

Kim Dotcom’s Mega Opens For Early-Access Users - lleims
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/kim-dotcoms-mega-opens-site-to-early-users-reveals-roadmap-with-mobile-access-office-style-features-and-more/

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lubos
Aren't we talking a lot about freemium models here? This thing is going to
implode, there is no way it will ever break-even.

There are three requirements any freemium model needs to meet to be
successful.

1.) Large addressable market

2.) Minimal marginal costs per free user

3.) Enough features in premium tier to convert sizable portion of free users

I think the only point 1 is met.

Giving 50 GB of free storage to free users is going to cost up to $5 per user
per month. That's insane. The cost should be no more than a few cents.

And how many users will ever need more than 50 GB? 0.1%? therefore point 3.)
is broken too. Not to mention premium tier pricing is too cheap to make it
profitable even without free users.

Mega will shut the door as soon as it runs out of investor's money.

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kordless
> cost up to $5 a month

Your opinion. Storage is constantly getting cheaper.

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joenathan
Agreed and not to mention that most people won't use anything close to the
50GB, combine that with the deduplication plans they have and you have a very
different scenario.

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lubos
they say, all files will be client-side encrypted which won't allow them to
"deduplicate" anything.

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X-Istence
Just because a file is encrypted doesn't mean that a small block doesn't match
another encrypted block even if the two are from two different files.

This would allow them to do deduplication at the block level (see ZFS for
example).

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rayiner
Think about that one for a second. An encrypted block is essentially supposed
to look like random data. I.e. if two people encrypt the same file with
different keys, you shouldn't be able to tell that they're the same file (or
your encryption sucks). So your block-level de-duping then depends on
incidental matches between random data.

What's the probability of two 4KB (or whatever) blocks of random data being
identical? Basically zero even with petabytes of data.

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harryh
see: convergent encryption

The encryption on the client doesn't use a random key. The key is a hash of
the unencrypted contents of the file.

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rayiner
Reading list-ed. Interesting.

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harryh
The issue is that you don't get the full benefits of encryption.

If you upload the map to the rayiner family treasure that only you have seen
you're good. No one else will be able to read it.

But if you upload the latest episode of Modern Family and Disney gets ahold of
the same rip you used they (if they can get a government to help them out) can
see what you did and charge you with copyright infringement (or whatever the
appropriate crime would be).

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tptacek
After 3-4 years of high-profile CPA-2 attacks on TLS, .NET, Java, and other
systems, you'd think we'd all be a lot more skeeved out about cryptosystems
that demand known-plaintexts. There's already an obvious conceptual attack
(beyond file confirmation) in naive "convergent encryption", which is that you
can leverage small amounts of known plaintext to learn unknown plaintext.

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modeless
I thought I heard that Mega was going to be partially funded by browser
extensions that replace ads on third-party sites with Mega-affiliated ads. Is
that not actually going to happen? It was the one part of the new Mega that
sounded really shady.

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rayiner
Copyright infringement on a mass scale: not shady. Replacing ads with other
ads: shady.

-_-

~~~
htf
I guess it depends on one's opinion about copyright law.

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rayiner
Sure, but I think a lot of people have inconsistent opinions re: copyright
law. I find it a little odd that people who oppose copyright on freedom
grounds have no problem with advertising, even though advertising industry
wouldn't exist at anywhere near its present scale without trademark law, which
creates far more dire freedom-related concerns.

I'd go further to say that this cognitive dissonance is the product of how
money is made in Silicon Valley 2.0: through advertising rather than sales of
content.

~~~
htf
I wonder how much advertising depends on trademark law. I suppose that,
without trademarks, companies would advertise their domain name instead of
their company name.

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rayiner
While domains are unique, how does it help Prada, Tiffany's, etc? It makes no
difference whether the copy-cats are selling rip-offs marked "tiffanys.com"
out of a cart. There is also more to trademark that just protecting marks.
Trademark protects many aspects of the brand (see: trade dress, dilution,
tarnishment, etc).

Companies spend a lot of money advertising because brands are valuable, and
trademark basically protects brands. Branding makes goods less fungible, and
is really the only reason companies like Prada or Ralph Lauren can sustain
such high margins in what would otherwise be total commodity markets. When
brands cease to have meaning to consumers, you end up with what you see in the
PC industry: a race to the bottom that eats up all your margins.

Why does advertising support so much of the internet? It's a $500 billion
industry world-wide, that's why. Without branding, protected by trademark, I
think it would be a fraction of the size. And I don't think it would
necessarily be a bad thing.

~~~
htf
Yeah, I understand the value of a brand. I was thinking that, without
trademark, there could still be ways to ascertain the authenticity of a
product. For example, tiffanys.com could list their physical stores on their
website. A fake store wouldn't fool the neighborhood for long enough to be
worth the effort.

