Kim Dotcom, the harried founder of file-storing site Mega, has offered a 10,000 Euro prize to the first person who cracks the site's open-source encryption, so convinced is he of its security.
"#Mega's open source encryption remains unbroken! We'll offer 10,000 EURO to anyone who can break it. Expect a blog post today," tweeted Dotcom on Thursday night.
That blog post hasn't been released yet, but Dotcom did mention security issues: users can now change their passwords.
The bounty, equivalent to about $13,638, serves not only to tout Mega's advances security, but to solicit aid from security experts who support Mega's venture.
"A few weeks into its existence, Mega is holding up pretty well. It's fended off its first round of takedown requests and is still crouched safely behind its wall of protective encryption," writes Gizmodo.
"From the get-go, Mega has been taking a lot of tips from the cryptography community, which has been picking apart the service's security and providing what amounts to a pro bono encryption spell-check. This challenge should serve as an effective solicitation for a little more."
Dotcom, who has run foul of authorities before when his previous site Megaupload was taken down, seems to be taking no chances with copyrighted content now.
"Dotcom claimed that just 0.001 percent of the files on Mega have been taken down for copyright issues, but it remains unclear how much visibility rights holders or anyone else has of the data, and how many requests are made," writes The NextWeb.
Some file distribution sites questioned Dotcom's claims. "Torrent Freak found that Mega was over-zealously policing content," says TheNextWeb.
"Legal videos that the blog posted to the service via Mega-Search were immediately taken down as copyright infringing, suggesting Mega is either preventing uploads from third-party clients or aggressively monitoring content uploads. This set-up has reportedly seen thousands of items of content taken down this week, and that contradicts Dotcom's claim that typically just 50 Mega-hosted files are removed per day."