Now that Kim Dotcom's new file storage venture, Mega has officially launched, I took the opportunity to check it out, and came away quietly impressed.
Mega is essentially a giant online file storage service that makes use of some heavy duty encryption that uses patterns in your typing keystrokes and mouse activity used to generate a random encryption key, making it very hard to break.
The upshot of all this jargon is that Mega's system administrators (and anyone else not in possession of the encryption key which only you should have) are pretty much unable to see what files are being stored.
This mightn't sound like a big deal, but trust me it makes all the difference. Whilst Mega's terms and conditions say that Mega may have to co-operate with law enforcement agencies should they demand access to data being stored on Mega, all the copyright cops will be able to access is a bunch of scrambled data, meaning they'll have no way of knowing if the data they have been given access to is an illicit copy of a Hollywood blockbuster or your kid's school project.
The significance of this cannot be overstated. Whilst other online services such as Google or DropBox can be forced to hand over data yet if the authorities want Kim Dotcom and Mega to hand over data all they'll get is an indecipherable mess of encrypted nonsense which from a legal perspective is likely to be pretty much useless to them.
