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."

Comments

Nope

[Anrego]

Two biggest reasons:

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

2) Bandwidth is far more valuable to me than storage space. I've got tonnes of storage space, it's cheap. Bandwidth far less so.

Re:Nope

[JMJimmy]

Besides, who has free storage space!?

Re:Nope

[BarbaraHudson]

Storj is based on blockchain technology and peer-to-peer protocols to provide the most secure, private, and encrypted cloud storage.

That's what they all say. Funny how it never works out that way.

Re:Nope

[OzPeter]

Two biggest reasons:

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

From TFA they talk about "shards" being stored on a computer, so that no one computer holds a complete file. But yeah, if LEA comes a knocking then I bet you will still be in deep do-do.

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Re:Nope

[blackest_k]

makes no sense, how much would you rent out say a 2 terabyte hard drive, cost less than $100 to be worth while. might not be bad if they paid $50 a month for it not so much for $5 a month or less.

So why are you willing to payout $50 a month for encrypted 3rd party storage which is legal.

On the other hand say you have a college which needs offsite backups you have another college in the same area also needing off site backups. Now you could could pay for a third party to provide off site storage or you could trade storage space for storage space. If their systems go down they can restore from you and if your systems go down you can restore from you.

It's not the worst disaster recovery plan ever. However it does need trust between the two parties not so easy between strangers. However you might do it between say your drives and your parents. Assuming your not in the basement of course...

   

Re:Nope

[blackest_k]

you can restore from them ... i really should proof read better before posting

Re:Nope

[Bomarc]

Are storage spaces (such as Megaupload) responsible for their users files?

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, according to the USA, yes they are, that is why Kim Dotcom is undergoing extradition legal action in New Zealand.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference here is that law-enforcement understands real hosting sites are not necessarily liable when users put illegal things on those sites. But law-enforcement would have no way to know that YOU are selling storage space as well, because YOU are not obviously a company. They will treat you as the suspsect, and you'll have to go through the nastiness of being arressted (potentially brutally with swat teams breaking your door and killing your dog), UNTIL you can clear up that you are selling diskspace and it is not your file.

Re:Nope

[fustakrakich]

And the worst problem of remote storage is that you need an internet service provider at both ends to access it. Maybe it's the second worst. Liability issues involving content would be the worst.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

People and businesses buying new drives? I don't buy drives and arrays to exactly match what I need now with no spare space, I buy new ones to account for filespace needed over some future time period. And if there was a way to subsidize that by renting space on it, a person could probably buy a larger drive than originally planning to, then get that space back at a later date when they need it, assuming they had no other qualms about such a service.

Re:Nope

[Charliemopps]

Are storage spaces (such as Megaupload) responsible for their users files?

The problem is, that hasn't been decided as of yet. It would make sense to any normal person that they wouldn't be. But law enforcement isn't sure how to deal with such services so they are doing their best to kill the industry with raids, but then drop the cases before they hit court so no ruling can hurt their efforts.

Re:Nope

[The MAZZTer]

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Easy, do it the same way RAID does it: redundancy.

Re:Nope

[radarskiy]

"I don't get is how do you get your files back"

If you keep your files in only one place then many here would say you deserve to lose them.

Re:Nope

[JMJimmy]

Ya... my last drive purchase took me 6 days to fill. It was a 3TB drive.

Re:Nope

[BarbaraHudson]

People with bandwidth caps are going to hate this. People with "soft" bandwidth caps (throttling after x gb) are also going to hate this. But I think the worst is that it now incentivizes people to install a trojan on your system and rent out your storage space without you knowing, same as they did for bitcoin mining.

Re:Nope

[whoever57]

Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

Imagine this in the UK:

Police:"We think you have kiddy porn on your computer, what are the contents of these encrypted files?"
You: "I don't know"
Police: "Tell us the password"
You: "I don't know it"
Judge: "Go to jail until you tell us the password!"

Re:Nope

[jellomizer]

Which is why both political sides suck.
We got the government making sure with its complex set of rules that trying to make a few bucks is difficult and risky.
Then we have the corporations trying to get their own extra cut in the action by trying to charge customers more because they are happening to be making money off their product.

Re:Nope

[Starport]

totally agree with you. secondarily, I dont have free space for it to be filled up for others, I have free space to be used, and ready for use, when I need.

Re:Nope

[Rei]

Yes, but they need to make sure that they incentivize it correctly. Having purely a "per gigabyte" cost isn't reasonable. That's only accounting for the capital costs of buying the drives. They also impose wear costs per write and bandwidth costs per seek, and probably come costs for their usage of processing time and ram and the like.

