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Kim Dotcom's Mega Claims 1 Million Users Within 24 Hours
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."
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
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
but I don't have 50GB of porn to fill it...
Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing
...but it's sure better than the current state of megavideo.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I hope it stays.
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.
This weird criminal somehow has 50 GB * 1,000,000 = 47.6 petabytes of enterprise storage? Without getting one dollar? How is this paid for? Not to mention all the data traffic back and forth which will be even more expensive?
Wouldn't recommend. Can't connect to web site. Haven't received email when trying to sign up.
Even Blizzard did a better job of taking initial load with Diablo 3.
I don't support Kim.com or Anonymous. Nor do I support DRM or the US Government.
while the feds tap in.
I signed up yesterday, but I have yet to complete uploading anything due to the traffic on the site. Hopefully in a few days after things die down it will be useable. I plan on using it as a secondary cloud backup for songs I have written (and which I own the copyright).
is it encrypted transmission and storage? otherwise its just another dropbox clone. also, 1st post!
Yes, Yes, No it's not, and no you weren't.
Be seeing you...
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Offering free 50GB isn't a useful business model or at all surprising that lots of people would sign to to try to get something for nothing.
I bet if he advertised a free steak and a blow job he'd get 2 million users in 24 hours (well, as long as he wasn't promising to fulfill that promise personally...)
I thought it was free and then had paid plans.
I'm sure their business model is alluring enough to attract plenty of paying customers.
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.
So nice to see that so many dumbasses are out there willing to trust people like that with their data. What could possibly go wrong.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Try an E-mail multiplier, such as SpamGourmet.
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.
when they are busy ratting each other out to the FBI? What do they need help with - negotiating their plea agreements with federal prosecutors?
So nice to see that so many dumbasses are out there willing to trust people like that with their data. What could possibly go wrong.
What part of "data is encrypted at the client using javascript" don't you understand?
I'll be happy to explain it to you. Was it the "javascript" part? Or maybe "encryption"? I can go over the difference between "client side" processing and "server side" if you like.
Please tell us. I've got a professional interest in sorting the dumbasses from the rest of the internet, and you seem to be able to tell the difference.
Links in the summary... NONE of them to the actual service. Brilliant!
Here is the actual site: https://mega.co.nz/
that's for megabox, his music service.
it made a key never gave it to me
then i cant upload files
seems like a useless thing
anyways have a nice day that was a perfectly good waste a time
Are you at least an athletic supporter?
It's a shame there's nothing between the free tier and the first paid tier. 100GB would be more than enough for me, and the cheapest pro account is still too expensive for how much I'd use it.
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 others because of Dotcom's incipient "MegaKey" agreement with big-name urban artists.
So, from where will the source of this revenue come? Ads are obvious - but really another nut to crack. I don't think this is what the new Mega has in mind for a foundation pillar.
Rather, I suspect that the artist agreements are expected to drive enough subscriber interest, for real takes, vs. simple freeloaders. The volume of signup in the past 24 hours is a great validation for Dotcom, if prospective participants need prompting.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Just wait until Slashdotters start waking up around the World. That should take care of both spotty and availability.
The artists want out of these RIAA handcuffs as badly as do their fans. They see there is a different, more direct model that doesn't fatten the talentless go-betweens sitting in air-conditioned offices, producing no value at either end of the production pipeline.
Sorry, Mr. Ego Hat, David Geffen.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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?
I don't support Kim.com or Anonymous. Nor do I support DRM or the US Government.
You're a rebel without a cause.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
If it is anything like megaupload, the differences on the first tier and free account will be the download links. You get a faster download and the people you give the links to does not have to wait for a specific server or be limited in speed because of public servers being overloaded.
This is probably only valuable if you are hosting files for work or something and need a quick way to disseminate them outside the building. Most smaller companies who are not into web services do not have a lot of extra upstream bandwidth.
Look what happened to data of the last people who trusted him for cloud storage.
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.
Brill: In guerrilla warfare, you try to use your weaknesses as strengths.
Robert Clayton Dean: Such as?
Brill: Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time.
$10 says within 6-18 months, there will be a story here about a certain dot com being a 'sting' all along.
Tick tock...
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?
Agreed. And, speaking of that...
"The doctors want out of these insurance company handcuffs as badly as do their patients."
There. Modified that for you...
You're new here, aren't you ? :)
Slashdot articles, la creme de la creme of journalism...
Megakey
http://michaelsmith.id.au
according to google if you type in kims new domain name
mega.co.nz
you will get
About 1,150,000,000 results (0.22 seconds)
this service will never get up cause of that
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.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Different industry, same people.
