Hasta La Gadget!

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has faced a lot of grief lately from pretty much everyone with a badge. His house was raided, and he was thrown in jail for a bit. However, he’s back and isn’t even close to getting out of the business that got him in trouble in the first place. Along with his past colleagues, Dotcom is starting another file-sharing service called “Mega.”

Dotcom describes Mega as a unique service that will solve the liability problems faced by many cloud storage services, and it will enhance the privacy rights of users. Then again, many critics are saying that Mega will simply be just another version of Megaupload that will skirt the legal issues that faced the old service, and will eventually be shut down just like before.

Certain aspects will indeed stay the same. Mega will be the same one-click, subscriber-based cloud service that will allow customers to upload and share large files, but the difference now is that files will first be encrypted before they upload, and anyone who downloads the files will receive a unique key for decryption purposes.

This means that Mega would not be able to view any files that are uploaded to its servers, which the company says would not make them responsible for its users’ uploaded content. Dotcom says that the only way that this new service would be deemed illegal is if encryption itself was illegal, according to Dotcom’s legal experts. However, Dotcom says his new service isn’t “a giant middle finger to Hollywood and the DoJ,” and he and his colleague note that if users violate copyright, there are rules in place to take care of it.

[via Wired]

Megaupload founder creates new file-sharing service, calls it “Mega” is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Entrusting AOL with your email sounds like something best left for the 90s, but the company hopes that its cross-platform management client Alto will bring you back into the fold. Designed to bring existing Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, .Mac, and .me email accounts into some semblance of order, Alto organizes messages into cloud based “stacks” that can be themed by sender, recipients, keywords, or other factors, mimicking the way people traditionally sort through their physical mail.

“The way we use email has changed radically over the years, but the core email application experience hasn’t” AOL’s senior director of product for AOL Mail, Joshua Ramirez, said of Alto. “We’ve taken a deep look at how people use email now, and designed an application around that reality.”

As well as manually creating stacks, Alto will create them itself; initially, that’s based on a selection of pre-loaded categories, such as photos, attachments, social networking notifications, deals emails from providers like Groupon, and messages from retailers such as Amazon. However, they can be easily customized.

Photos, meanwhile, can be shared directly from emails to Facebook and Twitter, and Alto can pull in contact details from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as the latest social networking updates from your friends.

“When you sort through physical mail, you put it into stacks because it’s a natural way to decide what’s important, what’s junk, and what to save for later” Ramirez says. “We wanted to recreate that experience with Alto, but make it intelligent and automatic, to easily deal with the hundreds of emails we get every day.”

AOL Alto is available in invite-based beta from today; you can sign up here.

AOL Alto wrestles your email into order is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It isn’t exactly a secret that authorities and entertainment groups don’t like The Pirate Bay, but today the infamous site made it a little bit harder for them to bring it down. The Pirate Bay announced today that it has move its servers to the cloud. This works in a couple different ways: it helps the people who run The Pirate Bay save money, while it makes it more difficult for police to carry out a raid on the site.

“All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing,” a Pirate Bay blog post reads. “The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.” The site told TorrentFreak after the switch that its currently being hosted by two different cloud providers in two different countries, and what little actual hardware it still needs to use is being kept in different countries as well. The idea is not only to make it harder for authorities to bring The Pirate Bay down, but also to make it easier to bring the site back up should that ever happen.

Even if authorities do manage to get their hands on The Pirate Bay’s remaining hardware, they’ll only be taking its transit router and its load balancer – the servers are stored in several Virtual Machine instances, along with all of TPB’s vital data. The kicker is that these cloud hosting companies aren’t aware that they’re hosting The Pirate Bay, and if they discovered the site was using their service, they’d have a hard time digging up any dirt on users since the communication between the VMs and the load balancer is encrypted.

In short, it sounds like The Pirate Bay has taken a huge step in not only protecting its own rear end, but those of users as well. If all of this works out the way The Pirate Bay is claiming it will, then don’t expect to hear about the site going down anytime soon. Still, there’s nothing stopping authorities from trying to bring it down, or from putting in the work to try and figure out who the people behind The Pirate Bay are. Stay tuned.

On Monday, Adobe dropped details for an update to its iOS and Android versions of Reader. The most noteworthy enhancement here is the introduction of cloud file storage with Acrobat.com, which allows users to view and edit documents seamlessly across mobile and desktop devices, à la Google Docs Google Drive. Reader Mobile has also gained FormsCentral data support, improved selecting and highlighting of Asian text, and mobile document rights management with secure watermark support. If Android is your mobile platform of choice and you’d like to give these new features a spin, head on over to Google Play to claim your prize. iPhone owners, on the other hand, have a bit of a wait ahead of them. The update is still awaiting Apple’s approval before hitting the App Store.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Adobe Reader for iOS and Android updated with cloud storage support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Oct 2012 22:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skydrive, iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive users have all been treated to upgrades recently, and now Box has announced a bunch of improvements are coming to its cloud platform for businesses. The portal header has been redesigned with a focus on searching and navigating quickly, and you can find other users at your company that bit easier, too. Additionally, Box Edit is ready to drop its beta suffix and, as long as you’ve got the relevant program installed, you can create files, edit them and save right back to the cloud from within the system. And, if you didn’t think the whole experience was social enough, an added ‘like’ feature for files will help you keep up with the latest trending process docs. The updates are due to roll out “over the coming weeks,” but until then, why not let an extremely sincere Box rep walk you through them in the video below.

Continue reading Box announces new features: improved search, file editing and a more social UI (video)

Filed under: Storage, Internet, Software

Box announces new features: improved search, file editing and a more social UI (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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