Slashdot Mirror
Kim Dotcom Reveals Mega Will Offer 50GB of Free Storage
An anonymous reader writes "Kim Dotcom on Thursday used Twitter to reveal some interesting new tidbits in regards to his upcoming Mega service, which will be hosted at the New Zealand-based domain Mega.co.nz. Two days before the service is to go live, Doctom says he plans to offer 50GB of free storage to all members and is also working on bringing over users' Megaupload files and data, but has so far run into legal issues." To say that Kim Dotcom has "run into legal issues" is like saying that Julian Assange is having a sleepover at the Ecuadorian embassy.
Hangin out in Middle Earth for a few months.
Tricksy Hobbitses
Will get lopped off this time! Unfortunately there is clearly one word that defines the Obama administration, vindictive! And it isn't pretty!
Another Kim Dotcom story. It looks like Kim Dotcom is to Slashdot like Kim Kardashian is to People magazine.
So the execs at MGM, Warner, AOL, MSNBC, Sony, and all those other media corps have a right to sit on their ass playing CoD all day too? Are you one of them, worried about your monopolies? Though I think Sony is probably one of the least evil offenders in this regard, they just defend their turf enough to not get steamrolled.
Thats just one industry, not even all of them.
Every single thing I used mega-upload for was legit. Mods for oblivion, quake, and other gaming uses.
Further under Kim's old model, the people who uploaded content benefited, if you uploaded your own content you actually got compensated for it, even if it was still pirated a bunch. Meaning Kim didn't run an exclusive monopoly on his ass sitting entrepreneurial lifestyle.
Stop crying because you can't control the whole godamn planet.
Use to be hosted on mega, http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/files/file/297-elsweyr-the-deserts-of-anequina/ back in the day bro. Your making a blanket assumption that Kim is an evil facilitator of destruction.
He's just an entrepreneur with his own political motivations, ones that don't align with the people in power. His sole purpose in life is not to screw over content creators as you believe.
"Doctom says .."
Come on! Not even 100 words in the summary, the name of this (by now) VERY well known dude appears exactly 3 times, and you can't even spell that right? Or at least make the same name appears each instance?
What does /. pay these editors for??? I mean, it's not like they are needed to select what stories to run on the frontpage (see firehose).
I would make the argument that he screwed over the big monopolies, but not the individual small creators, who couldn't get published by the likes of EA, or Time Warner, or MGM. Plus he facilitated fair use, such as taping NFL and redistributing it, because fuck all people use to be able to do that. The internet made it easier yeah. The NFL also didn't go out of business. I think they've made a profit each and every year. There's no actually creativity in that, just the buying of good equipment and talent to tape already planned events. So maybe the only thing setting apart major networks from people with their home camera's is quality.
But you know, things change. Maybe we should support peoples individual rights to profit from the same thing major companies are syndicating. Might help the economy too.
Are you kidding me? Rapidshare was a goldmine of copyright infringement. It's not as much anymore simply because there are now more alternatives and it's harder to search it.
Doctom says he plans to offer 50GB of free storage to all members...but has so far run into legal issues."
I'm planning to woo Kaley Cuoco and elope to Tahiti with her, but have so far run into reality issues. Where's my free press?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Conned how? Please provide a link as to how Kim was a con artist. His company actually payed out to people AFAIK.
Though I think Sony is probably one of the least evil offenders in this regard
I guess you've forgotten about XCP, eh? I surely never will, having been a victim. When was the last time Universal deliberately planted vandalous malwars on their customers' machines and called it "DRM"?
Sony is the worst.
I wish these guys weren't so creepy. I find it so hard to support them when they make my skin crawl.
At least there wasn't a reference to McAfee. Although, it appears that of the three, he is the least creepy.
Rapidshare was, at least at the time, terrible in terms of file size and speed.
Dropbox is great, but total storage size is poor.
I'm speaking of free accounts of course. I have a lot of film student friends. They need a convenient way to exchange raw footage securely. Nothing free has had enough storage space and speed to be useful, and they're too cheap/poor to pay.
And before anyone asks--we looked into ownCloud. It would be the perfect solution, if not for the fact that ISP monthly caps are too costly to get around in our area.
From the Embassy: ::sound of teenage girls chuckling::
Assange: this sleepover is amazing. Want to play truth or dare?
Ecuadorian Ambassador: No, Julian, can we just go to sleep?
Assange: How about we do some prank calls? I got a shit list we can call.
EA: Can we add Amnesty International and the EFF on there?
