2012 hasn"t exactly been the best year for Kim Dotcom. MegaUpload, the popular file sharing website he helped to create, was shut down by the US government in January. It also executed a raid of his home in New Zealand at the same time. Dotcom was briefly put in jail, along with other MegaUpload team members, and he and his legal team have been fighting in court and awaiting a possible extradition to the US to face online piracy charges ever since.
In the midst of all this, Dotcom has been hinting for months that he will relaunch a successor to MegaUpload. Today, the first concrete details of this new service were revealed in an article for Wired, which will be called simply Mega.
Dotcom and his partners say that Mega will still allow users to upload and share files via a remote server. Unlike MegaUpload, users who upload files to Mega will be able to one-click encrypt any of them from within a web browser. After that is done, the user receives a unique key to decrypt that file.
The end result is no one but the person uploading the file to the server will have any way to know what that file"s content will be like, including (in theory) the Mega administrators. Dotcom claims:
If servers are lost, if the government comes into a data center and rapes it, if someone hacks the server or steals it, it would give him nothing. Whatever is uploaded to the site, it is going to be remain closed and private without the key.
Mega partner Mathias Ortmann adds there is a way for companies such as movie studios and music publishers to still go after copyrighted content that is uploaded to Mega"s servers. Ortmann says, "If the copyright holder finds publicly posted links and decryption keys and verifies that the file is an infringement of their copyright, they can send a DMCA takedown notice to have that file removed, just like before."
Wired"s article claims that the new Mega service will launch sometime later this year but did not give a specific date.
Source: Wired | Image via Kim Dotcom