Interview of Mathias Ortmann MEGA CTO

I had the chance to interview Mathias Ortmann, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of MEGA, through Xavier Buck a Luxembourgish entrepreneur. Mathias Ortmann review the launch of MEGA, the secured Cloud based file sharing plate-forme.


How did you start MEGA adventure?

When we learned that our extradition proceedings would be delayed by the US government appealing against the high court’s decision that we are allowed to see evidence, we knew that we would be in for a long and costly legal battle. The only way to finance it is to make money, and since we have some expertise in the field of cloud storage, we decided to go down that path.

MEGA buz has generate a lot of cyber attacks, you excepted it?

Cyber attacks in the sense of denial-of-service or hacking attempts – not yet.
Cyber attacks in the sense of massive user demand – oh yes!

What do you think regarding the encryption polemic?

We are a bit disappointed by statements like “If you can break SSL, you can break MEGA” and the uninformed discussion about our de-duplication strategy. However, there is also a positive side – so far, two genuine vulnerabilities have been found, reported to us and fixed: A crypto-unrelated XSS issue and a basic design flaw in our static content verification process. We are still undecided on the issue of whether we should protect users that choose unsafe passwords or rather educate them better so that they don’t.

You host some servers in USA, should you worry?

Despite the WHOIS result, we have no serves in the US (or Africa).

MEGA propose a secured cloud storage as a service. What counter measure are in place in order to protect copyrights?

Copyrights are not affected by encryption. Whether or not the data is encrypted, policing all user files for copyrighted content is neither required nor permitted, and we enforce a takedown policy that complies with all applicable laws and works just fine despite the encryption.

Why is MEGA the best?

Are we the best? We leave that up to the market to decide. We believe that our product – the combination of privacy, convenience, performance and pricing – is an attractive one, and we hope that it will be accepted and become popular despite our legal fight and the negative crypto-related PR that erupted immediately after our launch. To use the weather as an analogy (MEGA vs. the market leaders): We believe that a few dissipating clouds in a blue sky are still better than standing in the rain all the time!