03 Nov 2015
Have you heard of MegaNet?
If not, you’d better get up to speed, as it is scheduled to launch in January 2016, and it will not be a quiet affair.
If not, you’d better get up to speed, as it is scheduled to launch in January 2016, and it will not be a quiet affair.
MegaNet is the latest brainchild of controversial German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom. You know, the guy who founded megaupload.com, the file storage/sharing site that was shut down by the US Department of Justice in 2012 (Kim Dotcom continues to fight criminal copyright charges from New Zealand).
Anyway, MegaNet is Kim Dotcom’s new project. Mr Dotcom himself shared his plans via Skype from SydStart in Sydney . The idea, according to Mashable, is his “alternative Internet, Meganet.”
The idea is succinct: create an internet that cannot be controlled, censored or destroyed by Governments or corporations, Dotcom said on Twitter.
Initially announced back in June 2015, TorrentFreak ran an article about DotComs preparing a crowdfunding campaign to get MegaNet up and running.
So what do we know about the mysterious MegaNet:
Here are some collated points, gathered from a number of sources on the net:
"MegaNet is a non-IP based internet, with no IP addresses. Dotcom said it uses blockchain and other new protocols to communicate and exchange data." -ZDNet
“Dotcom said there will be no IP addresses on MegaNet — the unique codes that identify a particular device online — meaning the server cannot be easily hacked. Rather, it will use a new, faster form of blockchain to exchange data, he explained, referring to the distributed ledger system best known for being behind Bitcoin.” -Mashable
“What we also know is that users’ mobile phones will play a crucial role, although at launch other devices will participate in the network. ‘All your mobile phones become an encrypted network,’ Dotcom notes. ‘You’d be surprised how much idle storage & bandwidth capacity mobile phones have. MegaNet will turn that idle capacity into a new network.’” -Torrent Freak
“‘Now if you have a hundred million smartphones that have the Meganet app installed we will have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined, and that is the power of Meganet.’” -Business Insider
“’The way it works is pretty astonishing because if you don't have IP addresses, you can't hack the server, you can't perform a denial of service attack on websites, or gaming services, and you can't take an entire site and services offline any more’”. -Financial Spots
It will be very interesting to see whether this launch is successful and, if so, how it will impact internet usage.
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Carole Theriault - Tick Tock Social
AKJ Associates' consultant
Tags: Kim Dotcom Megaupload MegaNet spying blockchain IP addresses privacy NSA
