clearly, some things haven't changed.
- prezjordan 14y agoI do not believe Daft Punk has exclusive rights to /\w+er\.? better\.? faster\.? stronger/, but I could be wrong.
- alexqgb 14y agoSeparate 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.
- georgeorwell 14y agoEveryone knows that it's Daft Punk. Credit isn't needed. What do you want? "Bigger. Better. Faster. Stronger. Safer. Thanks Daft Punk for all the music!" Daft Punk sold out by their second album anyway, they're hardly underground geniuses in want of credit now. Nonetheless, I think it's just more grandiosity and find it irritating that he riffed on the chorus at all.
- alexqgb 14y agoWhat do I want? For him to be thrown in jail. I honestly don't care about people swapping media between themselves. But setting up an exchange to do that, and paying for it by selling space to advertisers? That's not "sharing". That's business. And that business would collapse if he had to pay the copyright holders he depends on. In general, audiences have NO idea how much time, effort, etc. it takes to produce decent work. Partly, that's by design, since good work should look effortless. But when you count the time getting good, a decent album may represent a decade of someone's life (10,000 hours, etc.) And the thousands of names in the credits of major films represent actual work, by real people. There's no reason these people should be expected to "find a business model" that doesn't rely on some form of legal protection when protection is the backstop of every viable business model in existence (not always legal, in the case of drug cartels; and where there's no protection at all, what you're really talking about is good luck and charity). That said, I think enforcing copyright at the individual level is a fool's errand. No one writing the law - which evolved over centuries - ever imagined that it would be applicable on such a global scale, in such a granular way. Barring radical change in the law, I think individuals should be exempt from prosecution under something that is so spectacularly unsuited to free individuals and the democracy that depends on their liberty. But corporations are another story. They're tools, not people, and tools have no rights. Shareholders have rights, employees have rights, citizens whose governments issue corporate charters have rights. But corporations themselves? No rights whatsoever. There's no threat to democracy in making them secure permission - by paying for it on fairly negotiated terms - or getting sued into oblivion. Indeed, that's the exact expectation around which the law and industries that pay for copyrights both developed. The Internet's appearance doesn't change the premise that anyone building a business around material they didn't produce, should include the properly negotiated price of their inputs in the prices they charge to others. Obviously, that's my own standard. It's not reflected in law. But I think it's a fair break. If it were reflected in law, I think we could put the copyright wars behind us for the foreseeable future. As far as Kim Dotcom goes, it's clear he made his money on the wrong side of this line. That's why I'd like to see him jailed under law which should make jailing him a no brainer. I have no idea how he's going to pay for his current venture, but I'm pretty sure he says "safer" not "safe" for good reason. You'd have to be an idiot to give Mega the same level of trust that Dropbox enjoys.
- jtchang 14y agoRegardless 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.
- zalew 14y ago> You'd think anyone would quit after a FBI raid and being sued into oblivion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Criminal_investigat...
- d0m 14y agoThe 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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Lisa2000 14y agoThe 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.
- georgeorwell 14y agoIf you don't hold the copyright over the files, who cares?
- micheljansen 14y agoAfter 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.
- ooobo 14y agoOn visiting a download link in Firefox (latest) posted in this thread (https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudfUchdIPcdz6oGg 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!
- frewsxcv 14y agoWell, why do you use Safari?
- nessus42 14y agoI 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.
- DriesS 14y agoI'm using firefox because of the same reason, google chrome is using a lot of memory on mac...
- ktsmith 14y agoI use Chrome on a Mac with a half dozen spaces with multiple monitors and have never had problem moving between spaces. Out of curiosity are you using the release, beta or dev channel?
- nessus42 14y ago
- denzil_correa 14y agoWonderful slick and clean interface. Hate him, Love him but you just can't ignore him.
- JimWestergren 14y agoFrom his Twitter[1]: "Site is extremely busy. Currently thousands of user registrations PER MINUTE." - @KimDotcom "Wow. I have never seen anything like this. From 0 to 10 Gigabit bandwidth utilization within 10 minutes." - @KimDotcom [1]: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom https://twitter.com/KimDotcom
- thoughtcriminal 14y agoI'm getting a paid account. Help the brother out.
- glazskunrukitis 14y agoMuch ado about nothing.
- nullymcnull 14y agoHe's claiming 100K registered users in less than one hour. That's nothing?
- glazskunrukitis 14y ago100k users just confirm the fuss. Another question is if there is any real value to this service.
- nullymcnull 14y agoApparently some 100 million users found his previous file sharing service to be of some value, until it was shutdown that is. What's difficult to see, however, is what value your pointless dig brings to this discussion.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoSo, it generated a key... which is being stored where? I can't seem to download it?
