Dropbox crosses 100 million users, announces 100GB free contest

Dropbox, the cloud storage service, has crossed 100 million users, according to the company’s founder, Drew Houston. The achievement was announced in a blog post:“Once upon a time, Dropbox had its humble beginnings in a Boston train station when I forgot my USB stick at home. We’re still unsure if it was fate or fluke, but one thing’s stayed the same all these years: each of us has a unique reason for using Dropbox,” said Houston in the blog post.This is quite an achievement for the five-year old company, especially now when tech titans such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are investing aggressively in the cloud storage space with their own offerings. Apple had recently announced that its iCloud service had 190 million users. Google has also started its Google Drive service which offers 5 GB of free space to Gmail users.Dropbox was under a spam attack earlier this year, which caused users to get spammed via email accounts. Speaking to New York Times, Houston assured users that his company had added additional features to prevent future discrepancies. According to Houston, users store more than 1 billion files in Dropbox every day and the number of users has quadrupled in the last year itself.To celebrate the 100 million landmark, Dropbox is inviting users to share their ‘Dropbox story’ and the top 10 favourite stories will get 100 GB storage space for life.

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Megaupload founder announces new file-sharing service

Promotion: Hot deals Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, and possibly the most hunted man on the internet, has revealed plans for the successor to his wildly popular file sharing service. Dubbed ‘Mega’, Dotcom announced in a post on his website that the new web portal will go live on January 20, 2013, basically laughing in the face of US prosecutors and copyright advocates that have been trying for his indictment in a high-profile case involving alleged copyright infringement via his web service.Dotcom and his co-defendants have managed to find an innovative way to circumvent objections made against the services of Megaupload, by giving users direct control – and responsibility – over their files. The planned new encryption essentially means that owners of the site will have no idea about what content is being stored on their servers. The only ones with access to the required decryption key will be the users who upload the files themselves, thereby also providing increased security against hacking. In yet another snub to U.S. prosecutors, Dotcom has said that the new website will not use U.S.-based hosting companies as partners, in order to avoid being shut down by U.S. authorities.Before it was shut down in January, 2012, Megaupload was one of the largest file storage and viewing services in the world, averaging about 50 million hits per day. With over 25 petabytes (25,000 terabytes) of data stored on its servers, the portal was widely known and used, and its shutting down led to great outrage in the online sphere, with many severe responses from the file sharing community, including denial-of-service attacks on a range of websites belonging to the U.S. government and copyright organizations.Now, the latest offering from Dotcom and his co-workers seems to be filling the gap left by Megaupload’s shattering. While the new site boasts faster upload speeds and larger storage capacity, the encryption technology marks a major shift from Megaupload as Mega operators and owners will not have access to user files and therefore be immune from content liability.U.S. authorities have released no official comment yet on the planned venture. The announcement was delayed by an hour on account of overloading by users on data. In a tweet, Dotcom suggested that a lot of the traffic was driven by U.S. authorities: “FBI agents pressing reload... We see their IP addresses.”

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