Then there come issues of what sort of uptime / reliability / access times they want to guarantee? Surely they're going to have to distribute a given set of data out in a distributed fashion where any X percent of systems can be down or too slow at a given time and they still get their data back in a reasonable time. But how do you decide how much the system owner gets compensated under different downtime ratios / length of downtime / average access times / peak access times / etc? It'll be a tricky balancing act. Also access times vary from region to region, so certain regions could be more valuable for certain users than others, and some more valuable in general than others. Some people may not want to have their data in certain areas at all. And the system will have to decide when it decides a user to be too unreliable to store a fraction of a given dataset on and to store it on a different system instead. Then there's other things people may want to take into account, such as how green the power is

Technically possible, and a good goal, but quite a complicated challenge to do well.

Re:Nope

[DigiShaman]

I do. Though my drive/s have a finite lifespan. So when I get to the point of using about 3/4th total storage capacity, it's time to replace them; proactively when possible.

Data migration and expanding RAID containers is a major PITA. I absolutely loath the task! Each time it takes longer and longer to transfer date as the growth of storage capacity has far outpaced disk throughput. Because of that, I'm placing all non-essential media (music, movies, games, ISO images..etc) into simple RAID1 or JBOD containers while only my core data (family photos, documents, bills, scanned receipts, etc) gets more hand holding; I have a separate redundant backup scheme for them.

I wouldn't mind a space sharing scheme on a LAN as a last tier form of storage in a corporate environment (complete with co-worker usage tracking), but not for the general anonymous public.

Re:Nope

[Fnord666]

The problem is, that hasn't been decided as of yet. It would make sense to any normal person that they wouldn't be. But law enforcement isn't sure how to deal with such services so they are doing their best to kill the industry with raids, but then drop the cases before they hit court so no ruling can hurt their efforts.

Even if it turns out that you are not legally responsible for the content, that's not going to keep LE from confiscating/impounding your computer systems for an undetermined amount of time.

Re:Nope

[westlake]

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

This is the rock where Freenet comes to grief.

The corporate data service can bury its servers in a salt mine or cavern tucked away somewhere deep in the Appalachians. When ISIS or the Feds are breaking down the doors, on-site physical security becomes their problem, not yours, or your family's.

The geek can become obsessed with the notion of "plausible deniability." [Not so much with thinking clearly about what is actually plausible, but that is another story.] The problem is finding someone who gives a damn one way or the other. "Tag. You're It!"

Re:Nope

[ShanghaiBill]

People with bandwidth caps are going to hate this.

I don't think they will hate it. I think they will just not sign up.

But I think the worst is that it now incentivizes people to install a trojan on your system and rent out your storage space without you knowing

Why is that bad? It drives down the cost or storage for the rest of us, and incentivizes people to secure their systems. It is certainly better than them using compromised systems as spambots.

Re:Nope

[unixisc]

Two biggest reasons:

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

2) Bandwidth is far more valuable to me than storage space. I've got tonnes of storage space, it's cheap. Bandwidth far less so.

Not just that, this is a collective mentality of everyone must share. Do you share your car w/ arbitary strangers, or invite arbitary strangers into your house? Yeah, sometimes, people keep roommates, but it's not a normal practice. Similarly, why would one rent out unused drive space?

What's more - even for the guy who's buying, why go for that, when they can go to Google drive, Hightail or any other such services?

Re:Nope

[Kjella]

Besides, who has free storage space!?

I've been a pretty big pack rat, in total I think I have 18TB of HDDs. But the last time I was considering expand or delete I started going through my collection and realized you know all these series and movies I'd keep because I might see them again? Guess what, I hardly ever do. First of all there's always something new, secondly if I pull up something old I often remember what's going to get happen and get too bored to actually wait for it to happen. And it's not like this stuff disappears off the Internet in case I find out that yes, I'd really like to watch that again.

I ended up deleting 5+ TB that I figured, what the heck I'll find it again if I need it. Haven't missed much of it and what I did miss was easily re-downloaded, I know I could delete more but hey I already have the disks. And I've kept a ton of unsorted that I haven't rifled through in ages but I'm keeping just in case I need to dig something out of that pile, where I assume 90%+ could be deleted if I'd bother to sort it. Sure I have some personal material but it fits in a small corner of the total.

Re:Nope

[ArsenneLupin]

Even if it turns out that you are not legally responsible for the content

1. In many jurisdictions, posession is enough to make you guilty, knowing posession is not a requirement
2. Even in those jurisdictions that only criminalize knowing posession, the judge may strike the word knowing on a whim, an book you anyways. Yes, it's a bad bad world out there, and judges don't necessarily uphold the law as written. And they get away with it. Indeed, who is going to condemn them for it? Another judge, a work colleague who they've a good chance of knowing personally... This is an area where "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't mean squat.

Re:Nope

[ArsenneLupin]

You: "I don't know it"
Luxembourg judge: "You are a computer profesionnal. Computer professionals by definition know everything that's on their computer. Therefore you know your password. Now surrender it!"

