Mega.co.nz, Mega's new online home

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 12, 2012
Internet
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6

I'm not sure what to make out of all of this. You may remember that one of the most popular file hosting sites has been taken down by a joint effort of authorities in various countries. Users of the service suddenly found themselves without access to their files, and while Megaupload certainly has been used to share copyrighted files, it has also been used by legit users for various purposes.

From an outside perspective, it looks as if the people responsible for the take down used at least some trickery to get file hosting services and the New Zealand police to comply with their demands. Part of what has been taken during the raids have been given back already, but the servers and files have not been handed over yet.

Since it is not clear if Megaupload domain names, servers and data will be handed back to its rightful owners, the operators of the service began to develop and tease a new service they called Mega.

Instead of just launching a new version of the old Megaupload file hosting sites, Mega is more a version 2.0 of the site. One of the improvements of Mega is client side encryption and decryption of files. What this means is that only the user who is uploading the files, and users who get the encryption key from that user can decrypt the files. This in turn means that Mega itself has no information about the files hosted on the servers so that it can't be forced to use filter lists to block uploads of known copyright infringing files.

This falls in line with the second new feature. Instead of relying on a few data centers in the world, Mega relies on lots of them in many countries and regions of the world. This should improve connection and download rates for users of the service since it is more likely that they can connect to a server close to their location. It also makes it difficult for law enforcement to take down all of the servers.

Home of the future service was the me.ga domain, but after having been taken down by Gabon, it has found a new home at mega.co.nz. It is not really clear why the me.ga domain was seized by Gabon authorities, considering that no infringing or illegal contents were accessible on it at the time of writing.

It remains to be seen if mega.co.nz will remain the new home, or if the site will be moved once again to a new domain.

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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