With bombast and flair, Megaupload's successor appears

01.11.2012
With characteristic bombast, Kim Dotcom unveiled a splash page on Thursday for his Mega file-sharing service, a successor to the imperiled Megaupload that has landed its founders in deep legal trouble.

The launch of a new service could be a risky endeavor for Dotcom, who along with six others were indicted by a grand jury on criminal copyright infringement charges in U.S. federal court in January and face possible extradition from New Zealand.

He has revealed few details of the service, but in an interview last month in , said that Mega will only store files that have been encrypted by the service's users. Only those users would have the power to share the key to unlock the content.

In theory, the encryption scheme would give Mega's operators plausible denial that it has knowledge about what users are uploading to the network, acting as a buffer against legal action of the type Megaupload faces now.

Dotcom claimed on Twitter that "millions" of people were accessing the splash page at "me.ga," a domain name that actually redirects to Kim Dotcom's personal website. The domain "mega.com" is unavailable, as it is owned by an specializing in enterprise architecture.

Expecting high traffic to Mega, Dotcom : "We will need 60 state-of-the-art portal servers when the new Mega goes live. One thing is sure: The world wants MEGA!"