To file-sharing guru, alleged pirate and international Internet activist Kim Dotcom, his new creation, the encrypted file-sharing service Mega, is not only a company but also a "belief," not to mention "a guardian angel of your rights, freedom, and privacy."

Grandiose Declarations

This grandiose declaration came via Twitter on Tuesday, where Dotcom announced some quick figures on his new site's growth. After one month, Mega has hit 3 million users, with 125 million files uploaded. This is certainly nothing to scoff at, and more evidence that this guy is not slowing down, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has brought charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering against him.

Mega, the rebirth of file-sharing service Megaupload, which was shut down by U.S. authorities in January of 2012, has been gradually working its way into headlines since its lavish January 19 launch, where Dotcom staged a fake FBI raid to blaring techno music, among other wild antics. Notably, the service hit 1 million users in the first 24 hours, and Dotcom announced through Twitter last Saturday that Mega would be accepting bitcoins as currency.

Dotcom has also announced that mobile Mega apps are on the way, which bodes well for those looking for almost completely unrestricted on-the-go file storage options for iOS and Android. In case you were wondering, Mega's international traffic rates rank France, Spain, Brazil, Germany and the U.S. as the top five, in that order.

Mega's Perks & The Cloud Storage Battle

Dotcom is also making the news for his service's massively disruptive pricing. Mega offers 50GB of cloud storage, free. A Pro Membership package, with tier-1 offerings of 500GB of storage and 1TB bandwidth rate, costs £9.99 (or roughly $13) per month. Tier-2 quadruples the storage and bandwidth amounts of the previous tier for $26 per month, while tier-3 doubles all of tier-2's offerings for $39 per month. 

Mega's free option alone beats out the storage offerings of Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive combined. The additional perk is, of course, the privacy. Dotcom's service ensures that users' files are completely protected from peeking by way of an encrypted key. So unless you supply them with access, even Mega staff cannot access your files.

Mega: Privacy vs. Piracy?

It remains to be seen whether the service will become another source of rampant copyright infringement. Considering Dotcom's history, and the enormous amount of freedom Mega hands to users, that possibility certainly looms large. Being able to share anything and everything is great for privacy, but not so much for content owners hoping to keep file sharers from unauthorized dissemination of every new song, movie and TV episode. 

(See also Is Kim Dotcom's New Site, Mega, the Wild West of Piracy?)

In March authorities will rule on whether Dotcom will be extradited from New Zealand to the U.S. to face his numerous charges. Until then, he seems to be enjoying his new site's steady climb to the top of the file-sharing and cloud-storage leaderboard.

In an over-the-top press event at his New Zealand mansion last weekend, the notorious Kim Dotcom unveiled a new cloud storage service called Mega. From the ashes of his now-defunct Megaupload, which was shut down by U.S authorities exactly one year ago, rises a service that promises to be incredibly secure and better at handling copyright complaints.

But will users flock to it? More to the point, should you use it?

On a personal level, Mega is a big win for Kim Dotcom. With it, he shows the world that the military-style raid on his mansion one year ago (which was theatrically mimicked during the Mega launch event) did not succeed in bringing him down, even as he faces criminal charges over Megaupload's alleged involvement in copyright infringement. 

The Perks: More Storage And Better Security 

For users, the Mega message is less clear. Whether they were using Megaupload for piracy or legitimate file sharing, the site's users have had to move on to other means of transferring bits across the Internet. For some, that means services like Dropbox while others moved to Megaupload-esque solutions like Rapidshare and Mediafire, both of which have made changes to their functionality and public posture since the Megaupload raid. Where ever they went, Dotcom is hoping to lure those users back with tightened security and ample storage space. 

On the surface, Mega's offering is pretty tempting. While Dropbox and Box.net limit free users to 2GB to 5GB of storage, Mega lets you pile up 50GB worth of data before asking you to pay. The premium subscriptions start at 500GB for $10 per month and go up to 4TB for $30 a month. 

Given History, Is It Worth It?

Sure, Mega is also much more secure than its predecessor, using super-tight asymmetric encryption to keep data secure and out of view from curious governments and other third parties. But no matter how good it is, do you really want to store your valuable data on a service tied to Kim Dotcom? When you sign up for Mega, it's hard not to think about what happened to the founder's last filesharing product. You can't help but picture the armed raid and simultaneous seizure of Megaupload's servers. 