...he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.
Too late. He's got that covered.
How did you lot register in the first place? It keeps telling me "Please check your e-mail and click the link to confirm your account." but there hasn't been one, not for hours. :(
I signed on with my hotmail account.
Hours have passed. No confirmation message anywhere.
Yes, I did check the "junk" folder.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Content arguments aside, 500/mo for a 72TB server on a 1Gb connection is losing money for someone else's business. Even without redundancy you wouldn't make your money back on hardware for years, and that's before any support.
--- Need web hosting?
Soon the laws will be changed so that when they see traffic coming to/from your IP to megaupload, you will go to jail if you can't explain what you are doing there.
No reference, .co.nz is just the domain name used in New Zealand.
That's too funny. There is no way that swapping the ads on a website with explicit user consent by using a program installed on the user's computer is copyright infringement. The ad replacement program isn't copying any content, in a way it is like picking up a free magazine pasting over some of the ads with other ads then giving it to someone else. There is no copying involved ergo no copyright infringement.
Mod +1 LOL
I am curious about how he is doing strong encryption without getting busted for it. He is planning a worldwide cloud of these... so that means into and out of the US, and into and out of any number of countries that are on the no-no list for strong encryption.
Does someone know why he thinks he can get away with this?
That article you reference on digitaltrends.com is so full of holes that it's comical. It tries to argue that viewers of a web page are under legal obligation to view the page as the page designer intended.
That has never been the case since the dawn of the Web, neither as a matter of practice nor as a matter of law. There is neither a binding contract nor any other kind of agreement between the designer/owner and the viewer of a public page.
It looks good. A little bit slow now but it think it will be better.
Dotcom needs to deal with the US, and in particular recover the costs of the now clearly Malicous prosecution and loss of revenue.
New Zeeland is setting an excellent example here
MFG, omb
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 well. 50GB might sound like a lot but as Dropbox, Mozy, Flikr, Picasa and all the other storage/backup providers have discovered a lot of people want more than that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Exactly. I'll paste here what I tried to reply as comment to the above-cited article (but couldn't, since the owners of "Digital Trends" so adamantly like to censor every comment):
I would say Parmar's argument doesn't hold water. First, MegaKey DOES NOT turn your computer into part of a voluntary botnet, nor does it constitute malware... that argument is just silly. Content injection/modification with FULL user consent is not malware-like behaviour: if it was, then ad-blockers and stuff like userscripts-dot-org would be equally considered malware-like (and they're not).
Looking at the whole "copyright" side of the argument, it's easy to see it doesn't apply, since (at least in most countries) it is fully legal and within "fair use" to make PRIVATE derivatives of any copyrighted work. If it was ACTUALLY illegal, then it would be a big problem to use browsers such as Lynx or Mosaic, which are almost certain to render most pages "incorrectly" (i.e. in a manner different from what the original author intended); it would be a big problem to use stuff such as NoScript; it would be a big problem for people who block Flash/Java by default; etc. Nope, doesn't seem reasonable at all.
Lastly, if the company itself (i.e. Mega) could be directly sued by other websites under the claims of "inducing lost profit", "interfering with other businesses" or whatever, then companies/individuals making ad-blockers (such as AdBlock Plus) would be EVEN MORE liable since they make websites "lose" 100% of profit from ads, rather than just 15%. In fact, websites SHOULD prefer people to use MegaKey over generic ad-blockers, since it means that they get to keep 85% of their ad profit (rather than 0%).
Don't confuse wanting out with wanting some other fatcat middleman such as a this retard.
Sign up twice?
who says patients don't want insurance? if my kid breaks his leg and it ends up costing $500,000+ in initial and follow-up procedures, i sure don't want to have to be the one to try to fork over the money. hospitals would shut down without insurance companies. i don't know how doctors look at it, as i am not one, but i can't imagine they want to get rid of their main source of income.
Last time a million people signed up for a service titled "mega conz" a Nigerian prince did very well... Lets hope this time is different.
Status quo. Brainwashing.
When someone get's better percentages - without the handcuffs and obligations and restraints of working the Capitol/Sony/EMI plantations?
Croppers gonna leave...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Since when does MTV have music back on it?
He is referring to the malpractice insurance the doctors need that inflates the cost of repairing your kid's broken leg.
Don't we all have air-conditioned offices? I mean it's not like we're living in Vietnam here.
It doesn't. I have no idea what your parent poster is talking about. (Yes, I have MTV. And no, it doesn't promote new music in any shape or form, as far as I have seen over the last years.)
If the US government is agin it, it's probably good. Go KdC!
Social Credit would solve everything...