Re:Nope

[marcello_dl]

in fact the tahoe lafs idea (erasure coding, you need e.g. any 3 chunks of the 6 floating around to reconstruct your file) is better suited because you are not hosting the whole document, and you can't even brute force decrypt a single chunk to obtain a part of the document either

Re:Nope

[rtb61]

How about a new metric. Per gigabyte date cost of analysing data and 'DELETING' what you don't need. Are companies becoming stupid data hoarders, keeping useless data that has no value and simply ramps up data handling costs. So rather than spending more and more money to hoard more and more data, how about regular data reviews and start deleting what you don't need or has less value than the cost of handling it.

So the new big thing, data review cycles. Where useless data is eradicated for ever because even though data storage might be cheap, managing data storage is not.

Re:Nope

[dinfinity]

Man, that was the least confusing part of your post. At that point I was still wondering how many Slashdotters own colleges.

After understanding what you wrote, though, it is indeed a solid easy strategy. You don't even need to have drives in the systems of your colleagues or family. Just place a NAS in their network and put BTSync or Syncthing (FKAPulseFKASyncthing) on it. With BTSync there even is a hidden method to create an encrypted key so that the data on the 'untrusted' nodes is only there in encrypted form: http://forum.bittorrent.com/to...
Syncthing is actively considering adding this feature: https://github.com/syncthing/s...

I haven't tested the BTSync encryption yet and am not aware of how secure it is, especially considering that BTSync is closed source, but this approach seems to me to be the future of small scale offsite redundancy (and of ad hoc file sharing in general).

Re:Nope

[quantaman]

Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

Imagine this in the UK:

Police:"We think you have kiddy porn on your computer, what are the contents of these encrypted files?"

You: "I don't know"

Police: "Tell us the password"

You: "I don't know it"

Judge: "Go to jail until you tell us the password!"

Why assume the courts will make the stupidest possible interpretation of the laws? In the vast majority of cases where someone is claiming this (and it end up on slashdown) the evidence suggests that they're lying.

Having your hard drives confiscated as evidence for an investigation is a legitimate risk but prison is not. Courts don't run like a software program, imprisoning people because of a bug.

Re:Nope

[EmeraldBot]

BarbaraHudson what's this about you ac stalking/harassing/libeling others http://slashdot.org/comments.p... that you ate your words for? Downmod this we see it anyhow (most here browse below -1) so trying to hide it = effete & ineffectual.

DAMN, how many posts of this do you plan to make? Just go away, none of us give a crap's worth.

Re:Nope

[Krishnoid]

However it does need trust between the two parties not so easy between strangers.

How about between Facebook friends?

Re:Nope

[maorb]

Why is that bad? It drives down the cost or storage for the rest of us, and incentivizes people to secure their systems. It is certainly better than them using compromised systems as spambots.

Who said that they wouldn't also mine for Bitcoins, send spam, and zombify your computer for their DDoS attacks. They already managed to get the Trojan onto the target computer, no need to limit themselves.

Anyways, while it's definitely good to have a secure system, that doesn't suddenly make the 'incentive' for having a secure system a good thing. It's like saying that living in a bad neighborhood is a good thing because it teaches people to consistently lock their doors and latch their windows.

Re:Nope

[Kjella]

Easy, do it the same way RAID does it: redundancy.

RAID tends to choke bad if you got systemic faults like a bad batch of drives failing at the same time. What happens if a botnet launches a bunch of nodes, you upload some files and all the nodes which happen to have a specific piece of data is taken offline simultaneously? Data loss, that's what.

Re:Nope

[Blaskowicz]

In most countries there are no caps but the "soft cap" is how slow the upload speed anyway, like around 120KB/s on a maxed out DSL line.

Re:Nope

[Blaskowicz]

Maybe even deduplication, done "after the fact" : if people have some identical shards that came from storing and uploading identical files, then you could request it from anyone. That'd be where it becomes a grey area, but perhaps not more than the legal status of caches, proxy and such.

Problem with redundancy : your data needs to be uploaded twice or more (but when you'll download it, there will be more sources to send it)

Re:Nope

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh because courts HAVE and DO jump to the worst possible conclusion and fuck guy's lives up for nothing? For exhibit A how about men accused of CP thanks to virus which a whole 5 minutes with malwarebytes would have shown the PC was infected, but did the courts even bother to check? Nope in fact on a similar case the prosecutor said he believed it was a "trick" and that "the suspect infected himself" so he would have a fucking excuse! The reason? He had enough technical knowledge to build his own tower....yep, if you can read instructions in the USSA "you be a criminal mastermind yo"!

The problem you and many geeks have with the CP laws is you try to treat the courts as rational actors....they aren't. You try to treat the laws as logical and consistently applied...they aren't. You try to treat the judges and prosecutors as individuals that seek justice and apply the law as fairly as possible....do I really need to point out how wrong you are? THIS IS A WITCH HUNT, and by their very definition Witch. Hunts. Aren't. Rational. and trying to apply rational thought to a witch hunt is just a waste of time!

