January 21, 2013 | Paul Merak | Comments 0

From a prison cell to lavish kickoff of Mega

From sexy FBI agents, super-sized Mega power drinks to Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mr Dotcom’s Mega launch party kicks off Mega the file sharing service once again.

On Mr Dotcom’s birthday, exactly a years after Kim’s raid and imprisonment, Mega turns on their cloud servers to enable their Mega file sharing services. In the initial hours Mega received over 500,000 sign-ups.

Mathias Ortmann, Mega’s CTO (chief technology officer) said they were all up for over 40 hours running on caffeine and adrenaline. The servers were tough to keep up running as they were shutting off every hour, but rebooting brought them up every time.

Tony Lentino CTO (far left) and Robert Amsterdam, Mega’s lawyer (far right)

Tony Lentino, the new CEO and the largest investor into Mega was instrumental in restarting the financial aspects of Kim’s return including paying for rent after the Kim’s raid and imprisonment in January 2012. Robert Amsterdam is part of his legal team defending Mega’s prosecution. Amsterdam claims that former Senator Christopher Dodd executed “contract prosecution” leading to Kim’s imprisonment was breaching the human rights.

“This prosecution should not be afforded the presumption of regularity,” he says. “The way this was done—the helicopters; the rappelling down the buildings [of Dotcom mansion]; the over-reaction—all of these are signs of a classic political prosecution.”

Bram van der Kolk, dubbed Mr Dotcom thinks of his Mega company as privacy company.

“Privacy is a basic human right, but it has become increasingly difficult to communicate privately,” said Dotcom. “More and more companies are collecting data about you and your behavior. ISPs are inspecting the data you transfer, on behalf of the content industry. Hosting companies sell their decommissioned services and hard drives with your data still on it… the US government is investing billions into massive spy clouds.”

Mr Dotcom's wife Mona and Emily Lentino, Tony Lentino's wife

Kim’s wife Mona (left) and Emily Lentino, Tony’s wife (right)

Kim’s wife Mona is a silent partner to Mega, but hardly insignificant. She owns 89 percent of Mega. The remaining shares are owned by Tony Lentino controlled Instra, which will provide technical help and billing services for Mega.

Mega.co.nz is Mega’s new domain after Me.ga got shut down by Gabon in what Kim believed to be a “US-led witch hunt”.

Mega’s new cloud based file sharing service includes free 50GB of free storage. Here is a tweet sent by Kim to about 750,000 of his followers.