~~~
rayiner
Ever go to a mall and see all those little carts selling things? You think
people go online to verify whether those carts are selling the real deal? What
about products purchased online through Amazon, Zappo, etc?

Also, there is a whole world of non point of sale branding. When you give a
gift, you pony up for a real Kate Spade bag instead of a perfect knock-off
(which are probably made in the same Chinese factory!) You might get those
awful D&G glasses with the obvious branding instead of a perfect replica. A
lot of the value of branding is rooted in the fact that humans are basically
monkeys and we buy products to show the brands off in our social circles. A
lot of people would knowingly buy knock-off D&G glasses if they could get the
same effect for less money.

Now, I'm not arguing that this would be a bad thing. It'd save parents a lot
of money if their kids could show off their "Nike Swoosh" shoes without paying
a huge markup for something made in a Chinese sweatshop. But the fact that we
can't do that is certainly quite valuable to Nike (and D&G, and Ralph Lauren,
etc), and the inability to protect their brands in that way would certainly
reduce their incentive to invest so heavily in them through advertising.

~~~
htf
You're right. For many branded products (especially clothes and shoes),
consumers would indeed prefer to buy cheaper replicas good enough to fool
their social circle. If they had the freedom to do so, then yes, Nike would
lose much of their incentive to invest in advertising their logo. And yes,
that would probably be a good thing for parents. And the only advertisements
remaining would advertise quality instead of exclusivity. Or maybe Nike would
come up with a way for someone to authenticate someone else's shoes. I don't
see how they could do that though.

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FredFredrickson
Am I the only one who just yawned when Megaupload was taken down?

I have no ill-will towards the people who run or use that (or those types of)
site, and I don't really like how the government handled the Megaupload thing,
but with the proliferation of cloud storage sites hosted by Amazon, Microsoft,
Google, Dropbox, etc., it just seems stupid to subject yourself to all the
security issues, fake download buttons, ads, etc. that you find on sites like
this.

~~~
lmm
A few months after the takedown I went in search of a particular documentary
that I knew existed. It's specific to a small subculture and a particular
point in time; to the best of my knowledge it's never been released on DVD and
most likely never will be. Arguably it would be no great loss to history if it
were gone forever - but it was interesting to me. More than the big, famous
things, it's little works like this that make up our culture.

I searched, and searched, and couldn't find it - just hundreds of dead links
to Megaupload. There will be a copy in the BBC archives, but will anyone ever
see it again? That experience makes me take Mega's side in all this.

(I eventually found it on an fserv that I swear was being hosted on dialup,
but that's another story)

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visarga
I still regret the destruction of MP3.com. I took a liking to some music from
there. It was a vibrant community.

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RandallBrown
The real question is will this become the ad-laden bastion of illegal movies
and tv shows that MegaVideo was before it was taken down? While annoying to
use, it sure was convenient when you wanted to watch a show or movie that was
impossible to buy legally.

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edu
It looks like and unexciting competitor for Google Drive, and Google Drive
work pretty, pretty well. Sure, it doesn't have the client-side data
encryption and the price per GB is higher, but I doubt the Mega email/apps can
stand a round vs Gmail/Apps.

~~~
joenathan
When did Google Drive start offering 50GB of storage for free?

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AlexDanger
The outsourced storage model is interesting.

<http://kim.com/mega/#/hosting>

Does this shotgun approach to storage offer them extra protection against law
enforcement? Or is it just a way to try and minimise storage costs.

My guess is both.

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xs
From the mega website "Mega are looking for investors". Can someone explain
why they'd do that? Kim has more than enough money to cover all of the costs
of this site yet he'd rather get investors? I never understood when to use my
own money or raise money for my startup.

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X-Istence
His money was seized by the government ... how exactly does he have enough
money?

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haclifford
What function does a half baked google docs clone serve here?

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phpnode
He's doing his best to be comparable to Google and it provides a thin veil of
legitimacy. The core business will still be based around copyright
infringement, this is all just "plausible denyablity" in action. Interesting
to see how it plays out.

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Karunamon
>based around copyright infringement

 _sigh_

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karnajani
mega.co.nz is showing 'access denied' when I tried accessing the site.

Edit: Looks like the article mentioned that on the last paragraph. It has to
do with early access protection.

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rikacomet
Which is better? Dropbox or Mega?

~~~
Nux
Batman!

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mbetter
Just remember that this is mega.co.nz and not mega.co.ns, the world's largest
Lisp repository.

