14 DAY TRIAL // The new Mega is close to becoming a reality. While Kim Dotcom is still fighting for the first MegaUpload and that case will take a few years to reach a conclusion, the entrepreneur has been working on a new service for the past few months.
This new site will focus on file hosting as well, but it's not an exact copy of the old MegaUpload. Rather, it will come with a couple of twists that will make almost impossible to shut down, both legally and technically.
For one, the new site will encrypt everything it hosts. The old one did that too, the difference is that the encryption will happen client-side, i.e. only the user will know the encryption key.
At no point will the new Mega have access to that key so it won't have any idea of what people are hosting and it will be impossible for it to find out.
What this means is that the users are solely responsible for what they upload but also who they share the encryption key with.
It is an interesting approach one that, at the very least, will ensure the absolute privacy of the user. Without the key, no one, not Mega and not any government agency, will know what's being hosted.
But MegaUpload also had legal tools for dealing with copyrighted files and it still got destroyed by the US government pushed by the movie and music industry.
So the new Mega will be hosted in several places at the same time. This way, if its servers get raided in one country, the site will continue to operate, relying on all the other locations.
That's not to say that a concerted effort couldn't target all the locations at the same time, but it's going to be more difficult.