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Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space?
Press2ToContinue writes "There is a new idea out there, proposed by Shawn Wilkinson, Tome Boshevski & Josh Brandof, that if you have unused disk space on your HD that you should rent it out. It is a great idea and the concept may have a whole range of implementations. The 3 guys describe their endeavor as: "Storj is a peer-to-peer cloud storage network implementing end-to-end encryption would allow users to transfer and share data without reliance on a third party data provider. The removal of central controls would eliminate most traditional data failures and outages, as well as significantly increasing security, privacy, and data control. A peer-to-peer network and basic encryption serve as a solution for most problems, but we must offer proper incentivisation for users to properly participate in this network."
It is sad to see that years of propaganda and fear-mongering by the government, politicians and police have actually worked out so well for them.
I might be wrong on this, but I don't quite think it's "propaganda" and "fear mongering" if you actually ruin lives over it.
Twenty years ago, the response to a peer-to-peer hosting network would have been "give me some of that".
Well, 20 years ago this wouldn't have been terribly practical (remember, back then dial-up was normal, broadband was not, and a 4GB hard disk was insanely large), but for the sake of the argument, I'll assume that the essence of this sentiment is "today's technology with yesterday's mindset, atmosphere, and culture". Today, if you know who you're dealing with, you can use something like Bittorrent Sync to do real-time replication. The P2P networks of that day (e.g. first-gen Napster and Gnutella), we were all "give me some of that" because they allowed the recipient to make use of the data, whereas this system does not.
Today, it's "imagine how the police could fuck you over if they wanted to".
It's a cost/benefit problem. A very low risk of legal trouble vs. music for free in a pre-Spotify, pre-Pandora world was worth it to most users of early P2P networks. Let's narrow down the market that could benefit from this: ...who would be in this category?
"Everyone with data" - 1,001 backup methodologies exist for this. Carbonite, Dropbox/GDrive/OneDrive (crude, but survives a system crash...), Amazon S3 all help.
"Everyone with data they don't want on the hard disks of companies who will hand over data with a 'pretty please'" - WD MyCloud (and the Seagate & Buffalo equivalents), FreeNAS (and other DIY NAS units), BT Sync, and either family or friends who are willing to barter storing a backup drive at their place for storing a backup drive at yours.
"Everyone with data they don't trust on the servers of family, friends, or companies" - Two externals and a safe deposit box, or a hole in the ground outside.
"Everyone with data they don't trust on servers of family, friends, companies, and don't want to do a drive swap" -
With the problem of "storing your data somewhere" already fairly well solved by other means, let's disuss cost/benefit: not trusting a company with a known agenda (you're still trusting Storj, though...), and not building your own data backup device or buying one, but instead trusting a whole lot of complete strangers, in exchange for cryptocurrency-at-best. The cost/benefit just doesn't seem to solve a problem that isn't already solved in one form or another for virtually every use case already.
How much more will it take to admit to ourselves that most Western nations are now police states?
Well, "police state" is a complicated designation to give; to my knowledge it's most commonly labeled in retrospect. The situation here is that this storage model enters a well-populated field, introducing a problem most others don't have, the problem just happens to be a legal one. Even if we hand-wave the legal trouble away, technologically it raises plenty of questions that just don't really seem to solve more problems than they cause.