The Lede Blog: Fire at a Nightclub in Southern Brazil

Victims of the fire are attended by medics.

An intense fire ripped through a nightclub crowded with university students in southern Brazil early on Sunday morning, leaving behind a scene of horror, with bodies piled in the club’s bathrooms and on the street.

At least 232 people were killed, many of them students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs at a local university, police officials said.

As Simon Romero reports, a flare from a band’s pyrotechnic show ignited the fire in the nightclub, called Kiss, in the southern city of Santa Maria. Rescue workers continued to haul bodies from the still-smoldering building on Sunday.

Amateur videos posted to YouTube showed scenes of chaos as medics scurried over the bodies of victims who appeared to be unconscious, checking for signs of life.

Medics rush to care for victims of the fire.

Officials and witnesses say that security guards at the club had locked some exits, sewing panic as people attempted to flee the flames and smoke.

“Only after a multitude pushed down the security guards did they see the crap they had done,” Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student who survived the fire, said in comments posted on Facebook.

Shortly before the fire, a club D.J. posted a photo on Facebook from inside the crowded club apparently showing the pyrotechnic display on stage.

A short time later, another photo that was said to be taken outside the club and widely disseminated through social media showed smoke billowing from the front entrance.

BOATE KISS PEGANDO FOGO! http://t.co/tdV2DO4q

— Boatos SM ® #LUTO (@BoatoSM) 27 Jan 13

The fire quickly engulfed the building.

Firefighters and volunteers who used T-shirts to protect themselves from the smoke struggled to pull people from the burning building.

Firefighters and volunteers tried to pull people from the burning building

Photos from the scene showed frantic friends and family members gathered outside the club and a hospital.

As Mr. Romero reports, witnesses said the fire started about 2 a.m. after the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, took the stage. At least one member of the five-person band, which is based in Santa Maria and advertised its use of pyrotechnics, was said to have been killed in the fire.

Overcrowding and a disregard for fire safety codes have led to deadly blazes at nightclubs in the past, though Sunday’s tragedy in Brazil is among the worst.

In 2003 in Rhode Island, also fire set off by a pyrotechnic display at a club killed about 100 people. A fire that erupted under similar circumstances in Russia left almost as many dead in 2009.

And in Luoyang, China in 2000, 309 people were killed in a fire that broke out at a dance hall, forcing some to leap from high-rise windows.

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Djokovic completes Australian Open hat trick

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — No shirt ripping or bare-chested flexing this time.

Novak Djokovic completed his work before midnight, defeating Andy Murray in four sets for his third consecutive Australian Open title and fourth overall.

It was also the second time in three years Djokovic had beaten his longtime friend in this final. So the celebration was muted: a small victory shuffle, raised arms, a kiss for the trophy. No grand histrionics, although that's not to say the moment was lost on him.

"Winning it three in a row, it's incredible," Djokovic said after his 6-7 (2), 7-6 (3), 6-3, 6-2 victory Sunday night. "It's very thrilling. I'm full of joy right now. It's going to give me a lot of confidence for the rest of the season, that's for sure."

Nine other men had won consecutive Australian titles in the Open era, but none three straight years. One of them was Andre Agassi, who presented Djokovic with the trophy.

A year ago, Djokovic began his season with an epic 5-hour, 53-minute five-set win over Rafael Nadal at the Australian Open, the longest Grand Slam final. He tore off his shirt to celebrate, the TV replays repeated constantly at this tournament.

He mimicked that celebration after coming back to beat Stanislas Wawrinka in five hours in a surprisingly tough fourth-round victory this time.

Since then, he's looked every bit the No. 1 player. He said he played "perfectly" in his 89-minute win over fourth-seeded David Ferrer in the semifinals Thursday night. Murray struggled to beat 17-time major winner Roger Federer in five sets in the semifinals Friday night, and still had the bad blisters on his feet to show for it in the final.

In a final that had the makings of a classic when two of the best returners in tennis were unable to get a break of serve in the first two sets that lasted 2:13, the difference may have hinged on something as light as a feather.