Assange: Sure, as long as we can call Obama
EA: Why not? I got a red phone over there.
sudo make me a sandwich
Oh yeah the rootkit. Your right, got me there. Sony BMG music group also I guess. But is Sony Universal really "Sony" or an American front or shell for their video industry. It gets confusing you start researching who owns what. I am thinking Sony, as in plain old hardware Sony. Or Sony Entertainment Corporation. Sony has allot of studio's.
How is he being scammed or conned when he got what he wants, he wanted somewhere to throw his files and they let him. You seem to be under the impression that Dotcom is some evil person when all he does is chase money. He may have screwed up in his past (he used to act as a malicious hacker) but he was punished and paid his debt to society and is now just running a file locker service what is put there by others is not his responsibility.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Same name, guilty. Let them burn in hell.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
The site isn't live yet, but the information pages are *really* interesting.
1) Distributed storage?
Mega is inviting people to be a mega storage node. Allocate some storage and bandwidth on your system, and Mega will store files there.
This would imply (to me, at least) that the site will use distributed storage. If I'm right, that means it will be nigh impossible for any authority to take the data offline in a single action. All Kim needs is a list associating peoples' files with where they are physically stored, and it won't matter to *the users* if the site gets taken down - he can just publish the list and everyone can get their files from the cloud storage nodes directly. (I'm probably overlooking a more elegant solution, such as unpublicized backup domains which can be announced as alternate portals if the main site gets taken down.)
Also - They propose to *pay you* for being a mega storage node. That won't be popular, no sirreee...
2) Published API?
They propose to publish a comprehensive API and software dev kit. In their words: "We hope to see a thriving ecosystem of crypto-enabled third-party client apps emerge."
We don't need to trust Kim for security. Open source applications will sprout like weeds, and you can choose from whichever publisher you trust. (The Firefox plugin from Mozilla perhaps, or the version put out by the Apache foundation...)
2) Encryption == No liability?
In their words: "You hold the keys to what you store in the cloud, not us."
This neatly avoids any liability on their part for hosting content, and at the same time protects everyone's online content from random web snooping by the likes of CIA, NSA, and various repressive regimes. Including Chinese hackers.
IANAL, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that attaching liability to this type of storage would require new laws, and a sea shift in the way liability is determined. Any such change would be unworkable, since it would also encompass broad swatches of the existing internet.
3) Better functionality
The site mentions improvements in functionality, such as having servers near the customer for speed (due to the distributed nature of storage), complete disk functionality, and so on.
====================
I have to say, this *really does* look like it will change the world, and will be the future made manifest.
Go check out Mega.co.nz and see for yourself - it's an interesting read.
(Oh, and if you would like to help erode the influence of the media conglomerates (RIAA, MPAA, &c), getting a free account and storing your legally owned files would be a drop in the bucket towards that end.)
I would tend to agree, but thats like blaming the people behind originally Blizzard for Vivendi-Activision, at that point it starts to grey out a bit in my mind. And knowing corporate politics, my father worked for Evens-and-Southerland, that sometimes one division can do something to harm the entire company.
I'm not trying to exonerate them. Just thinking and speculating (speculation) is the first step, while not an actual factual understanding of things.
No need to repeat yourself.. :p
After doing a bit more research, there is no Sony Universal, so it would be Sony Entertainment. Sony and universal got into a spat over betamax in 1984, but thats far reaching for conspiracy.
I think Sony, just bowed down and developed the rootkit to make their service look better to the producers, Sony, being the distributer in this case. If I had the rootkit I don't know, I also didn't have autoplay enabled on my computers. So bad Sony =/ I personally have a love hate relationship with them. Because they funded startups like Verant 989 (which was actually owned the whole time by Sony) and have done plenty of good hardware development. Minus their latest PS3 failure due to RHOS and re-balling the BGA socket GPU's.
The page under "Server requirements" has this interesting tidbit:
"Unfortunately, we can't work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user-generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process."
Get out the popcorn, this should be fun to watch!
(And a P.S. for web designers: mega.co.nz is a model of website design efficiency. Easy to read, short and to-the-point, graphics and layout which improve the presentation, and fast loading.)
Sounds a lot like mega cons. You'd think he could have done better.
megaconz ... Intentional or not... seems accurate enough.
I'm pretty sure he 'ran into legal issues' in regards to providing people with their old MU files. Pretty sure the actual website is happening either way.
Doctom says he plans to offer 50GB of free storage to all members
Doctor Tom?
I don't like dropbox simply because its software and registration is pretty invasive. But if I was seriously considering trying to making money of a project, I would try ad-fly. I have used drop box for family photo transfers.
