Mega Cloud Storage Successor of Megaupload?

By Corentin Béchade, redactor, StorageNewsletter

Exactly one year after the brutal shutdown of the highly
controversial Megaupload website by the FBI, Kim Dotcom is launching
a new cloud storage service, which is said to make "the US
government fails and Innovation wins." according to Dotcom.

The new website mega.co.nz offers 50GB of cloud storage for all free
accounts, making it the larger cloud storage offering in the market,
way beyond most popular Google Drive (5GB) Dropbox (5GB) and Microsoft’s
Skydrive (7GB).

The pro accounts starts at $9.99 per month for 500GB of storage and
1TB of bandwidth (Pro I).

Two other monthly plans are offered: 

• Pro II: 2TB of storage and 4TB of bandwidth for $19.99 / month

• Pro III: 4TB of storage and 8TB of bandwidth for $29.99 / month

And each of these plans can also be subscribed yearly,
giving  two
month free:

• Pro I at 99,99 € / year

• Pro II at 199,99 € / year

• Pro III at 299,99 € / year

While these prices are seductive, offering more storage than the
competition for a lesser pricing, the controversial legacy of
Megaupload weighs over the site. Massively used for sharing
copyrighted content, the site was regularly attacked by major’s
industry for copyright infringement. Aware of these issues Kim Dotcom
reinforces the legal team protecting his website and put an emphasis
on security.

The process of uploading a file is rather simple. The website offers
drag-n-drop functionality or you can manually search for your file.
Every uploaded file is duplicated and stored in two different servers
to avoid data loss. Each files uploaded to the site is encrypted with
a personal AES-128 key generated on the client side. Therefore all
the data stored on the platform is strictly personal and neither the
MEGA team nor any other third party can access or view the content
uploaded. But there seems to be some flaws in the encrypting process and it’s still impossible to change the password.

This mechanism is aimed at protecting the privacy of users but also
the hosting status of MEGA. The key being strictly personal, the MEGA
team doesn’t have any access to the content uploaded and cannot technically be
held responsible for any copyright infringement.

On the software side, MEGA is still today limited to a web-app
accessible from any browser that support HTML5, but a mobile app and a
client for Windows, integrated to the local file system, are said to
be on the way.

The site is still looking for hosting partners outside of the U.S.
because of the DMCA law.

The following specs are asked
to become a
MEGA hosting partner:

• At least 20TB of disk capacity

• Quality RAID controller

• 4GB of RAM

• 1Gb/s uplink minimum (2Gb/s preferred)

But despite those advantages, MEGA does not seem to be perfectly
fitted for enterprises and professionals, the unique RSA key and email
address allow only one user to be in charge. 

It remains to be
seen if the service is going to be use for something else than
sharing copyrighted content illegally and if this controversial service is going to conquer professionals and enterprises, especially the ones that thought of Megaupload as a legitimate backup service and lost all of their data during the shutdown.