MegaUpload's Successor, Mega Adds 100,000 Users in Under an Hour, 250,000 in Two

Kim Dotcom, today, launched his new filesharing service called Mega. Mega launched, today, on the one year anniversary of Kim Dotcom's arrest by New Zealand authorities for breaking numerous copyright laws. Today marks one year since he and his co-founders were arrested at his house in New Zealand, and simultaneously marks the launch of Mega, MegaUpload's successor. If anyone remembers, MegaUpload was the largest filesharing service on the internet, but it had some legal holes that made the people running MegaUpload liable for the content hosted on their servers. Now, with their current scheme, Mega is significantly more secure and makes the owners of Mega completely free of liability as to what is on their servers since they have no way of knowing what is there. They've taken the willful blindness approach, where they simply have put themselves in a scenario where they simply cannot know what is going on in their own servers. They have also updated Mega with a more detailed ToS that talk about what users are and aren't allowed to do, even though they realistically have no idea what is actually stored on their servers.

Now that registrations have opened, you can register here and see for yourself what Mega has to offer, as 250,000 other people have already done in the past two hours. Mega got 100,000 users to register within the first hour, and 250,000 within the second hour. At this pace, it is quite possible Mega could see over a million registered users in the first day. Noting, that Mega is launching itself on a weekend rather than an obviously busier week day.

As was with the original service, Mega also has a free tier of service, which provides for 50GB of free cloud storage. In addition to that, Mega offers professional packages which enable various levels of storage space and bandwidth. Looking at Mega's professional offerings, you can see that each of these is in euros, which translates to 10 euros, 20 euros, and 30 euros a month. Considering how much space they're giving you and how much bandwidth you can get for a completely secure connection, it isn't bad. In the past, the free service was also capped in terms of speed, while the professional services were uncapped speeds. Many people used Jdownloader to get around this in the past, so we'll see if Jdownloader is able to work for the new Mega as well.

Their about page states, "We are a dedicated group of technologists who were given the time, opportunity and Internet access to build an awesome cloud storage service that will help protect your privacy. We have programmed this Internet service from scratch in Auckland, New Zealand. Unlike most of our competitors, we use a state of the art browser based encryption technology where you, not us, control the keys. Our design group includes (bottom) Kim Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato. Our CEO, industry veteran Tony Lentino, has experience running a renowned global domain registry. We hope you like it."

Currently, their servers are getting hammered, as Kim himself has stated on twitter.

Kim Dotcom, via Twitter, also teased yet another service to piss off the MPAA on top of the RIAA with his MegaBox. He teased a new service called MegaMovie, which details are scarce on, but should be very interesting.