Most of the files I'm talking about were hosted in multiple places as well. Rapidshare, mega, filefront, game spies old service before it combined with filefront (or maybe I have that backwards). There's a decades worth of file sharing history to get right there, which I'm kinda just going to lazily assume most people know off hand.
The problem with Mr. Dot-Butt-Cum and his illegal theft operation is that he is clearly attempting to facilitate the theft of assets legally owned by folks other than himself, depriving these legal owners of income from their legally owned assets.
That's not a problem for me.
It's reached the point where I just don't care about the feelings or rights of the "legal owners of income" any more.
For lots of issues there are mitigating circumstances, ways to "consider the other person's point of view", ways to frame the discussion as shades of grey.
Not for these people.
I don't care about the arguments any more. No mitigating circumstances, no heartfelt appeals to starving artists, no reframing of the situation from their point of view.
There comes a point when considering their view is too much of a reach, and you admit to yourself that these people are just plain evil.
Buddah fought against evil, and so do I.
Mr. Dot-Butt-Cum is a despicable low-life (really) whose illegal operation will do more good for the world than all the media conglomerates put together. I applaud him for his sense of hurt, his outrage, and most importantly - his sense of doing something about it!
It's a problem for you, not a problem for me. I wonder how many people think it's not a problem for them, either?
The fact that it installs directly to the computer instead of residing only in browser plug-in. Also, the fact that it automatically creates a shared folder and syncs that to your drop box account.
For random uploads to the net bigger then 100mb, I personally want a service that doesn't assume defaults like this.
For a service that expects you to constantly be sharing in the cloud with your pals and other accounts this is actually good default behavior.
Its just a criticism based off what I wanted to use the service for.
Except the client is optional. I can access my files from dropbox.com and still download/upload.
The client makes this much easier, literally drag and drop to a specific folder.
Let's assume I'm just creating and editing some textures for a game to share with a local modding community, and not my family or facebook friends (I don't like social networking sites). I only want to upload once anonymously and not be hounded for update, or whatever. So that is how I see dropbox - the social network of filesharing sites. Microsoft was doing something like this. I didn't buy into that service either. Mega would work in this regard as long as you used an anonymous email registration. You can do this with dropbox to. But I don't need an application or service permanently installed for stuff like that.
Sony does an old japanese 'business tactic' where a large company spawns off all it's little sub-interests into 'companies' that share part of it's name and claim they are independent so when something goes wrong, or they want to shuffle profits around and get huge tax breaks while claiming losses, it's easy, and quasi-legal. If anything goes wrong, they just declare that it was that subsidiaries fault, and not really Sony's, so you can't nail Sony to the wall for it's activities since they claim to have no control or responsibility over what the subsidiaries do, despite their iron grip control.
It's kind of like putting sock puppets on your hands, then mugging some people, and when you get caught, blame it on the sock puppet, and claim innocence for yourself. In an act a attrition you remove the sock puppet and throw it on the ground and turn you back on it. Meanwhile the now defunct sock puppet had already transferred the money from the muggings to another sock puppet, and it is now sitting safely in your wallet, and since you are 'innocent', so it the money and your acquisition of it. After you've successfully flummoxed your accusers, you don yet another sock puppet and continue the charade.
It's apparently related to the stunts involved in Hollywood Accounting where they do such things as rent their own equipment to themselves, charge for the renting, and the depreciation and usage of the equipment, among many other dirty tricks, and claim the movie as a massive loss despite making a large amount of money way beyond their total costs of production and promotion, etc.
A friend who's got some kind of degree in business told me it's kind of like a reverse shell corporation, but honestly, I don't really understand how shell corporations really work.
So, you readers can take it however you like, but don't for a second believe Sony is anything like innocent. (I'm pretty sure that applies to all big corporations, but still...)
Do you get 500GB of storage if it's not pirated? For pirated content, they can usually merge duplicates with the other copies of the same pirated content. If it's unique content, they really have to store it.
Will they support Mecurial or some other revision control system? I'd like to store Autodesk Inventor engineering design files for my personal projects, which are many gigabytes of binary files if you keep all the revisions. 500GB on Dropbox is $500 per year, and Github gets upset if you store big binary files on their system.
I use the files on different machines at different TechShop locations, and have to haul them around on USB sticks and manage backups. So I have a use case for this.
Disclaimer 1 - This is my system
Disclaimer 2 - The System (ScatterBytes.net) is under heavy development and not currently online. I maybe shouldn't be advertising this on Slashdot, but I would like to get some feedback and if you are interested in adding a storage node or using a client, please respond here or through the website,
https://www.scatterbytes.net/
I currently only want people comfortable with a Linux and a CLI and with the stomach to host data on a system in beta.