Preparing for a second serve at 2-2 in the second set tiebreaker, Murray was rocking back about to toss the ball when he stopped, paused and then walked onto the court and tried to grab a small white feather that was floating in his view. He went back to the baseline, bounced the ball another eight times and served too long.

After being called for a double-fault, Murray knocked the ball away in anger and flung his arm down. He didn't get close for the rest of the tiebreaker and was the first to drop serve in the match — in the eighth game of the third set. Djokovic broke him twice in the fourth set, which by then had turned into an easy march to victory.

"It was strange," said Djokovic, adding that it swung the momentum his way. "It obviously did. ... He made a crucial double-fault."

Murray didn't blame his loss on the one distraction.

"I mean, I could have served. It just caught my eye before I served. I thought it was a good idea to move it," he said. "Maybe it wasn't because I obviously double-faulted.

"You know, at this level it can come down to just a few points here or there. My biggest chance was at the beginning of the second set — didn't quite get it. When Novak had his chance at the end of the third, he got his."

Djokovic had five break-point chances in the opening set, including four after having Murray at 0-40 in the seventh game, but wasn't able to convert any of them.

Then he surrendered the tiebreaker with six unforced errors. Murray appeared to be the stronger of the two at the time. He'd beaten Djokovic in their last Grand Slam encounter, the U.S. Open final, and had the Serb so off balance at times in the first set that he slipped to the court and took skin off his knee.

Murray held serve to open the second set and had three break points at 0-40 in the second game, but Djokovic dug himself out of trouble and held.

"After that I felt just mentally a little bit lighter and more confident on the court than I've done in the first hour or so," Djokovic said. "I was serving better against him today in the first two sets than I've done in any of the match in the last two years."

Djokovic said he loves playing at Rod Laver Arena, where he won his first major title in 2008. He now has six Grand Slam titles altogether. Federer has won four of his 17 majors at Melbourne Park, and Agassi is the only other player to have won that many in Australia since 1968.

Djokovic was just finding his way at the top level when Agassi retired in 2006, but he had watched enough of the eight-time major winner to appreciate his impact.

"He's I think one of the players that changed the game — not just the game itself, but also the way the people see it," Djokovic said. "So it was obviously a big pleasure and honor for me to receive the trophy from him."

Agassi was among the VIPs in the crowd, along with actor Kevin Spacey and Victoria Azarenka, who won the women's final in three sets against Li Na the previous night.

Murray broke the 76-year drought for British men at the majors when he won the U.S. Open last year and said he'll leave Melbourne slightly more upbeat than he has after defeats here in previous years.

"The last few months have been the best tennis of my life. I mean, I made Wimbledon final, won the Olympics, won the U.S. Open. You know, I was close here as well," he said. "No one's ever won a slam (immediately) after winning their first one. It's not the easiest thing to do. And I got extremely close.

"So, you know, I have to try and look at the positives of the last few months, and I think I'm going the right direction."

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Unboxed: Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.

The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).

These findings are hardly the last word. At this stage, this kind of digital analysis is mostly an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities. The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.

“Traditionally, literary history was done by studying a relative handful of texts,” says Mr. Jockers, an assistant professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. “What this technology does is let you see the big picture — the context in which a writer worked — on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

Mr. Jockers, 46, personifies the digital advance in the humanities. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Southern Illinois University, but was also fascinated by computing and became a self-taught programmer. Before he moved to the University of Nebraska last year, he spent more than a decade at Stanford, where he was a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to the digital exploration of books.

Today, Mr. Jockers describes the tools of his trade in terms familiar to an Internet software engineer — algorithms that use machine learning and network analysis techniques. His mathematical models are tailored to identify word patterns and thematic elements in written text. The number and strength of links among novels determine influence, much the way Google ranks Web sites.

It is this ability to collect, measure and analyze data for meaningful insights that is the promise of Big Data technology. In the humanities and social sciences, the flood of new data comes from many sources including books scanned into digital form, Web sites, blog posts and social network communications.

