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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.
That's why you spend the next few weeks downloading porn, followed by the next few months uploading it all to Mega and freeing the space in your hard drive, and then... you'll have to download it *again* from Mega just to be able to watch it.
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.
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
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?
1. Not every user is using 50gb.
2. He has lots of money.
3. He is investing in a new enterprise and knows that he has to spend money first in order to make money in the future.
I assumed all that was fairly obvious. What's your theory, by the way?
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.
Links in the summary... NONE of them to the actual service. Brilliant!
Here is the actual site: https://mega.co.nz/
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..."
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..."
This would work if the files weren't encrypted.
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?
That is called deduplication and most modern SAN systems have this feature. You can have both thin-provisioning and deduplication for increased savings. In Mr. Dotcoms business model I doubt he will get many exact duplicate files, but that really doesn't matter because you can still deduplicate similar binary strings within differing binary files or as you said duplicate blocks. In any case dedupe and thin-prov are not mutually exclusive, you can do both.
Normally dedupe is more efficient for backups or when used on the disk target for a virtual environment since you only need one copy of notepad.exe if you are hosting 200+ windows servers. The same applies to unchanging files in *nix systems. The thing is you *have* to have some way to "present" the 50GB of promised space. While you may use dedupe or any other method to reduce your storage footprint the end user wants to see that storage. You either have to present that space raw, which comitts it from the SAN or as a thin-provisioned LUN with only the bare minimum of space actually reserved. How you store those files after the fact is up to you as the hosting company, but if you promise 50GB of space the user will want to see that space available.
Your encrypted data, you mean? I don't mind them selling my encrypted data, honestly. Would take more time to unencrypt it than it's really worth and they'd just lose money. Renting out those botnets DOES cost something and it'll take them a while to break AES128.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
but I don't have 50GB of porn to fill it...
You need to hand in your geek card. Immediately.
Mega's availability remains spotty as of this articles' writing."
So it's only partly Cloudy.
You don't even NEED a lot of money to get 50 PB of storage.
Granted, you need some, but it's a lot less than people think.
18 months ago, BackBlaze showed how to build a 135 TB server for $7,384, and the price would be just about the same today.
That's $56,696/TB for a total of $2,834,800
For what Kim has in mind for Mega, 3 million in storage hardware isn't exactly surprising. In fact I'd be surprised if they haven't budgeted for a lot more than that.
The connection to New Zeland is via undersea cable over a monopoly called the Southern Cross.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable
Is one fiber cable going to be able to handle the traffic?
The truth shall set you free!
2. He has lots of money.
3. He is investing in a new enterprise and knows that he has to spend money first in order to make money in the future.
I assumed all that was fairly obvious. What's your theory, by the way?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/building-mega-ars-pre-launch-interview-with-kim-dotcom/
The Mega business plan will be a distributed model, with hundreds of companies large and small, around the world, hosting files. A hosting company can be huge or it can own just two or three servers Dotcom says--just as long as it's located outside the US.
"Each file will be kept with at least two different hosters, [in] at least two different locations," said Dotcom. "That's a great added benefit for us because you can work with the smallest, most unreliable [hosting] companies. It doesn't matter because they can't do anything with that data."
More than 1000 hosts answered a request for expressions of interest on the Mega home page. Dotcom says several hundred will be active partners within months. Successful hosts will get paid E500 per month per server; each server needs to supply 24 hard drives with 72 terabytes of storage and one gigabit of bandwidth, among other requirements.
That's all down the road, however. For now, Mega is launching with just one, professional, hosting operator--a subsidiary of Cogent, based in Dotcom's home country of Germany.
According to other articles, he has a (maxed out) 10Gbit pipe from this Cogent subsidiary
And FYI - Cogent was the US host for megaupload.com, so they believe in his business plan enough to host for him again.
If he can get Mega back into the big leagues again, it's going to put some serious strain the undersea fiber that feeds the USA.
That's the most expensive wired bandwidth around and he's planning to host nothing in the USA.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!