Mega Encrypted Cloud Launched w/ 50GB of Free Storage Space

Kim Dotcom recently launched MEGA (Mega Encrypted Global Access) at an extravagant press conference yesterday in New Zealand. MEGA is a new encrypted file storage and sharing service that features 50GB of free storage. Mega is just one component of what Dotcom and his team hope will be a suite of online encrypted services from Mega Ltd. including email, voice calling, instant messaging, and video streaming.

MEGA functions very much like the old MegaUpload but which automatically encrypts files before they’re uploaded by users to the MEGA servers. Mega users choose their own password. That password is then used to generate the user’s login credentials when connecting with the service, as well as a unique encryption key used to encrypt a particular file. By design, Mega knows only the user’s login credentials, not the password used to generate them. Nor does it know the name of any file the user uploads, or have any way to access a decrypted version of any of those files, since both the file name and contents are encrypted using a unique key tied to the user’s password. This means that Mega has no knowledge of the what is being uploaded. You can also use Mega to share files with others, and add other Mega users to your contact list for easy drag-and-drop sharing. It looks like that should be enough to protect Mega and users from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Basically, you control the encryption key now and not the site! This is why Mega refers to the service as user-controlled encryption. Within a few hours of Mega’s launch it had lined up over 500,000 registrants worldwide! Are you one of those that have signed up?