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

“Some call it computer science and some call it statistics, but the essence is that these algorithmic methods are increasingly part of every discipline now,” says Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Cultural data analysts often adapt biological analogies to describe their work. Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.

Mr. Michel and another researcher, Erez Lieberman Aiden, led a project to mine the virtual book depository known as Google Books and to track the use of words over time, compare related words and even graph them.

Google cooperated and built the software for making graphs open to the public. The initial version of Google’s cultural exploration site began at the end of 2010, based on more than five million books, dating from 1500. By now, Google has scanned 20 million books, and the site is used 50 times a minute. For example, type in “women” in comparison to “men,” and you see that for centuries the number of references to men dwarfed those for women. The crossover came in 1985, with women ahead ever since.

In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.

JON KLEINBERG, a computer scientist at Cornell, and a group of researchers approached collective memory from a very different perspective.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated Matthew L. Jockers’s age. He is 46, not 48. 

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Factory Fire Kills 7 Workers in Bangladesh

A.M. Ahad/Associated Press

Firefighters and volunteers worked to extinguish the fire at a small garment factory in Bangladesh’s capital on Saturday.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — In the latest blow to Bangladesh’s garment industry, seven workers died on Saturday after a fire swept through a factory here not long after seamstresses had returned from a lunch break. Workers said supervisors had locked one of the factory exits, forcing some people to jump out of windows to save their lives.

The fatal fire comes roughly two months after the horrific blaze at the Tazreen Fashions factory, which left 112 workers dead and focused global attention on unsafe conditions in Bangladesh’s garment industry. Tazreen Fashions, located just outside Dhaka, the capital, had been making clothing for some of the world’s biggest brands and retailers, including Walmart.

In the aftermath of the Tazreen Fashions fire, Bangladeshi political and industrial leaders pledged to quickly improve fire safety and even conducted high-profile, nationwide inspections of many of the country’s 5,000 apparel factories. Global brands, meanwhile, promised consumers that they would not buy clothes from unsafe factories.

But Saturday’s fire in a densely populated section of Dhaka, is a grim reminder that the problems remain. The blaze erupted at about 2 p.m. at Smart Garment Export, a small factory that employed about 300 people, most of them young women who were making sweaters and jackets. All seven of the dead workers were women.

Masudur Rahman Akand, a supervisor in the Bangladesh Fire Department, said workers were returning from lunch when the blaze erupted in a storage area. The factory was located on the second-floor of a building, above a bakery, and it lacked proper exits and fire prevention equipment, Mr. Akand said.

“We did not find fire extinguishers,” he said. “We did not find any safety measures.”

With smoke filling the factory floor, workers apparently panicked. Mr. Akand said the seven workers who died either suffocated or were trampled by others trying to escape. Eight other workers were hospitalized with injuries. Workers told rescuers that many people could not quickly escape because one of the exits was blocked by a locked steel gate. Witnesses said people began jumping out of windows before the gate was finally unlocked.

Azizul Hoque, a police supervisor, said investigators initially suspected that the fire was caused by an electrical short circuit in a room where fabrics and materials were being stored. But Mr. Hoque said the investigation was continuing.

“We do not know the reason or the source or the origin of the fire,” he said.

It was unclear whether the Smart Garment factory was making clothing for international brands or retailers. Dhaka’s industrial areas are filled with factories, large and small, that produce clothing for much of the Western world. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-biggest exporter of apparel, trailing only China.

An American delegation with four members of Congress arrived in Dhaka on Saturday to meet with political leaders and garment industry executives for a discussion of trade issues, including efforts by Bangladesh to win tariff-free access to the American market for the country’s clothing exports.

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi.

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Hackers claim attack on Justice Department website

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Hackers sympathetic to the late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz claimed on Saturday to have infiltrated the website of the U.S. Justice Department’s Sentencing Commission, and said they planned to release government data.

The Sentencing Commission site, www.ussc.gov , was shut down early Saturday.

Identifying themselves as Anonymous, a loosely organized group of unknown provenance associated with a range of recent online actions, the hackers voiced outrage over Swartz’ suicide on January 11.