We have seen time and time again, going all the way back to McMartin Preschool, that sanity and CP are two concepts that just don't go together. Doesn't matter how obvious it is that it isn't your CP, doesn't matter if you don't have the key to the crypto, in fact the laws of many states don't have anything about you personally having access to it, merely that you possess it, so your rational statements? Really do not belong in this discussion.

Re: Nope

[blang]

Everybody who has any space at all. Space that is not used is free.
Of you hav 1 tb for $50 but using only 500 gb, then you are paying effectively 10cper gb, not 5 cent.

Re: Nope

[blang]

That is a very obvious one. You dont.
The system must however permanently scan your library of rented space to tally how many copies are online, and as soon as it drops below 4 or whatever the threshold, ned to rent space on anew nide, or as an emergency measure start backing up the data to owned local storage, or a public cloud.

Re: Nope

[blang]

Its economy, stupid.

Landlord first. When you pay 100 dollars for a hard drive and using only half of that capacity, you are sitting on 50 dollars wort of storage, unused, wasted, 50 dollars that you will never see again. Providing your bandwidth is good, you system is not overloaded, almost any price higher than $0.00 would be profitable.
You might buy a 10 tb nas for $1000. It will take you 5 more years to fill it up. If you get $800 back over the nex couple of years, would it still be a bad idea?

Tenant side:
The main reason for renting is that we dont want to buy something, especially if it is only temporary. Maybe you need 10 tb for a short project over a couple of months. You can buy it yourself for 1000 or so, or you can rent it for 30 for a couple if months. If you needed 10 tb permanently you likely would just buy.
Or if rental prices are favorable, you could rent.
You say disk is cheap.
I will let you in on a secret, kid.
It is going to be even cheaper next year.
So the price to rent 1 tb us going to go down and down.
If you buy disk now, you miss out on the half price disk next year.
Renting will let you keep you $100 in your pocket. You might be able to rent 1 tb for 20 dollars for the next 100 years.
So you saved 80.

And regardless of saving a buck, this sounds like a relatively inexpensive way to buy offsite backup.
The only problem i see is that you need more rendundancy than normal solution, since the providers might quit the service ot go offline with no warning.
Increased redundancy means much less efficiency. So this system is not something you could set up just for making money in competition with the main cloud vendors.
It is only a system to recover some of the money you itherwie have wasted on excess capacity.

Re: Nope

[blang]

This.
If not every major infrastructure and technology executive would be serving life time prison sentences for the millions of crimescommitted on their equpment every day.

Re:Nope

[ncc74656]

Data migration and expanding RAID containers is a major PITA. I absolutely loath the task!

That's why you don't use RAID. Instead, use something more flexible. I've been running Greyhole for a while now. Adding storage doesn't require shifting files around (unless you want to rebalance storage), you can use drives of different sizes, and you can control the level of redundancy you use (more for important files, less for stuff that's easily replaced). You can yank a disk out of a Greyhole installation and read all of the files off of it with standard file-copy tools.

Important stuff that doesn't take too much space (documents, Git repos, etc.) is backed up daily to Tarsnap. Less-important stuff (movies, music) and larger files (photos) get dumped to BD-R and are stored in binders in my desk at work; images are prepared with dvdisaster for added error recovery capability and are burned to single-layer BD-R HTL media.

Re: Nope

[blang]

You could get your hard drives confiscated after a house guest uses your internet connection.
He might not even have done antything wrong except being infected.
It is ok to be paranoid. But if you chose to live like that, please cover all the bases and dont be a moron.

Re:Nope

[JMJimmy]

The comment wasn't anything more than a lighthearted anecdote. No I do not believe things are black and white.

For personal use I buy 2 drives a year typically at no more than CDN$37.50/TB. I always retire a drive when I add a new one though to keep upkeep costs down.

Re: Nope

[blang]

Very clever, but you forget one thing.
The dudes showing up at your door is not going to a be gullible fellow nerds.
They will carry it all away, you tablets cell phones, and anyting that looks like sort of computerlike. They are not going to take just the usb stick you hand them, they are going to look at you with blank eyes when you try to explain about vmware.
Then they can with law in hand force you to hand over passwords.
The inconvenience is not that they might find something youre hiding,
The inconvenience us that they will take all your stuff, for who knows hiw longm and werher ut wilk be returned to you intact. The san itself probably should be in a different physical location, preferably on a different address that does not have internet. With wifi or ethernet connectivity to your server location.

So better be more clever. If you have added frequent offsite backup, via net or sneaker, and the ability to recover quickly to a replacement san, ok.

If you have the $$ also review any such deal with a lawyer and have a plan what to do in case of different scenarios.

Re:Nope

[DrStrangluv]

I have some friends in the IT department of a college in Arkansas that did this recently: they exchanged rack space with a college in Oklahoma and have an agreement for bandwidth with use to send backups to each other.

