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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't he a billionaire? Have you see the photos of his home?

He might want to make the reward slightly higher than what the black market will pay out.

"His" home, the one in Coatesville, is actually a rental. I don't doubt that he could afford to own it, but he was prevented from buying it by the NZ overseas investment commission.

I doubt that he's a billiaire, but even so all his funds have been seized at the moment. He had to get friends and investors in to fund mega.

Dunno why you were downvoted. Yer very right. People just don't talk about it this loud.

He was down voted for illogically raising the wealth of Dotcom. By all means argue that it's too low, but the decision for this cost should come from the company's financials and the potential benefits of that spend, not the size of the house its owner lives in.

I mention his wealth because it's specifically from his business and offers a comparison to his ability to pay for security fixes that threaten the very operation of such business.

It's like saying hey this business is worth $100k a day to me but I'm only willing to pay $10k to anyone who can show me a problem that would expose all my customers and bring it to a halt, perhaps permanently if the data got into the wrong hands, foreign governments, etc.

A business can't go to the founder as its own piggybank to get out of bad decisions. It's not only a legal and accounting nightmare, but it's bad for the business, too.

I didn't really care about who has what money. I just agreed with his point that 10k doesn't beat the black market for something this high profile.

I don't know much about the black market, but how much could a way to download files you don't own off mega be worth? The majority of the files on mega are going to be pirated software/movies/audio, right?

Because of the 50gb free space, I already have a lot of non tech friends using it for all their highly sensitive / personal stuff. And probably for sharing stuff between work <> home; people in big (gov) companies.

Also, in the last week I heard a lot of people moving of others (dropbox/gdrive) simply because they are now expensive compared. And they were already hosting private/secure sensitive (unencrypted => at least mega is encrypted) info on those. Lot of technical minded people seem to forget that ease of use beats anything for non tech people; privacy, security (and even, morals, when downloading stuff they didn't pay for; mega and others are easier than amazon, steam, netflix etc) go out the door when something is easy to use. And preferably free.

Agreed, the point is that having an exploit is only useful to someone who really really really wants into that specific system. With a system that will have millions of users, someone's sure to be angry at someone over something that's up there.

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