In a video posted online, the hackers criticized the government’s prosecution of Swartz, who had been facing trial on charges that he used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service.

Swartz had faced a maximum sentence of 31 years in prison and fines of up to $ 1 million.

The FBI is investigating the attack, according to Richard McFeely, of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch.

“We were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation,” McFeely said in an emailed statement. “We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person’s or government agency’s network.”

(Reporting by Deborah Zabarenko; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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Stan Musial remembered during funeral Mass

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Stan Musial was remembered as a Hall of Famer on and off the field during a 2-hour funeral Mass.

Broadcaster Bob Costas, his voice cracking at times, pointed out during Saturday's lengthy tribute that in 92 years of life, Musial never let anyone down.

Among those in attendance were baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, former St. Louis standout Albert Pujols and Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Bruce Sutter and Red Schoendienst.

The 90-year-old Schoendienst once roomed with Musial.

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The Haggler: When Customer Service Is a Dead-End Street

SEVERAL readers have surprised the Haggler by rising to the defense of McDonald’s and its in-store ad for the McRib sandwich — “It’s real pork!” — as described in our last episode. The ad suggests that McDonald’s thinks that its customers have pathetically low expectations about the chain’s raw materials. Just as bad, it breaks the Haggler’s unwritten rule that companies should never boast about the realness of any product that consumers have every right to assume is real.

Au contraire, argued a fearless few. One reader said he thought McDonald’s might simply be trying to alert people who don’t eat pork — Muslims and kosher-observant Jews, for instance.

But would someone with a dietetic restriction against pork ever even consider ordering something called a McRib? Even if the answer is yes, there is another problem here. If the point of the ad is to give a heads-up to the pork-averse, it would need only say “It’s pork!” The world “real” in this context is unnecessary.

Of course, if McDonald’s posted ads for the McRib that merely stated “It’s pork!” the subtext of the ad would be, “We believe our customers are really stupid.”

Someone else argued that the ad helps because pigs aren’t the only animals with ribs that are barbecued. Beef ribs are popular, too. Fair enough. Yet, again, if the goal is to eliminate any doubts about the origins of the meat, “It’s pork!” would suffice. No need for “real.”

But another reader made a point that the Haggler believes must be shared.

“I thought you were going to note that there are no ribs in the McRib,” wrote Jack Schwartz of Baltimore. “It’s parts of the pig that have been formed to look like ribs.”

Actually, according to a McDonald’s spokeswoman quoted in a Business Insider article in December, the McRib is made of “simple ground pork.” Which sounds like a combination of pig parts that could very well include ribs. But the rib look of the McRib — that is indeed an illusion.

So perhaps a more illuminating slogan might be “McRib: Only the look is fake!” That might not sell as many sandwiches, but it is certainly more informative.

O.K., letter time.

Q. On May 9, 2012, a certificate of title was awarded to Bank of America as part of a foreclosure on property I own — a vacant lot that I had hoped to build on. But Bank of America has continued to report delinquent payments to credit-score agencies, like Equifax. This means that I could have bad credit reports for all eternity, with no hope of ever improving my credit score.

Rectifying this problem has proved impossible. The call-in procedure at Bank of America seems designed to frustrate. No one seems to know the correct number to call. When I finally reached service reps, they were not allowed to call me back and could only repeat a robotic litany: “We have no record of a foreclosure sale. Would you like to make a payment?”

 I finally reached a supervisor, but she would not provide me with a direct number.  I had to go  through another generic number.  Two people who answered said they did not know who my contact person was.  “We have no knowledge of a foreclosure sale,” onesaid. Round and round we go.

Can you help? CONRAD REVAK

Naples, Fla.

A. First, the Haggler would like to point out that this is the first mortgage-related question ever posted in this space. That seems crazy, given that millions of Americans have been complaining for years that their bank won’t return calls or has mishandled paperwork, entered incorrect data and so on. Mortgages surely have caused more consumer heartburn than anything else since the housing crisis began.