It's also hard not to think about Kyle Goodwin. He's the Ohio-based high school sports broadcaster who was using Megaupload to transfer video files between himself and the video editors he had hired to help produce his broadcasts. After one of his external hard drives was damaged, Goodwin tried logging into his Megaupload account to retrieve his old files. By then, the FBI had already seized the servers, locking Goodwin and plenty of other users out of their data. He has since been involved in a class action lawsuit demanding that authorities give non-infringing users access to their Megaupload data.  

How likely is a shutdown of Mega? Thanks to the way the service was built and the lessons learned from the demise of Megaupload, probably pretty remote. But for some users, it's going to be tough to swallow the idea of trusting a service that is so intrinsically linked with the subject of a major, ongoing criminal prosecution. 

Other than the color scheme, the Mega interface isn't all that different from that of Megaupload. Even the logo's typography is the same: It looks like they just lobbed off the "upload" and changed the color. It just feels a lot like a site with which many people are familiar, but which has been replaced with an FBI anti-piracy warning message. 

Potential Security Holes

Plus, as big of an improvement as Mega may be when it comes to privacy and security, it's not perfect. In a detailed analysis of Mega's security, Ars Technica pointed out that the JavaScript-based method of randomly generating numbers for the encryption keys isn't the most rock-solid option available. 

"The end result of this is that it is easier (not easy, but easier) to reverse-engineer a Mega user's private RSA key than it should be," writes Lee Hutchinson. "That means it's easier to spoof the identity of a Mega user when sending messages or files."

The site has other limitations as well. For one, it's very insistent that people use Chrome to access Mega, due to its advanced implementation of HTML5 features. Not even the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Safari will suffice. Despite this strict adherence to the latest in Web standards, Mega still relies on Flash for some tasks, like downloading files. That means it won't work on iOS devices until Mega submits official apps, which Apple may or may not approve. 

What does that all add up to? For users like Kyle Goodwin, who have a day-to-day need to rely heavily on cloud-based file storage for critical data, Mega remains a bit of a gamble. But for sharing miscellaneous, backed-up files here and there, there's little reason to not give it a try.

Megaupload, the hosting site that the U.S. government shut down last year over charges of copyright infringement and pirated content, is being reborn. Sort of. The new version is called Mega, an encrypted file sharing service built by Kim Dotcom, a man some call an Internet slumlord, others an online folk hero.

The new site will launch on Saturday, Jan. 19, almost a year to the day after New Zealand police raided Kim Dotcom's plush home in the suburbs of Auckland and arrested him along with three of his associates on a slew of charges.  

The German-born Dotcom, nee Schmitz, is hosting the new site in his adopted New Zealand. (This after promising that country's government that he would not resurrect the site, and after they admitted to illegally spying on him. Phew.)

He's also planning a press conference a day later on Jan. 20 at his ritzy rented pad, where he plans to introduce the site as a protected means to securely store and transfer confidential data. He says Mega will be completely in the cloud, and will protect files from the prying eyes of the government through its encryption. 

Backstory

In New Zealand, Dotcom gained popularity for his luck in seemingly outfoxing the legal system. Citing a paperwork error, New Zealand's High Court ruled that $750,000 in his assets could be returned in the raid on his home. That meant that his property had been seized without proper notice by Kiwis who worked jointly with U.S. federal prosecutors.

With the search warrants invalidated, the decision on his extradition to the States was tabled until March of this year. It has since been pushed all the way to August. According to Bloomberg, authorities in New Zealand have been alerted of the new site, and as yet, have raised no objections. 

Dotcom is still considered a criminal by U.S. authorities, and the Department of Justice accuses him of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering.

U.S. authorities say Megaupload, which last year accounted for 4% of the Internet's total traffic, generated upwards of $175 million in profit from the flow of pirated content. If the U.S. gets a hold of him, tries and prosecutes him, the larger than life Dotcom could face 20 years behind bars.

Pirate Or Entrepreneur? 

In some ways the new site seems like just another way to provoke authorities. But Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says there's a very real need and desire for a safe place to keep information. "There's a place for services that allow individuals to store their data, to store their files, without fear of government intrusion," she says.

 Photo Courtesy of Brinny D and Sam Churchill