Mega, or, How to Hide and Share Your Files at the Same Time

Rewind to a year ago. In that age, if you wanted to find movies, TV shows and other media that was, for a variety of reasons, not available for viewing in your country, or at that time, or without an extortionate price, you had two options. The first was using torrents, which required tracking down the right link to the right torrent and using third-party software to get said media. You had the media forever, at that point, but you also opened your IP address up to all kinds of danger from itchy-fingered prosecutors.

Most people, however, only needed the media once (especially for TV episodes), and for that, you went to MegaUpload, which delivered media through MegaVideo and its siblings, streamed right to you, without having to download a thing. And it was so good at this that one year ago the US government came down like a ton of bricks on owner Kim Dotcom.

Months of pointless litigation and meandering later, and Doctom is back, this time determined not to go through any of that again. Late last month, he launched Mega.co.nz, which put a very swish coat of paint over what is, essentially, a peer-to-peer file hosting and sharing service.

File hosts like Dropbox and SkyDrive have been doing this for a while, but Mega puts a massive emphasis on security and encryption. Your files are encoded before they ever reach the cloud servers, and those servers don’t have the decoding key needed to decrypt them, only you do, and you can share it with whomever you like. That way Mega can cooperate with any government investigation, while also not having anything to give them. Without the key, your files are meaningless data.

The site garnered more than 1m signups within its first weekend live, and many had trouble getting their media up to the site at any decent speed. There’s also a huge way to go before the security experts get through with throwing every kind of brute-force attack imaginable at the service, to see just how reliable its encryption and its legal immunity really is.

That said, the fundamental concept of a legally invulnerable, well-encrypted repository for all kinds of files opens the door to every kind of copyright-busting opportunity imaginable. Movies, TV shows, and more, all easy to view and impossible to directly take down, all make the case that if media producers can’t offer a simple, widely-available spot for their media, the pirate community will do it for them.