But for some reason, only a handful of people have ever thought the Haggler could help. And the other cases were either too convoluted or were resolved before interventions could be made.

So you think the Haggler can’t handle a mortgage? Phooey. If you’ve got a good, clear case and can summarize it in less than 300 words, do share.

In this instance, the Haggler wrote to Bank of America, which resolved the entire problem in about a day and a half. The details here are that Mr. Revak — or more specifically, his lawyer — asked a court to grant what is called a deed-in-lieu, a financial instrument that lets a borrower give the title of a property to a bank, bypassing the standard and more arduous foreclosure proceeding.

A spokeswoman at Bank of America, Jumana Bauwens, said the wheels were grinding slowly in Mr. Revak’s case because his deed-in-lieu approach was unusual, and the “bank’s legal team felt they needed to do some more research to ensure that we wouldn’t have title issues when we sold the property in the future.”

O.K., but what’s up with the Bank of America’s phone system, which runs customers from one dead end to another? Might the company want to rethink that issue?

The Haggler tried to get the spokeswoman to say anything about this subject, but with no success. Which is maddening. How about just telling the Haggler that it’s working on the phone problem, or wants to, or is really bummed that it hasn’t already? Anything would be better than ignoring the issue.

As for Mr. Revak, he wrote to say that Bank of America got in touch by phone with a whole new and far more helpful attitude. Apologies were offered, and a promise was made that the bank would contact the credit scoring agencies and correct the record.

If Bank of America follows through with that promise, Mr. Revak wrote, “I will consider the case closed. The big unanswered question, though, is how many Americans are taking a hit on their credit score for no reason?”

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

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From Front Lines, Women Offer Evidence on Ability in Combat

Stacy Pearsall

Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall, who was a photographer in Iraq, in a self-portrait over Baghdad during her first deployment in 2003.

During her second deployment to Iraq, Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall of the Air Force found herself attached to an Army ground unit that was clearing roadside bombs. They had just found their 26th device of the day when one of their armored personnel carriers exploded. An ambush was on.

The chaos that unfolded over the next few hours was not a typical day for Sergeant Pearsall. But under the Pentagon’s decision to allow women into front-line combat units, officially announced Thursday, it could become much closer to the norm for women in American uniforms.

As Sergeant Pearsall tells the story, her vehicle came under intense fire that day in 2007, near the city of Baquba. The male soldiers in her carrier had already dashed out to join the fight, so she jumped onto the machine gun and began returning fire.

Outside a soldier lay unconscious. Sergeant Pearsall opened the rear door and crawled to the man, who was 6-foot-2 and more than 200 pounds, twice her weight. From behind him, she clasped him in a bear hug and dragged him toward the vehicle. She fell once, then again. Somehow, she hauled him into the armored safety of the carrier.

After tearing off his protective vest, she realized his carotid artery had been torn by shrapnel. As blood spurted all over, she closed her eyes, stuck her fingers into his neck and squeezed. He screamed, and she thanked the heavens. He was still kicking.

What happened next seemed almost cinematic. Emerging from a purplish haze outside, a medic jumped into the carrier and set his kit beside her. “Are you a medic?” he asked.

Heck no, Sergeant Pearsall replied. “I’m the photographer.”

The question that now looms over the Pentagon as it moves toward full gender integration is whether female service members like Sergeant Pearsall, for all their bravery under fire, can perform the same dangerous and physically demanding tasks day in and day out, for weeks at a time, as permanent members of ground combat units like the infantry or armored cavalry.

Since 1994, women have technically been barred from serving in those front-line units. But throughout the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, women — working as medics, intelligence officers, photographers, military police officers and in a host of other jobs — have been routinely “attached” to all-male ground combat units, where they have come under fire, returned fire, been wounded and been killed.

To supporters of Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta’s decision to rescind the prohibition on women in combat, the experiences of those women proved that the distinction between being “attached” to a combat unit and actually serving in one was outdated, and pointless.

“When the military goes to full integration, it allows commanders to put the best person in the job, not just the best man,” said Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer who is now policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group for women in the military. “If the best shot in the platoon is a woman, I can make her a sniper. But until now, I couldn’t do that.”