Re:Nope

[ihtoit]

This. Particularly if the case in hand hits the public domain, then $Joe Sixpack is out for blood. Anybody's blood. That someone stands accused is enough for the Court of Public Opinion to declare guilt and start sharpening scythes. Why aren't more police being locked up for CP? Think about that for a second, here's the answer: because they are POLICE. How about social workers? Again, Because they are SOCIAL WORKERS. They like the police, have been entrusted with the safety of the public (laughably), therefore they are above reproach. Until some bad apple gets *caught*. They're the stupid ones, the smart ones haven't been caught. Kids are still suffering. Think of the children. Lock up a cop.

Re:Nope

[ihtoit]

RIAA don't have the authority to issue fines, that is something reserved for judges.

Re:Nope

[TrollingForHostFiles]

He's been doing this for 15+ years.

Re:Nope

[tlhIngan]

1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.

The way to do this is not to store whole files on an individual computer - instead it's to do a RAID-like system where you only have a small portion of the file.

And the worst problem of remote storage is that you need an internet service provider at both ends to access it. Maybe it's the second worst. Liability issues involving content would be the worst.

That's why you don't store it as files, you store it as a RAID-like stripe. There are many coding systems that let you pick how many stripes you want to make, and of those, how many you need to reconstruct the file - e.g., you can pick 3 of 4 (a la RAID5), 3 of 5 (RAID 6), or any arbitrarily set of stripes and minimums.

So if it's a super important file, you might want put it across many stripes with only a few to recover it.

Re:Nope

[super3]

1) You are not storing whole files but rather encrypted shards of files. We have another methodologies, to prevent against this. If you are really paranoid about it then you can be selective on what chunks you choose to host, but you won't make much. 2) Bandwidth is rewarded as well. Those with high bandwidth low storage would tend toward CDN applications. Those with high storage low bandwidth would tend toward data backup applications.

Re:Nope

[super3]

We don't implement a cost per GB, although someone at the application level is free to do that. Space sellers are able to set their own pricing and they can factor in costs like drive wear and bandwidth costs. You have the buyer on the other hand who is trying to find the most reputable peer, with good uptime, at the lowest cost. Amazon S3 uses a homogeneous architecture and hardware, while our network is quite heterogeneous so it make sense for buyers and sellers to set their own prices to factor in the many variables.

Re:Nope

[super3]

Well we have incentive for bandwidth as well, and we will have some controls in the applications as well to limit bandwidth. If you are accepting data contracts that are more backup related, you just have the initial download, then the user might not ever access that data again. In that case, we can work with very low bandwidth easily. I'm currently writing a whitepaper on the incentives and token system. Basically you have to buy a "software license" of sorts to participate in the network, and establish reputation by hosting shards of files well. This is unlike Bitcoin where compute power has a direct correlation to earning potential. The bot master would have to spend a small fortune on licenses for that many nodes, and I assume botnet nodes are not the most stable in terms of uptime. This is a great edge case though, and I'll write it into my paper.

Re:Nope

[super3]

This kind of attack is covered in the whitepaper: http://storj.io/storj.pdf

Re:Nope

[Sqr(twg)]

I wouldn't call it "covered". What is says is: "If randomly distributed, the probability of the same redundant piece being hosted on the same controlled node is statistically quite small." It does not attempt to quantify what "quite small" means. So I'll try to do that.

Assume that you have a million blocks stored in the network. Each block is stored as three identical copies. Then assume that 1 % of the storage network is taken down at the same time. The probability that all copies of an individual block got lost is one in a million. However, the probability that at least one out of your one million blocks was lost is approximately 1-1/e or 63 %. So in this scenario, you are more likely than not to have lost data.

Re:Nope

[super3]

1) Your scenario includes simple redundancy, whereas in the spec we have k-of-n erasure encoding. This increases the number of floating pieces, and reduces the probability significantly. 2) Users and applications are able to control their redundancy. Our networking testing data will tell us the recommended numbers. User with a large amount of redundancy will shrug this off 3) I can host my files with known peers. For example, I could send some of my chunks with my friend Bob or a known datacenter. 4) 1% of the nodes going down as the same time has two possibilities: a problem at the DNS or backbone level, in which case we can expect those chunks back when that recovers, or a coordinated attack. 4a) Using the psuedo-reputation and token system we can keep botnets from joining the network. They would have to pay even to be peers, and if they have poor uptime(it is a botnet), they won't earn anything or get any contracts. 5) The ultimate solution is smart contract based SLAs. We can cover as many technical ways of doing, but incentives are the best way. Lose all the chunks and the user gets a $10k check. Creates huge financial disincentives for an attacker. Cover it well enough? Let me know if you have any questions.

Re:Nope

[cdrudge]

If you are a company where your business is providing disk space for random files of a subscriber, you'll need to deal with law enforcement. But it's not likely that the business will be liable for the contents of those files unless they completely ignore any credible notification of illegalities. For the average Joe running a random piece of software that allows him to sublet his excess storage likely would have a lot more scrutiny and a lot more hassles proving those files aren't his.

