Mega launches long awaited in-browser chat

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 22, 2015
Internet
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The encrypted file hosting service Mega seems to do quite well judging from the site's Alexa traffic rank.

The spiritual successor of Megaupload was launched two years ago, a year after the shut down of Megaupload by the United States Department of Justice in cooperation with law enforcement agencies in other countries.

Users who sign up for a free account get 50 Gigabyte of space and 10 Gigabyte of traffic currently. Paid accounts are available to increase the available space to 500 GB, 2 TB or 4 TB respectively.

The operators of the service announced some time ago that fully-encrypted chat would become part of Mega in the near future.

The company announced yesterday that it released a beta version of MEGAchat, a browser-based end-to-end encryption chat supporting video and audio on the new domain mega.nz.

Chat is only available to registered users at the time of writing. When you sign in to your account on the website (you need to sign in on mega.nz as mega.co.nz does not list the communication options at all) , you get a new conversation icon in the left sidebar that you can click on to see all your conversations.

mega.nz conversations

Conversations are only displayed here if you have have clicked on the person under contacts and there on the start conversation option.

Conversations list all contacts that you have added this way in list form on the left, and options to call the selected contact on the right.

mega start call

A click on the start call button displays options to start an audio call or a video call. Calls are handled by the browser, plugins or third-party programs are not required for that.

Incoming calls are indicated by audio notifications and the call prompt that is displayed on the screen.

incoming call

Options to accept or decline the call are provided.

The chat worked quite well during tests even though it is rather bare bones when it comes to features. There is for instance no option to initiate a text chat right away, and the requirement to sign in to a Mega account before chat can be used may also be seen as a nuisance to some.

Mozilla showed that communication is possible without account requirement when it launched Hello in Firefox some time ago.

Still, Mega Chat is a beta product right now. It is likely that Mega is already thinking about adding more features to the client before it leaves beta.

Now You: Have you tried Mega Chat?

Summary
Mega launches its long awaited video chat client
Article Name
Mega launches its long awaited video chat client
Description
Mega Chat Beta just launched on the new mega.nz domain. It offers encrypted audio and video chat for all Mega members.
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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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