But to skeptics of the policy change, it is one thing for women to perform well when they come under fire while temporarily attached to all-male combat units. It is a far different thing, they argue, to carry out the daily mission of hunting down and engaging enemy forces as an infantry soldier or tank commander.

Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and a Marine Corps veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, defines it as a difference between “incidental combat,” as women have faced in convoys or attacks on bases, and “the direct combat duties of our advanced and most elite ground operators.”

Representative Hunter said in a statement, “The question here is whether this change will actually make our military better at operating in combat, specifically finding and targeting the enemy.”

Ask Sergeant Pearsall, who was decorated for her actions in Baquba and received a medical retirement from the Air Force in 2008, and the answer is simple: Yes, women can do it, and I already have.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the standards that female service members have to meet to pass their physical fitness tests. They must meet the same sit-up standard as men, they are not allowed to pass with fewer sit-ups. Women are also allowed to run a slower 2-mile run, not a 1.5-mile run.

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Everything You Need to Know About Kim Dotcom’s Mega

Click here to view the gallery: Hands On With Mega

Mega — the long-anticipated file sharing and cloud storage site from Kim Dotcom — is now open to the public.

[More from Mashable: Google Glasses Spotted and Two Other Stories You Need to Know]

Thanks to its association with the now-defunct Megaupload — and the legal issues facing its founder Kim Dotcom — the amount of press, user interest and hype surrounding Mega is greater than any file hosting/cloud storage launch in recent memory.

According to Dotcom, more than 1 million users signed up for Mega in the first 24 hours. On Twitter, the larger-than-life entrepreneur has continued to share usage stats and traffic graphs that compare Mega with perennial cloud favorite, Dropbox.

[More from Mashable: 9 Fresh YouTube Shows You’ll Love]

If you’re curious about the inner workings of Mega, how it works and how it handles security, we’ve got you covered.

The Phoenix of Megaupload

Mega is the spiritual successor to Kim Dotcom’s last business, the insanely popular file-hosting service Megaupload. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice shut down Megaupload and pursued criminal charges against Dotcom. Dotcom, a New Zealand citizen, is actively fighting U.S. extradition orders.

Megaupload was targeted by the DoJ because of its role in illegally distributing copyright material — including digital copies of movies, TV shows, books, music and software.

Rather than try to start a new service eschewing the potential for copyright material to be uploaded and shared, Dotcom is positioning Mega as a service that cares about and protects its user’s privacy. In fact, Mega’s tagline is “the privacy company.”

How It Works

On the surface, Mega is a bare-bones cloud storage host. After signing up for accounts, users can upload files and folders of all types to the service. Those files can then be shared with others.

The free plan gives users 50GB of file storage. There are no hard limits on file size, meaning users can use Mega as a way to back up photos, documents and other data. Obviously, this means users can use Mega as a way to store media content — video files, music, DVD images — as well.

For now, Mega is optimized to work on desktop web browsers. Mega strongly encourages users to use Google Chrome. And while Mega has big plans for developers and client-side apps, for now, the only way to access files is via the web browser.

Files can be uploaded to the service using drag and drop or a file-upload menu. Users can create folders in the file manager.

Uploads and downloads take place in parallel. If you upload a large number of files at once, each file uploads one at a time. In the future, Mega says users will be able to change the upload order. If you need to upload or download multiple files at once, simply open a new Mega tab in your browser and select that file.

You can upgrade to a higher-tiered storage plan from within your account. Mega doesn’t sell these plans itself; instead it has resellers who sell vouchers for a service. A 500GB storage plan with 1TB of enhanced bandwidth is 9.99 euros a month or 99 euros a year (a little over $ 110 U.S. dollars). That’s cheaper than most of its competitors.

The Importance of Passwords

It’s very important to remember the password you select when setting up your Mega account. The password is a big part of how Mega encrypts data on both ends.

