Slashdot Mirror
Online Storage With a Twist
mssmss writes "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor — whose survival my storage depends on. It looks like Wuala has a way to do this, according to this story in the Economist. They use donated disk space of users to scatter your encrypted files over multiple computers."
It's like RAID for online storage.
Sounds great, but what happens when a massive worm outbreak occurs?
I don't think I want to be liable for the data that someone puts on my PC should the encryption ever be broken.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor â" whose survival my storage depends on."
And when the master server that knows where all those little pieces are goes down, you are still without your data.
Hmm... sounds good. I'll donate 2TB of space each from multiple computers at different locations and between all of them i'm bound to have two critical pieces of your files, then all i have to do is shut them all down! Muah haha haaaa!
And actually, what would happen if a major disaster shut down all the PC's in a major metropolitan area? Does the service provide enough redundancy that even if everyone in silicon valley went offline, my files would still be safe? I'd rather know where my data is.
Also, slashverteisment? The concept is interesting but the story doesn't bring up the more interesting issue of privacy, it seems like just an ad.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
> I don't think I want to be liable for the data that someone puts on my PC
I don't want random people's data on my disk. Period.
I was a beta tester for Wuala and the lack of access control to my donated disk space was the biggest issue. I talked to their CTO and suggested to have an option of donating the space to specific peers only, which should've not been hard to do given they have the social grouping support in place already. He didn't see an issue with wildcarded access though, so they were not planning (nor in fact did) anything about it.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Step 1: Joe pervert is busted (legitimately) for kiddie porn. It is determined he stored some of it with this service.
Step 2: Service is subpoenaed, and they give out all the user info for all the places where the bits of the files are stored.
Step 3: Arrest hundreds of people, declare a major kiddie porn ring busted, receive promotion.
Step 4: GOTO Step 1
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
And wouldn't kiddie pron collectors love this technology?
You could say the same about almost every technology. Full disk encryption, digital cameras, the entire internet itself, all this makes the life of a child pornographer that much easier. Focus on the good uses of a technology, and let law enforcement do its job if someone misuses it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I have a home business. So, for safety, I always keep one copy of my data at work and one at the office.
Oh wait.
You people do realize we need to start with the toaster if we really want to do something about the kiddy porn problem. After all, studies have shown that many child pornographers start their day with a piece of toast for breakfast. Why should corporations be providing child pornographers with equipment that helps them exploit children in this manner?!
On paper it is mostly a great idea.
We had a paper on some tricks to play in file systems to make it perform better:
http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/mcorner/papers/fast_2007_tfs.pdf
But when you get down to it, churn is your biggest enemy. If you look at the rate at which people join and leave p2p networks, the amount of replication you need to do can use a lot of bandwidth. Every time a user quits (or drive crashes etc.) all of the data they were storing for others must be replicated again. If they aren't available online for a while you have to assume they have left the network and replicate proactively. See the paper for a few sample calculations based on the churn found in systems like kazaa and skype.
-M
Must be nice to have family members for whom "ssh account" isn't a foreign language.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Simple, have a RAIH (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Houses) so you can just mirror your houses, so that if one happens to burn down then you'll have a backup copy.
I'm not sure how well a RAIH5 solution would work though but I'm sure there are plenty of people working on that though.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
...but it certainly is done. The projects I've found that do much the same thing are NOT being run by kids in their basement, but serious, large-scale research centers that need to do wide-area RAID.
dCache
iRods
OPeNDAP
PVFS
TPIE
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The only disk space I would be comfortable donating to this would be on a Truecrypted drive, so even if someone cracks their protection, it's secondarily protected by mine. If the cops seize my drive, they find nothing.
I piss off bigots.