Friday, April 19, 2013

Inside Mega: the second coming of Kim Dotcom...

(...)

But today Kim Dotcom is putting all of that in his souped-up golf cart’s rearview mirror. His new storage startup, called simply Mega, launched Jan. 20, defiantly a year to the day after the sudden destruction of Megaupload. It’s already exploded to exceed 3 million registered users. His engineers tell me it’s moving 52 gigabits of data per second–that’s nearly half the entire bandwidth of New Zealand–and growing at 30% a week. The traffic has been driven in part by Dotcom’s own larger-than-life persona: an Internet mogul who doubles as either an intellectual-property-stealing supervillain or an oppressed freedom fighter, depending on whom you ask.

Either way, Dotcom has learned from his legal misadventures and promises that the copyright cabal will find this company much harder to snuff. Mega is “the Privacy Company.” Unlike Megaupload, everything sent to Mega is encrypted. No one can decrypt those scrambled files except the user–not the FBI, not the Motion Picture Association of America, not even Kim Dotcom. Mega claims to keep the eyes of both authorities and snoops off its users’ files, a libertarian ideal that fits neatly into Dotcom’s personal narrative as a victim of the U.S. government’s overreach into the digital world. “Mega is not just a company,” he says. “It’s a mission to encrypt the Internet. We want to give the power back to the user.”

The revenge Dotcom is planning, he says, will be twofold: Not only will his new, better company be immune from his enemies, but he has also hired a team of 28 global lawyers who he believes will make the U.S. government pay for treating the Internet as a subjugated colony.

He powers his golf cart up a steep hill to a peak overlooking his estate, with life-size giraffe sculptures in the distance and MEGA spelled out in 15-foot-tall white letters laid out next to his winding driveway. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Megaupload founder Dotcom: I'm going to turn this world upside down...
  2. Megaupload's Kim Dotcom and "Mr.President"
  3. Megaupload judge quits case after "US is enemy" comment...
  4. Megaupload search warrants were illegal, declares High Court judge...
  5. U.S. shuts Megaupload.com, hackers hit back...

No comments:

Post a Comment