During the sign-up process, Mega uses your password to create a 2,048-bit RSA key. This is the key that tells the system you are who you say you are. If you forget your password, you’re not going to be able to get into your account.

Right now, Mega doesn’t even have a password reset or recovery feature. In the future, Mega says it will have a reset mechanism but it will only allow users access to files or folders they have file keys for (more on file keys below). Users won’t be able to access other files until or unless they remember their password.

Because your Mega password is also your master encryption key, it’s important that users choose a secure password. We recommend using a password manager and printing a copy of the password to store in a safe place.

Understanding File Security

Mega is focused on end-to-end encryption. This means that files are encrypted both on upload and on download. With most traditional file hosts or cloud storage lockers, a public link to a file also includes a file path. With Dropbox, for example, the public or shared link includes the file name.

With Mega, things are a bit different. While users can share specific files to other Mega users or via email, the URL to a file doesn’t contain a file name; instead, a cryptographic key is appended to the URL. Without this key, you can’t access the file. Once decrypted by the server, a user has the option to download the linked file.

Mega’s promise, in other words, is that users control who has access to their files and accounts and no one else.

For important files or folders, users might want to make a note of the file key and keep it in a safe place — if they are worried about getting locked out of their account.

How Safe Are Your Files

Since Mega is touting itself as “the privacy company,” it’s important to look at how the company stores files and content.

The end-to-end encryption scheme is only part of how Mega secures data. Still, some are already criticizing the service, noting that it’s not as secure as it says it is. An article for Forbes cites two professionals who have problems with Mega’s security.

Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at John Hopkins University, is particularly critical of the way Mega uses JavaScript to verify its encryption method telling Forbes that “it makes no sense.”

Mega has responded to Green’s claims on its own blog, noting that its scheme “basically enables us to host the extremely integrity-sensitive static content on a large number of geographically diverse servers without worrying about security.”

Meanwhile, at Ars Technia Lee Hutchinson raises concerns about how Mega comes up with its crypto key at sign-up, as well as how the company handles deduplication, or how it eliminates duplicate copies of data.

Again, Mega has taken to its blog to attempt to clarify its policies and the way it handles data.

While Mega’s crypto system certainly doesn’t seem any less secure than any other file locker, we do agree with critics who note that the system might be more about giving Mega culpability against claims that it knows infringing content is on its servers, rather than about protecting that data itself.

The service is still in beta and much of its code is available via open source, so security purists might want to watch how Mega’s system evolves before trusting it with important, sensitive data.

Will Mega Stick Around?

While security experts can quibble and argue over the way Mega uses cryptography and how it stores data on its array of servers, the bigger issue, for us, is long-term survival.

While I would argue that most users who actively used Megaupload were not using it as a traditional cloud service, the fact remains that when the service was shut down, user files went with it.

Already anti-piracy groups are campaigning to shut down payment processors to Mega’s resellers. One of the reasons Mega isn’t taking payments itself and is instead using resellers is to prevent those groups from shutting down payment processors or trying to seize funds.

This is worrisome because in addition to outside capital, Mega needs professional accounts to keep its site working.

It’s too early to say if Mega will be around for the long haul or not, but our advice is not to use Mega as your only file storage solution. Keep backups of crucial files on disk or other cloud-based services.

What do you think of Mega? Let us know in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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After beating Federer, Murray reaches Aussie final

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Andy Murray was sucking in deep breaths, trying to recover from his exhausting win over Roger Federer. Pain was very much on his mind.

The U.S. Open champion defeated Federer 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-7 (2), 6-2 in a four-hour Australian Open semifinal Friday night. It was Murray's first victory against the 17-time major winner at a Grand Slam event.

But with the clock about to strike midnight, Murray was already thinking about Sunday's final against two-time defending champion Novak Djokovic, who is on a 20-match winning streak at Melbourne Park. This will be a rematch of their U.S. Open final.

"Every time we play each other it's normally a very physical match," Murray said. "I'll need to be ready for the pain. I hope it's a painful match — that'll mean it's a good one."