I look at it like someone being caught transporting drugs. If they were shipped via UPS, Fedex, or USPS, the courier and company aren't going to be arrested. But if you or I got pulled over and drugs were found in a box that we were "just delivering for someone", we probably would be.

Re:Nope

[AmiMoJo]

It's cheaper to keep data than to evaluate it. Someone asked about sorting out a large collection of photos they had taken for work (professional photographer) due to the amount of storage space they were taking up on Slashdot a while back. Someone else then pointed out that even if they paid some intern minimum wage to do the evaluation it would be more expensive than just buying more drive space and a NAS.

For companies where people who are well paid generate data, like say engineers or researchers, they would need someone who understands those things to do the evaluation. The cost of deleting something they need years later could be high. I sometimes look at 15 year old files for work. The thing is, 15 year old files are all tiny and can be stored easily. By the time file are old enough to consider deleting them it just isn't worth doing.

Re:Nope

[BarbaraHudson]

Thanks for replying, and happy new year.

The problem is disk space is incredibly cheap, so why would anyone rent from people when they can just peer with someone else they trust and each back up the other? Or just back up to multiple hard disks and take them off-site - faster backups, no dependency on bandwidth ("never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard disks"), and much quicker recovery times in the event of a disaster?

Nobody's going to buy a software license to participate in this sort of scheme where it makes it more likely for them to suffer a catastrophic data loss from quicker hard drive failure, never mind the inconvenience and cost of leaving the computer on 24/7.

The other problem is that backing up your files is not sufficient. You need to back up the OS as well, which means making a whole disk image (or at least a partition image). Taking a snapshot of that disk is going to require a disk with the same capacity, so you're stuck with having a second drive anyway, so why not just bring that second one off-site?

This was, IMHO, poorly thought out wrt competing technology and practicality. People who absolutely need dependable backups can't use it. People who don't need absolutely dependable backups can use free solutions or an external backup drive - 3Tb is now going for as low as $90.00 at tigerdirect, and if there's one thing we know, it's that it will get cheaper in the future.

Re:Nope

[mccalli]

Crashplan, amongst others, implements a backup scheme as you describe. I use it - some friends allocate drive space to me, and I allocate drive space for them. We back up remotely to each other's systems via Crashplan, and do so for free. The resultant backujps are encrypted, so they can't see my files and I can't see theirs.

Works well - I've used it a couple of times for actual recovery of files, and it worked both times.

Re:Nope

[STORJX]

You can have a look at our FAQ (http://storj.io/faq), there is a section on Illegal Material on Storj where we propose shard graylisting. Anyone could make a graylist indicating the unique hash of a shard that is associated with certain decrypted content. Then, the farmer could decide to opt-in to such a graylist if they don't wish to be party to distribution of such content (e.g. child exploitation, violent terror videos, etc.).

Re:Nope

[STORJX]

Not sure what projects you are referring to and not interested either when you say: "they all say that". As far as Storj goes the quote you mentioned is what we are actually hard at work to deliver. Watch this space you will be surprised when we go live. ;)

Re:Nope

[STORJX]

"I think the worst is that it now incentivizes people to install a trojan on your system and rent out your storage space without you knowing" about your mention above, our software is not a trojan and it doesn't install as if by magic. People will have to want to run our software. If you want to find out more about Storj go to http://storj.io/ or head over to our forum at https://storjtalk.org/ where you can join the discussion and get all your questions answered.

Re:Nope

[STORJX]

You can have a look at our FAQ (http://storj.io/faq), there is a section on how DriveShare and MetaDisk work. About bandwidth and retrieving your files, consider that files are "sharded" which means they get shredded in lots of different small pieces and distributed over the network with a default redundancy of 3x. The network has algorithms that run a periodic check (heartbeat) to find out if all shards for a specific file are stored where they are supposed to be. If one or more of the shards are not available when a heartbeat runs the network will find another copy of it (out of the 3x), replicate it and store it on a different node (host) that is live. Users will be able to choose the amount of redundancy they feel comfortable with, from 3x to 50 x or 200x... As we proceed further with our beta we will also look at it ourselves and see what works best. We may find that a default 3x redundancy is not good enough, so we will increase it accordingly to make sure files are retrievable.

Re:Nope

[STORJX]

It won't work the way you described it, if you are using DriveShare you are only sharing your free HD space and make it available to the network. There are no private keys or passwords involved. What will be stored on your HD is only small encrypted chunks (shards) of files, not the entire files themselves. So even if your HD gets accessed by someone else, these shards have no use and are unreadable unless they are retrieved by the original uploader who has the private key to decrypt and thus reconstruct the file from all the different pieces. These pieces are hosted and many different nodes all over the world. The responsibility here is on the uploader of the files, not on who helps the network with their own free storage.