You get paid to be a storage node and other than being generally always on, it doesn't matter what type of equipment you use because the system is highly redundant and node outages are expected. Payments are handled through Paypal - both sending and receiving. I'm working on a guide to use a Raspberry Pi as a storage node so that initial costs and power usage will be minimal. The Pi would also double as media/file storage for a local network.
As a client you choose how much redundancy you want. Anywhere from 2 to 20 (or more) mirrors for your data. You can also add parity. After encrypting and splitting a file, the client uploads the pieces to different storage nodes (assigned by a control node), which transfer those pieces to other storage nodes for replication. ALL communication is encrypted and nodes are verified using X.509 certificates signed by a scatterbytes.net CA. Files are encrypted by the client and only the client has the key so ONLY the client can read the data.
I'll admit maybe my original criticism is not the best. It may not even be a good reason to avoid them. Call me crotchety, I just signed up and downloaded whatever they had, tried it, decided I didn't like it and moved on. Proceeded to uninstall the extra software, and send their mail to my junk folder.
Fuck off, bitch, Kaley is mine!
Man, reading your post makes me feel like I am in Bizarro land.
So having a decent client and seamless integration, as opposed to a shitty webinterface, is invasive nowadays? Good god.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I am sorry. I lived staunchly in keep it simple stupid land. But I can see your point. In my defense I never looked at it from your perspective. Look at Adobe's updater software which gets installed alongside their pdf viewer which would automatically install McAffee unless you unchecked it. This actually required software to be installed to view pdf's. But experiences like that make users suspicious of anything that has been done via-web based java in the past and now all of a sudden requires MSI installation.
Well they have not shut down any emulator for Everquest (SOE), and they were fairly decent about letting people install Linux on PS3's. I don't have a money trail to follow to see how much they have lobbied for as for draconian protection for their business model. I think Disney and some of the major US TV networks may be worse in the long run or overall terms. Could the rootkit be construed as a direct violation of internet cracking laws, yeah.
I honestly don't know, I would need to do some serious research to find out how evil Sony is compared to some of the others.
Simply put, they may be like the Sauroman, rather then the Sauron of the evil guys.
You're thinking of plagiarism. Copyright infringement is infringing someone's copyright, which is their legal right to control distribution of their works. When you distribute a work in a manner that the copyright owner does not allow, you are committing copyright infringement. You should use the proper terminology instead of trying to redefine things to what you want them to mean, and then saying that those who don't agree with your redefined terms need to "learn english".
I am Charlie Sheen, you insensitive clod.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You will get no argument from me. I'm just not sure I would class them as #1.
Not caring is not enough. Might I persuade you to leave your neutrality behind?
The criminal angle is probably good, as in desirable and in need of every person's support. My thinking on that, is that if you're not building to protect against the obvious threats, like governments, then what else are you leaving out? It's like trying to have crypto and not even making sure that it is protected from interference by CALEA. If you're CALEA-compliant, then you're Mafia-compliant and Chinese-spy-compliant too.
Same for hosting. US Congress had its chance to repeal DMCA after it clearly turned out to do more harm than good, but they failed to do it. Now DMCA takedowns, issued by unbelievably stupid (yet legally powerful) robots, make US hosting unreliable. That's a fact, Jack. If you have to spend a significant amount of a human's time to unblock a page simply because it contains the word "boardwalk" but also regrettably the word "empire" (two words which also exists in the name of an HBO show) and even doing that means you had "only a few days" of downtime, then you have a reliability problem. I'm not talking about criminals. I'm talking about everyone who publishes anything. DMCA, if it won't be repealed, must be made irrelevant. Everybody's efforts everywhere, depends on this. It's not a criminal thing.
Any technical advances in hosting have to take this very real problem into account, and criminals are the perfect people for us all to ruthless exploit in order to get it started. Let them take all the risks, spend all the money, fail and try again, and come up with a way to publish a Disney movie and be immune to DMCA. Most importantly: let them succeed. We all need them to. Then the rest of us can come in and build on their work to have reliable non-criminal hosting, for the day when one of our pages contains the word "thrones" within three paragraphs of the word "game."
Look forward to the day when someone asks "What's DMCA?" and instead of people linking to cornell.edu, someone answers "It's that law all the non-US countries lobbied US to pass, to make it so that every data center will be located outside of America." Because until Congress itself sees the truth buried within that parodic definition, they are not going to repeal this destructive law.
Don't not-care. Give Dotcom your money. He's just the kind of scum to come up with something that actually works. Who else will do it?
As they say, sometimes you have to go for the lesser evil.