Murray had a 10-9 record against Federer, but had lost his three previous Grand Slam matches to the Swiss star. One of those defeats came at Wimbledon last year. Murray says the disappointment of that loss triggered his run to the gold medal at the London Olympics, and then his drought-breaking triumph at the U.S. Open.

"You know, I've obviously lost some tough matches against him in Slams," Murray said. "So to win one, especially the way that it went tonight, yeah, was obviously nice."

Murray ended a 76-year drought for British men at the majors when he beat Djokovic in five sets in the final at Flushing Meadows.

He's hoping the step-by-step manner in which he has crossed career milestones off his to-do list will continue Sunday. He lost four major finals, including two in Australia, before winning a Grand Slam title. He lost three times to Federer in a major before beating him. Even then, he wasted a chance to serve out in the fourth set Friday night as Federer rallied.

"Those matches ... have helped obviously mentally," he said. "I think going through a lot of the losses that I've had will have helped me as well. Obviously having won against Novak before in a Slam final will help mentally."

Djokovic will not be the only defending champion this weekend playing for another title. Victoria Azarenka will face China's Li Na on Saturday night for the women's crown.

Azarenka hasn't added a major title since her breakthrough in Australia last year. She's coming off a semifinal victory over American teenager Sloane Stephens in which she had to answer a torrent of questions over her nine-minute medical timeout after wasting five match points and then dropping serve in the next-to-last game.

Li, who is seeded sixth, lost the 2011 Australian final before claiming her first major title months later at the French Open. She made the final with less commotion, beating No. 2 Maria Sharapova in straight sets.

The first title of the 2013 Australian Open, women's doubles, was decided Friday when top-seeded Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci of Italy beat unseeded Australians Ashleigh Barty and Casey Dellacqua 6-2, 3-6, 6-2.

That was a prelude to the night match, where 15,000 people packed Rod Laver Arena, including the great Laver himself, to see if Federer could reach a sixth Australian final. The 31-year-old Swiss has won four of his 17 titles at Melbourne Park.

He showed flashes of his customary genius, but also rare bursts of anger. Murray showed his frustration as well. The crowd started to turn on him after he challenged a call in the eighth game of the fourth set, booing each time he complained to the umpire. His unforced error into the net on the next point prompted a huge cheer.

In the 12th game of the fourth set, Federer appeared to yell across the net after Murray stopped momentarily behind the baseline during the rally.

Murray shrugged it off and seemed to dig in. He'd won that point but lost the game and was taken to another tiebreaker, which he lost.

"We were just checking each other out for bit," Federer said. "That wasn't a big deal for me — I hope not for him."

Murray said "stuff like that happens daily in tennis," and added that it was "very, very mild in comparison to what happens in other sports."

When Federer got break point with Murray serving for the match at 6-5, the applause was so prolonged Murray had to wait to serve. And when Federer got the break to force a tiebreaker, the crowd stood and roared as Murray slammed a ball into the court in anger.

The crowd cheered for every Murray error in tiebreaker. One man yelled, "Andy, don't choke."

He didn't.

Rather than wilting under the pressure in the fifth set, Murray hit his stride. He allowed Federer only four points in the first three games of the fifth set, bolting to a 3-0 lead and carrying it through to the end.

"It's big. I never beat Roger in a Slam before. It definitely will help with the confidence," Murray said. "Just knowing you can win against those guys in big matches definitely helps."

Federer could see improvement in Murray's approach in the tough situations.

"With the win at the Olympics and the U.S. Open, maybe there's just a little bit more belief," Federer said. "Or he's a bit more calm overall."

Djokovic already owns three Australian titles and is aiming to be the first man in the Open era to win three in a row. The 25-year-old Serb was nearly flawless in his 89-minute disposal of No. 4-ranked David Ferrer in Thursday night's semifinal, and said he was hoping Murray and Federer would go to five sets.

"Obviously, Novak goes in as the favorite, I would think, even though Andy beat him at the U.S. Open," Federer said. "Novak is the double defending champion here. He's done really well again this tournament. Obviously a tough match again, and give a slight edge to Novak just because of the last couple of days."

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