Re:Nope

[cthulhu11]

Not to mention that most people have asymmetrical connections with limited upstream speed. Which is already going to be saturated with torrenting :-x

Re:Nope

[Anrego]

Too low reward to risk and effort for me.

You can say you'll _probably_ be fine, but as said in my original post, even if you are completely in the clear, just dealing with LEA is going to be unpleasant, and for whatever cents I could get renting something that can be had fairly cheaply, it's just not worth that risk or effort involved in mitigating that risk.

Re:Nope

[rtb61]

You are not just keeping it. You require a protected structure to keep your protected storage. You need to backup and verify backups. You need to renew backup media as it ages and this needs to be regularly checked. So it depends how much unnecessary data you are keeping and that you would have thrown away if it were paper, 10X, 100x, 1,000x, even 10,000x and then of course there is swamping needed data under masses of unneeded data making retrieval harder, say something like informal email versus formal email or variations on development versus the final outcome. Of course there is also a world of difference between deleting types of data versus individual documents, so what types of data is kept and for how long. Mass data hoarding only really suits the profit profiles of company that store other companies data. So evaluating data on the go is in reality cheaper in the long run versus high cost archiving mass useless data. A lot of companies doing it smart could pretty much cut data storage back to one large hard drive in a fire rated safe kept on site, in fact by far the majority. Of course looking at it that way, youch, it would cripple data storage companies profits ;).

Re:Nope

[Salgat]

I'm assuming the storage is redundant, which means they could divide up each encrypted file among several computers. This means that even if you knew the decryption key, you'd have no way to decrypt it.

No thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

And be responsible for someone's illegal content? I have a family, a house and a job. I like them very much. I'm not endangering them to host someone's stash of kiddie porn or anything.

Re: No thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about kiddie porn? I'm adding you to the FBI watch list.

Not a chance.

[YrWrstNtmr]

Drive space is cheap. In addition to not being able to use some of what I have here, I also have to dedicate part of my bandwidth?
Not happening.
In addition, whose responsibility is it as to what is 'stored' on my hard drives?

"proper incentivisation"? You couldn't afford enough to pay me for this.

Re:Not a chance.

[mattventura]

Drive space is cheap, and so are current backup services. I can't imagine that this service would be significantly cheaper than the existing services, so what's the point? There's unlimited (yeah yeah, "Unlimited") backup services for $5/month, so it's not like there's even much money to be saved.

Re:Not a chance.

[Grishnakh]

As for the type of data stored on your disk...those are just bits. They are encrypted and unknown/unavailable to you. Exact and similar patterns of bits show up in hundreds of files. They are just bits.

Have fun explaining that to the SWAT team that just busted down your door and shot your dog and is beating you while you're on the floor.

Re:Not a chance.

[Bengie]

You wouldn't need to dedicate any bandwidth, just set it to low priority. I run several P2P programs that I seed and stuff 24/7. I just have my P2P ports traffic shaped down to just enough to maintain connections, while allowing P2P to use all of my free bandwidth. I will let P2P use right up to 96% of my bandwidth and as soon as my wife starts watching Netflix, Netflix will be allowed to burst, pushing P2P down into the single digits and quickly rebounding once the burst is over. All the while not affecting my pings at all, less than 1ms of jitter.

HFSC is like magic, once you figure out how to configure it. I also recommend having dedicated bandwidth, otherwise HFSC doesn't work very well, or at least setting it to traffic shape to your lowest expected bandwidth. If you have a connection that bounces between 50 and 25, then you target 25.

Re:Not a chance.

[mattyj]

"Drive space is cheap" can be interpreted as "Throw more storage at it", a notion the IT community dismissed as absurd over a decade ago. If I just kept throwing drives at my data, I'd quickly run out of physical space on my NAS, would have to buy a 10 bay unit and put six more drives in it, etc., etc. People who say 'drive space is cheap' never actually adhere to that philosophy, which is a weird paradox because they're more likely the ones that manage their storage in a more sane way, yet they give out this horrible advice.

Or maybe these are the people that have 30 TB of storage on a small 'heater' next to their TV, but with 3 year's worth of time machine backups on it. Either way, 'drive space is cheap' is pretty lame.

It's not just Hard Drive space

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we're talking bandwidth and processing power (encryption). And electric bills.

And in return, you may be hosting kiddie porn or illegal downloads and not know it. Try explaining that to a judge if one of the clients gets into legal trouble and blames the entire stack (software, software company, and end-hosts).

Re:It's not just Hard Drive space

[gnupun]

Now we're talking bandwidth and processing power (encryption). And electric bills.

And who keeps their PC/laptop on all the time. It's not a server.

No

[gatkinso]

For the reasons already cited.

Re:no

[allo]

This is called Betteridge's law.

Wuala used to have this

[ButcherCH]

That's more or less what Wuala used to have but they dropped this quite some while ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... For details why the dropped it http://www.eurecom.fr/fr/publi...