- aw3c2 14y agoIf you could download it, what use would it have. ;)
- drivebyacct2 14y agoHuh? 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 https://mega.co.nz/#developers
- edwardy20 14y agoThere are a million cloud drives out there (some with advanced privacy features), what's different about Mega?
- josephagoss 14y agoHonestly? I think its the marketing, Kim kind of has his own brand going on here.
- arrowgunz 14y agoGuys, any idea if they have an iOS app?
- ukd1 14y agoMy first upload: https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudfUchdIPcdz6oGg https://mega.co.nz/#!jFlzGQiZ!CL2dMi5IAYLUp3ZQ5JS7nmW0sYtudf...
- fredsted 14y agoPerhaps 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.
- benologist 14y agoHis 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.
- DriesS 14y agoA 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.
- benologist 14y agoGizmodo says you can share them with a link http://gizmodo.com/5977265/how-megas-encryption-will-protect-you-but-mostly-kim-dotcom 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_ 14y agoHow 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 14y agoI don't think it does. I think that is just there for legal reasons.
- g_lined 14y agoThey 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.
- micheljansen 14y agoDoes 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 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?
- beala 14y agoAccording to the help page, no keys (except the public key) ever leave the client [1]. [1] https://mega.co.nz/#help_security 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.
- dabeeeenster 14y agoIn 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...
- beala 14y agoAccording to Ars, the public sharing works by bundling the encryption key with the link to the data [1]. I don't have reliable access to the site, so I don't want to speculate too much, but I suppose there must be a way to export your keys so you can view your files from different computers. I agree with the sentiment, though, that this is security theater. It's subject to the same problem as Hushmail, where they could be forced to snoop on their customers by modifying client code. [1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goes-hands-on-with-kim-dotcoms-cloud-storage-site/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/mega-arrives-ars-goe...
- egeozcan 14y agoTrying to access from Germany: http://i.imgur.com/Iw70r1U.png http://i.imgur.com/Iw70r1U.png
- gjulianm 14y agoI 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 https://mega.co.nz/#terms EDIT: Added example.
- arankine 14y agoThis 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
- dabeeeenster 14y agoSomething 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?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dexter313 14y agoThe 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.
- markshead 14y agoIt 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.
- zalew 14y 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 14y agoReally? I'm on FF3 and I didn't get a notice, which was quite surprising. File upload didn't work though....
- zalew 14y agowow, that's even weirder. btw thanks for the downvote, whoever that was.
- icebraining 14y agoResist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rplnt 14y agoIn Opera 11.x you don't get a warning, but the site never loads.
- joering2 14y agoIf 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.
- vitobcn 14y agoAccording to Kim, over a 100,000 users registered in under an hour (https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292702999078387712 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292702999078387712). Pretty impressive, and it explains the slow responsiveness of the site.
- rplnt 14y agoMuch ado about nothing. He's pretty clever.
- rorrr 14y agoIt freezes during the registration process in both FF and Chrome. EDIT: It's because AJAX return "500 server too busy" error.
- dexter313 14y agowoot!? https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292707119424229376/photo/1 https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/292707119424229376/phot...
- jordanbaucke 14y agoregistered. confirmed. nothing after that.
- xanadohnt 14y agoSame.
- GowGuy47 14y agoHow much storage does the free version allow is my question... Couldn't find it any where
- ditojim 14y ago50gb - It has been mentioned in a few articles but I did not readily find the info on the site.
- icebraining 14y agoIt's in Help center: Account. https://mega.co.nz/#help_account https://mega.co.nz/#help_account
- georgeorwell 14y agoI 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.
- dexter313 14y agoWhat illegal products are you talking about?
- x3sphere 14y agoHow 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..
- andrewbaron 14y agoSeems 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoIt looks like debug can be activated in the javascript console: type "d=true", navigate, look at your console.
- attheodo 14y agoAnd embraces flat design apparently :p
- rplnt 14y agoHorrible 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 14y agoIt looks fine to me ?! Flash is not used at all and the design shows some taste.
- rplnt 14y agoIt'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.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cmelbye 14y agoHeh, interesting that the site so proudly says "Made in New Zealand" despite the fact that New Zealand raided his home.
- navs 14y agoUnfortunately, 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-plays-Santas-lovechild http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/whats-on/8073823/Kim-Dotcom-...
- vyrotek 14y agoThat loading/cloud symbol reminds me of something... (https://stripe.com https://stripe.com)
- alternize 14y agohum, is it just me or is there really no way to change the email address and/or the account password?
- Corrado 14y agoSomeone 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 14y agoI 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.
- bluegate010 14y agoThe 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 14y agoSSL 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.
- zeynalov 14y agoFor now, upload doesn't work.
- navs 14y agoI'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 14y agoI'm getting "This webpage is not available"
- cgio 14y agoReading 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 14y agocompletely 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 14y agoThe 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoI 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 14y agoand... it's down.
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