There really is no true "limit"
Just go here: http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
create a "10 minute email account"
register multiple mega accounts and win :P
hell I had 8 different megaupload accounts and all premium due to running their "ad supported app" on an old linux box inside a virtual machine of winxp :P
on my seed box I use RuTorrent web front end, and Rapidleech web program, once a torrent finished it auto copied to the rapidleech upload folder then I'd click a drop down box megaupload/2shared/etc and put a checkbox in all the famous share sites back in the day and rapidleech would upload to all of them.
3 of my old mega's were for the Imagine group
but ill stop there -grin-
True. His sole purpose in life is money and fame. If you know his history, you'll have to agree. He doesn't care for the law, good and evil or the copyright mafia. He's not your friend. He just happens to rob the bank you hate.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Of all the lesser evils: Kim Dotcom, I choose you.
The root kit? Which one? The CD rootkit or the USB drive rootkit? http://techreport.com/news/13096/sony-usb-thumb-drives-come-with-rootkit
And Santa Claus is real.
Do your research....
Whatever you may have to say about Kim's past activities, his character, his figure or his motivations here, he appears to be pulling out all the stops on Mega.
Lawmakers can and will work around him, inventing new charges to encompass anything he pulls, and when they can't react quickly enough enforcement will simply flout their own laws to suckerpunch him (as has already happened).
So Kim's fighting them on his own playing field: technology. From this angle, he seems dead intent on Getting It Right and making Mega impervious to ISP blacklisting, server confiscation, and the inevitable vandalism/wholesale destruction that comes when you stand up to the mob.
Mega could be the model for a new Internet. Encrypted end-to-end, truly distributed and thus truly resilient.
Slashdot, interview this man!
He's offering by far the largest storage space of any the companies that you listed and quite a few others, it depends how you can access it though.
null
Actually from someone who has been researching the topic, the only free service that comes close to that amount of data is Microsoft's Skydrive.
null
There's no way I would consider pooling considerable disk space, bandwidth usage, and number crunching time from my machines enough to get paid if it means I must give out all my info to the online US payment processing corporation that is an essential part of the status quo of the moneyed banking elite that took Megaupload down in the first place. You would be a fool for not learning from the mistakes that have already been made: in 2013 you are still going to base your financial payments between your company and new Mega project's heavy contributors on PayPal?
This is no different than handing the US government banking-level details of your collaborators! Sortable by highest-valued contributors, at that. How do we know we won't be singled out by the federal agencies and their international network of state-sponsored goons in other countries who are attacking Kim Dotcom and co. so voraciously? Even in another country, I'd be giving my name, address, e-mail, phone #, and banking details to the US and jumping up and down shouting "ME! ME! I'M PROFITING OFF OF MEGA 2.0 NOW TOO, NOT JUST Mr. DOTCOM!!"
These potential contributors (presumably, many of us) are going to be involved in the relaunch of a project that drew a fully armed international SWAT team to, however retardedly overzealously, forcibely attack, imprison, and plunder the possessions of those involved in its creation. Many of the more intelligent people who could lease serious rackspace and RAID arrays for money to diversify the network nodes and add larger amounts of high bandwidth data access are NOT going to want to have anything to do with being compensated via PayPal.
You need to get serious with your security, cut out the US-based middlemen who will be obviouslly surveying you, and implement BitCoin. If you do not have BitCoin and your code is not Freely/Libre licensed, there's going to be quite a large section of technically inclined folk who will stay the hell away from anything you build (beyond using the gratis service). That said, if you do embrace these things, maybe you will change the world with this new service after all... only time (and your decisions) will tell.
Kim made millions of selling bandwidth and 'cloud storage'. It should be of no more concern for him that pirates were among his customers than owners of toll roads should be that stolen cars, cars filled with stolen goods (or even murdered people) and similar were using their product. He never sold any downloads, illegal or otherwise; everything were available for free if you could be bothered to wait for a slow download.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
No one said he was an angle
Now now, no need to be obtuse :P
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
they were fairly decent about letting people install Linux on PS3's
Until they forced* a firmware update that removed the 'Install Other OS' feature on all PS3s.
*If you wanted to continue using the online services
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
so you're questioning the wisdom of a guy who changed his name to Kim DOTCOM.
Good luck with that, mate!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Wow, I bet your parents are proud of you.
they'd probably roll in their graves...
I'm 48 :)
course my son is a pirate as well, so it's all in the family :P
I prefer to not choose an evil, thank you.
I know the concept is hard to grasp for many these days, as things like the US presidential elections have been turned into a "choose the lesser of two evils" campaigns. Take a step back and realize that by choosing the lesser of two evils you still support evil. If I were religious, I'd say it's the most devious trickery of the devil.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org