Oh for a roundtable meeting

With Kim Dotcom and John McAfee. All sorts of bonkers.

"failed on a variety"

"failed on a variety of platforms (Mac, Windows, iPad, over ADSL in two locations and 3G wireless)"

Are... are you saying that you think making a request to an overloaded server from a different client device / different connection will affect it's ability to respond?

I really need to find another IT news site.

When you see propoganda it is so much sweeter when you can call it out for what it is and know beyond doubt that you are right. For some this is a massive story for some just an opportunity to create a bit of traffic to their sites, as it the case for the author of this piece. I managed to register three separate accounts with MEGA over the time period he is talking about and before then too.

I have managed to upload a few files and although small it worked very well so i call bullsheepers to the author of this piece and i have registered specifically to say that, not that all the comments will be shown but on sites that really matter MEGA is a huge success for all, and Kim is again making waves that need to be made in this closed society of ours where greed is the ultimate factor in any decision by those with just a little perceived power. The internet is the great technological levelling of the field, where anyone can say anything they want and share anything with anyone else. It is time for those who thought they had power to fall by the wayside and their cries and desperate attempts are going to be met with the contempt they deserve.

Response

No problems registering and validation email arrived immediately. However my initial test upload of a 1 Mb file is still at 0% after 15 minutes.

It's convergent encryption. The upload process works like this:

1. Encrypt the file with the file's hash as the key

2. Upload the ciphertext (which will always be the same for the same plaintext)

3. Client-side encrypt the hash (key) with the user's password

4. Upload the encrypted key for storage

The download process then goes:

1. Receive the ciphertext (encrypted file) and the encrypted key to that

2. Client-side decode the key with your password

3. Client-side decode the ciphertext with the now decoded key to obtain the original file

Because the encrypted file will *always* be the same from the same source file, they can detect duplicates. Since the hash function is one-way, there's no way to decode the original file server-side. Of course, it does mean that they know which users have uploaded a copyrighted file.

This is why the lesson here is: If you don't want Mega to know you've uploaded a copyrighted file, archive it with some random data before you upload, so the hash will be different.