I'm not involved in Mega anymore. Neither in a managing nor in a shareholder capacity. The company has suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud. He used a number of straw-men and businesses to accumulate more and more Mega shares. Recently his shares have been seized by the NZ government. Which means the NZ government is in control. In addition Hollywood has seized all the Megashares in the family trust that was setup for my children. As a result of this and a number of other confidential issues I don't trust Mega anymore. I don't think your data is safe on Mega anymore. But my non-compete clause is running out at the end of the year and I will create a Mega competitor that is completely open source and non-profit, similar to the Wikipedia model. I want to give everyone free, unlimited and encrypted cloud storage with the help of donations from the community to keep things going.
That Kim guy is really always good for a story. I'm impressed. But has anybody seen his documentary? I don't think he's really happy. On the top of his career he had "bunnies" and yacht parties, and a VIP seat in a Formula 1 race. But he never seemed happy, and most of his friends just seemed to be these people who just want to get a share from the money. I don't know, but seeing that I never wanted to exchange my life with his.
I read a quote once from a guy that became very wealthy when his company went public. He too became a magnet for fake friends. He said that the thing with fake friends is they are so much better at acting like friends than real friends. No doubt Kim knows that feeling.
I hope he took from his down swing how to recognize these. That's a huge negative impact on one's life, having such kind of friends. Even on the good days they suck out your energy without you realizing it. And again, I think even as such a friend you don't have a happy life.
I think he (my friend, not Kim) ended up deciding he preferred his fake friends because they were so much better at being "friends". His real friends would call him out and tell him to get real when he started getting too full of himself due to his new wealth. His fake friends were always supportive regardless of how outrageous his behavior became (and it went way over the top). I guess it is kind of a selection bias effect and the same thing that leads to big-headed bosses surrounding themselves with yes men. I wonder if Kim fell into that trap.
Yeah, we all are like that in our naive form. Only through bad experience and the ability to learn from failure we can overcome that. Only few people have that ability, and some are "lucky" and never have such a bad experience until the end, but I would assume they still feel something missing yet never realise what it is.
If Dotcom wanted an open-source community-supported file sharing platform that couldn't be taken over by external forces, why did he create the perfect antithesis to that?
Why did he in fact sign an agreement barring him from competing in that sector?
I can't understand how somebody who wants such a perfect world consistently painted himself into a corner from which he couldn't.
The way I understood it, he just has different priorities now. It's not like he always wanted to do the community supported solution and decided to do the closed source one. He apparently made this decision recently.
It still sounds like he's just reacting to his current situation, rather than doing because of his ideals.
Even if the title is "Mega denies" they either confirm what Dotcom claims or simply don't comment.
Dotcom: "In addition Hollywood has seized all the Megashares in the family trust that was setup for my children."
Mega: "Mega said that it has 13 percent of its shareholdings subject to two freezing orders. A 6 percent holding controlled by Dotcom's estranged wife was frozen in November 2014 by the New Zealand High Court on application by five Hollywood film studios."
How can this be called a "denial" I don't understand.
Firstly, the line you quote said "all the" shares, the fact that 13% have been frozen doesn't prove or disprove that statement.
Secondly, Dotcom's main claim was the hostile takeover, his family shares were just a part of that. It could be true that they were frozen but un-true about the rest of his claims.
So yes, it's a denial of his full claims, but maybe (or maybe not) a confirmation of one part of his claims that you pulled out.
That said it's obviously a bunch of PR speak that means nothing. For example this line:
> "More than 75 percent of shareholders have supported recent equity issues, so there has not been any 'hostile takeover',
You could plot a hostile takeover in which the end, winning, result is that you own 75% of the shares, that is the takeover. So having shareholder support when the claim against you is "they took over the company by sneakily getting shareholder control" is irrelevant.
All in all, it's a denial, but not one with any evidence in either direction.
All the "shares in the family trust" seized by "Hollywood" (claimed by Dotcom) can be exactly the "6 percent holding controlled by Dotcom's estranged wife (which) was frozen (...) on application by five Hollywood film studios" (stated by Mega).
On another side "The company has suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud." (said by Dotcom) is not commented by Mega at all (unsurprisingly). So what did Mega actually deny? I claim, nothing. It's OK if you consider it enough that they call the statement "a denial" but from my subjective point of view, the press and we, the readers, should not even accept such a name if there's nothing in the statement that denies anything Dotcom claimed. I think you actually agree that nothing was effectively denied, as you also say: "it's obviously a bunch of PR speak that means nothing." So yes, Mega can call it a denial, but I don't understand how anybody else can call it so if he/she reads the content of the statement. Specifically, how can the news agency write the title "Mega denies" and be trusted? It's not the same as "Mega responds."
> The company has suffered from a hostile takeover by a Chinese investor who is wanted in China for fraud. He used a number of straw-men and businesses to accumulate more and more Mega shares. Recently his shares have been seized by the NZ government. Which means the NZ government is in control. In addition Hollywood has seized all the Megashares in the family trust that was setup for my children.
Huh! I had no idea Mega was publically shared. Why would you do that if your philosophy was supposed to be privacy, not money?
It doesn't have to be publicly shared for a hostile take-over to happen. All that has to happen is that your 'investor' shares constitute a majority and that those shares end up in the hands of someone that kicks out the C-suite and replaces them with others.
One way in which this could happen is if the entities holding those shares are bought (so an indirect hostile takeover).
As an example: one of my companies holds shares in another. If I sell the parent company the other shares - and their voting rights - will transfer as well to the new owner. This is because there is no 'change of control' trigger clause in the shareholder agreement of the daughter company, if there were then such a change of control could force the company in the middle to offer its shares to the sitting shareholders of the daughter company.
But even that can still go wrong: the sitting shareholders would have to be able to meet-or-exceed the value placed on the shares and if they can't the shares end up in the hands of others.
Assume "the cloud" is always untrustworthy, and act accordingly.
Sync encrypted filesystems to the cloud. EncFS has some known issues, but for a lot of my stuff, where it's "write once read many times" it still seems to be OK from an encryption point of view - though it inevitably leaks file size information. On the other hand, it does play very nicely with Dropbox/GoogleDrive/BTSync - although for the sufficiently paranoid you need to consider the risk of the Dropbox/GoogleDive/BTSync binary running on your device having access to the unencrypted local partition... Using rsync or some open source sync tool might mitigate that somewhat (but I suspect if you've got data which you suspect an attacker might subvert Google or Dropbox to get access to, you _really_ shouldn't be trying to work out how to protect that data on someone else's storage - buy your own hard drives and deal with multiple copies and geographically separate duplicates yourself)
(because remember, there is no "cloud" there is only "other people's computers")
I attempted to use them for a while but found the upload speeds of their (proprietary and closed) clients to be utterly useless for anything more than a trivial amount of data.
Everything I found pointed to it being a client issue (the client was simply not uploading 90% of the time and my PC was more than capable of performing the required encryption and hashing operations far faster than my network connection could accept the bits) so I opened a ticket and talked to their support for over 6 months (!!!) and in the end they decided to just refund my money.
If you have a trivial amount of data, go ahead and use the $7, 30GB plan but don't fall for their 1TB plan, there's no way you can get close to using it.
Never trust a single location, be it a service, device or person, unless you don't care about your data. There are tools which can help you keep multiple copies on multiple services and/or devices.
