Mega will only succeed if developers take the fall | Hacker News Reader

Mega will only succeed if developers take the fall

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31 pointstoomuchblah22 comments

The article seems to be pulling in two directions on MEGA:

1. It's identical to Dropbox (or spideroak, or tarsnap, etc.)

2. Its only viable use case is piracy.

These two claims seem at odds...

If nothing else, it's Dropbox where I get 50 GB of free space. If Dropbox can be legitimate and viable, I don't see why this can't (once they work through some kinks and get a good client).

No, he is saying it cannot compete with DropBox/box.net/etc - those are very good products that focus on cloud storage/backups, not 'secure' sharing of files; and the only way for it to make money is through it's affiliate program, which is very likely to cause legal trouble.

Right now it is not competing with DropBox at all, since it doesn't offer client apps or effortless syncing.

Oh, I like Dropbox a lot. But you know what? For 50GB free, I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience.

Well http://adrive.com has offered 50 GB free for several years. If they want to make news, they should offer much more.

It could be legitimate but it will be an impossibly hard fight if they can't use piracy as an incentive and a short one if they do.

1/2 OT:

50 GB of free space?

According to https://www.dropbox.com/pricing, the default is still 2 GB of free space and up to 18 GB with referrals.

He is saying that Mega = DropBox with 50GB of free space, not that DropBox gives you that space.

50 GB free at MEGA?! That can't be viable.

Consider: If you can write an rsync-variant with the API, then movie pirating will pay for the Internet population's backup system...

>50 GB free at MEGA?! That can't be viable.

Why not? The cost of 50GB of live storage is not that high anymore. Doesn't gmail provide something like that much now already?

If you upload data and no one ever downloads it then there only has to be one copy in one datacenter on the entire internet, which not very expensive. And if you upload data that tons of people are accessing all over the place, they'll have to cache it closer to the destination and that will cost money, but then it generates ad revenue and pays for itself.

Moreover, I don't think anyone with a brain will be using it as a backup solution for anything important, because I highly doubt they'll provide you any kind of service level agreement. It's almost the opposite of a backup: If you upload something then it highly likely gets distributed to the world, but if they have a serious hardware failure (or have another encounter with corrupt law enforcement officials) then your data might go away at random sometime and have to be re-uploaded.

As for free Gmail storage, it is ~10.0926 GB as of 2:35 CST. At least according to the Gmail sign-in page.

Can MEGA really be free for e.g. tens of millions using a few GB of bandwidth/month to backup their video diary logging?

That is not an unrealistic scenario in a few years.

(I'd do backup to MEGA for my personal stuff, if I could at the same time use a couple of similar (free) services in parallel. Then lack of 100% dependability isn't a problem.)

It doesn't have to be. Uploading that much data would take upwards of 900 hours (!) on my fairly-typical residential cable connection (18m down/128k up). Those of us without fiber at home will never come close.

This article abruptly terminated as if author got hit by a bus.

I thought a single reference to the 'usual' problems developers can face building on someone's API would be enough by now.

For those tuning in now, the "usual" is probably best synthesized in Tim Bray's 'sharecroppers' piece of ten years ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...

it's an really rare thing that a comment on HN makes me laugh, well done.

All someone has to do is release a white-label, searchable aggregator for links and keys, with instructions on how to copy-paste the key to decrypt the file. No need to interact with the Mega API at all. The developer releases it with a collection of Creative Commons content, legally says "This should only be used for open-access content," and open-sources or sells the source code. Then these sites pop up all over the place with pirated links. Since the aggregator's original authors never intended it for piracy, they're blameless, and the operators who use the site take all the risk of takedowns.

Such an app would bring Mega back to its former infamy. A MegaDropbox is not needed. And no developer needs to take the fall.

Piracy isn't the answer to our arcane copyright laws, or to the industry's failure to embrace digital distribution, so I hope such a thing won't be made. But I'm pretty sure it will be.

>Since the aggregator's original authors never intended it for piracy, they're blameless, and the operators who use the site take all the risk of takedowns.

Are you sure? http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/coder-charged-for-g...

Be warned: there are only three types of businesses you can build on Mega’s API:
- ones that nobody cares about
- ones that become features
- ones that will destroy your life

It’s basically just like Twitter and every other platform that rose or fell before them, but with prison sentences.

Can someone please explain what this means?

He means one of these three things:

- No one will use your app and you will fail.

- Your app will be great, Mega will take the idea and build it into the service and you will fail.

- Your app is made to promote piracy using the Mega API and you will go to jail.

Not sure I agree but I figure that's what he means.

Deleted comment

There are a bunch of systems with client-side encryption: Tahoe, SpiderOak, Secureshare, Wuala, etc.

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