MegaUpload has been down for almost a year now, but mastermind Kim Dotcom has had no intentions of letting it stay that way. Previously, he’s teased some details about a relaunch and the servers are bought and paid for. Now, we’ve got a date: January 19, 2013, the one-year anniversary of the takedown.
The new service, called simply “Mega” has a clever new approach to the file-sharing game, which could very well make it impervious to the kind of meddling that took down the first iteration. Dotcom also made reference to a doomsday launch switch, presumably the ironic opposite of the theoretical button US authorities suggested could have existed to implode the original site in case of a raid.
There are still things we don’t know about the service, like where it will be hosted since the classic MegaUpload.com domain is still seized by the feds. Where ever it’s hosted, though, launching on January 19 certainly sending a message, a message you can probably interpret to contain profanity directed at the US government. We’ll just have to wait to see whether or not that’s where this battle ends. [Kim Dotcom via TorrentFreak]