Kim Dotcom's new sharing website Mega got a little closer to resembling its old, closed-down version, Megaupload on Wednesday. Anonymous users launched a search engine that indexes files uploaded on the new sharing service, potentially making it easier to find copyright-protected material.
On Thursday, less than 24 hours after the first news reports of the existence of the third-party engine surfaced, Dotcom blocked it. The engine, called Mega-Search.me, is not available anymore. A message in French on its home page reads (according to a Google Translate translation): "Due to a script developed by Mega to delete all files indexed in
Mega-search, the engine is temporarily unavailable. A solution to overcome this problem will be made shortly."
The files on Mega are encrypted so the engine relied on a very simple technique to index files: crowdsourcing. Users were encouraged to submit links and names of the files they had on their Mega clouds. Once you found what you were looking for, you could transfer the file to your own account or download it directly.
It's unclear who made the site, although all signs point to French-speaking people. According to
WHOIS, the Internet equivalent of White Pages, the site was registered on Jan. 20, the same day of Mega's launch. Reports of its existence first surfaced on Wednesday and Mega's response came roughly less than a day after the news came out.
Ira Rothken, Dotcom's lawyer, told Wired that Mega has no
involvment with the website.
According to
The Next Web, most of the files available on Mega-search.me were pirated movies, music, games or software.
Mega's quick response might be a sign that Dotcom's new company is really serious about copyright, and wants to avoid being shut down like Megaupload.
"Kim Dotcom has apologised to users of his new website, Mega, for its "poor service quality."
The opening 24 hours of Kim Dotcom's Mega project have not been good from a reliability standpoint, but in terms of popularity, it has been a huge success.
The new "legal" cloud storage website went live in New Zealand at 6.48 a.m. local time on Sunday, and Dotcom threw a huge launch party at his Coatesville mansion, north of Auckland, to celebrate.
However, Dotcom took to Twitter on Tuesday to say sorry to Mega users who have experienced problems with the website.
"The massive global PR around the Mega launch is simply too big to handle for our startup. I apologise for poor service quality," he tweeted. "We are working 24/7 and expect normal operations within 48 hours. Lesson learned ... No fancy launch event for Megabox."
Dotcom hopes to launch Megabox, a music service, in about six months' time.
But Dotcom was coy about just how many people have registered on Mega.
"If I would tell you how many sign-ups we had since the launch, you wouldn't believe it. I can't believe it. So, I won't tell you," he also tweeted.
At the Mega launch and press conference on Sunday, Dotcom told media and invited guests that more than a million people had visited Mega within 14 hours of the site's launch, and about 500,000 had registered as users.
"What we are offering is a smarter, faster, and more secure way of cloud storage, and we are fully assured by our legal team that we are in compliance with the law," he said.
While the site is currently in beta and is a work-in-progress, concerns have been raised over the security of the Mega site. Users currently have no way to delete an account or change the password given by the user during account creation. That means that if an account is hacked, the user has few options available to keep the hacker out.
For the first two months Windows 8 was on the market, the news alternated between success and disaster. One report said it was selling, another said it was a stiff.
After two months, Microsoft is clearing up the picture, and it's not a best case scenario. Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer for the Windows product group at Microsoft, said at the J.P. Morgan tech forum at CES 2013 that Windows 8 has sold 60 million licenses to date.
That would seem to hint at a slow-down. In December, Microsoft announced it had sold 40 million licenses in the first month of general availability. Reller's figures mean it took the company more than one month to sell half as many licenses, and during the usually lucrative Christmas season to boot.
Microsoft expanded a little on a blog post announcing Reller's comments, stating there are now more than 1,700 certified systems for Windows 8 and Windows RT. A lot were announced at CES, too.
But so far, Windows 8 is swimming against the current
of a terrible economy. This Christmas, the PC industry got a collective
pile of coal in its stockings. NPD Group said Windows 8 did nothing for
notebook sales, which were down 11 percent over the same period in 2011.
Even Apple wasn't immune to the poor economic conditions, as Macbook
sales dropped 6 percent year-over-year.
That 60 million figure comes from both commercial and
corporate sales, and in both cases, don't mean that there are 60 million
Windows 8 users out there in the whole wide world, notes Steven Cherry,
an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.
"What it doesn't tell us is how many did the customer
use. Even with consumers we're seeing downgrades. Corporations exercise
downgrade rights. So if anyone makes a statement that x number of
licenses were sold, it doesn't tell us how they were deployed," he said.
Windows Vista, for example, sold right up until
Windows 7 shipped in 2009, but many firms chose to downgrade to XP
instead, since Vista was so poorly received and unpopular.
Cherry said firms are doing that now, as well. When
Windows 8 shipped in October, he surveyed Directions on Microsoft
clients on their interest, and the large majority said they were
sticking with Windows 7.
"They also indicated their plan was to use Windows 8
to evaluate it or in places where there was a particular usage scenario
that it made sense, like tablets. There's some really good Windows 8
hardware, including Surface, but I am yet to find a good Windows 8 app
in the Windows Store," he said.
For desktop users, the lack of apps isn't really a
problem since they have legacy x86 apps to draw upon. For Surface that's
more problematic. "Without a killer app for Surface, it's only good for
Solitaire," said Cherry.
When Megaupload's
Mega site goes live on Saturday, it'll offer something the competition can only balk at: 50GB of free storage.
"Mega will have very generous limits for free users," Kim Dotcom, the site's legally beleaguered founder,
tweeted Thursday. "For example you get 50GB storage for free ;-)"
Dotcom's announcement elicited an outpouring of retweets and good tidings.
"@kimdotcom
#Mega is going to kill it!" @CajunTechie tweeted. "I'm totally excited.
Stay strong. The enemies of progress will fall!"
@LassanaDiarra_ had this to say: "I love u @KimDotcom."
'It's like time travel'
The tweets didn't stop there.
"I think you will be very happy with the new #Mega," Dotcom effused. "It's like time travel. We'll take you to the future!!!"
Just
what it is to be like time travel we don't know, but we can say Mega
promises more storage than either Dropbox and Skydrive.
We all get to experience the
world changing power that is Mega on Saturday, so stay tuned..!
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