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

Ross Anderson and 1996 came calling. And the cypherpunk movement had reasonable implementations of such an Eternity Service for a decade or two already. This is, of course, not to say that the first implementations have ever been winners in technology sphere. However, rather than "Wowz, there's this rad completely new idea of renting out your storage space!", I'd like to hear what new features they actually bring to the table -- besides marketing.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

Oh, yeah, they should've said that in the summary - the difference to Morpheus, Freenet, Mojonation, Chord etc. (in no particular order) is that with Storj (which, somehow, is supposed to be pronounced "Storage" according to their site) is that to participate at this stage, you'll have to buy (currently) 300 dollars worth of their freshly minted cryptocurrency. No thanks.

Additionally from their FAQ: "As described in the MetaDisk whitepaper, we will use Florincoin as an initial solution. Eventually, we will transition to a system with more direct and scalable access to the Bitcoin blockchain via proof-of-existence. As blockchain technology improves we can use systems like Factom to provide faster throughput, and Ethereum to create enforceable contracts on data storage." So... they're in large part relying on technology not even developed yet. I get the modern rush to put software out before anybody else (Or say, 20 years after...), but this does sound like a prime example of putting the cart before the horse.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Oligonicella]

That catapults it from no to fuck no. Smells very much like scam.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Donwulff]

I'm trying hard not to be the token anti-cryptocurrency dude here, but yeah, the theme of the year seems to be "We've invented the wheel - now with Bitcoin!". The glut of different freshly minted cryptocurrencies from everybody who arrived upon the bright idea of starting out a new cryptocurrency, pre-mining it a bit and giving a fancy name has led to people differentiating with different tie-ins to try to get people adopt their coin adopted.

There isn't any instantly apparent reason Storj is tied down to cryptocurrency (which they themselves admit will be changing), although I'll admit it does give a snazzy way to pay for the storage service, but it's nothing new - at least Mojonation was originally based specifically around the idea of micropayments with a cryptocurrency. In fact it sounds exactly like MojoNation from 2000 with Bitcoin like Merkle trees for proof-of-storage thrown in.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with improvement like that, one thing that catches the eye is that despite copious references, their whitepapers don't really reference any of the prior work on the area of distributed storage like that, and try to sell it as completely new proof-of-concept idea. Oh yeah, along with the "Now with Bitcoin, but all you have to do is buy our new cryptocurrency" :)

Re:Wuala used to have this

[dinfinity]

Yeah, the coin doesn't seem to be doing well: http://coinmarketcap.com/asset...
It's not on any exchange, either.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[super3]

We are going to be using the cryptocurrency as a pseudo-reputation system(writing a paper on this), and a software license. At this point we don't want everyone and their uncle trying to join the network. The cryptocurrency serves as a barrier for now. We get the right type of crypto nerds to get early access to the software, and give us good data and feedback. Based on demand we will lower the barrier of of entry. I understand the hesitance, but I'd wait till I produce another paper on that. I've written two on the system itself so far, and I can only write so fast.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[super3]

We only want cryptocurrency nerds at this point as we slowly scale out the system. That is a purposeful barrier to entry. We will lower it as we scale out the system. Well its just a scale issue, you can't put a hash in the Bitcoin blockchain. Due to tx fees this is prohibitively expensive. Florincoin was a good temporary solution to get it working for one of our sample applications. This worked great as a proof of concept, but we need to support more than 7 Transactions per second(TPS). The Factom system we plan on using is quite simple. Give me a few beers, and a could probably program the base concept in a weekend. Take your metadata, hash them up into a merkle tree, add the merkle root in OP_RETURN of a bitcoin transaction.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[STORJX]

We are running our early beta test and you can check the network status at https://live.driveshare.org./ We have had a crowdsale where our supporters have contributed to have early access to our beta software. We are not asking anyone to go and buy Storjcoin X (SJCX) to get into our beta and we will never do. The way we want our beta to go is to scale up slowly like any other company does, 10 users, then 50, then 100, then 1000 and so on. We have enough crowdsale supporters to help us out during our beta, we are not pushing anyone here. Everyone will be able to get our apps for free once the beta is over, so I'm not sure what your point is. For your second point we are concentrating on decentralizing cloud storage, again we are in our early beta. Other projects in the space are trying to solve other issues (contracts, system of records, etc), we are building Storj as modularly as possible to make it easy to integrate with other projects and technologies. You make it sound like if it's a problem to want to integrate with other players in the space. We don't believe in competition at Storj we believe in cooperation and integration. One project on its own will never be able to decentralize everything, but different projects put to work together could make a lot of difference.

Re:Wuala used to have this

[Salgat]

You shouldn't use such a scammy sounding method for your product, even if you think it'll help you in a minor way. This has a very bad PR feel to it and will probably scare away a lot of customers and take away some of your legitimacy.

No way in HELL!

[Anonymous Coward]

This would most likely mean letting a stranger access my private network. Not gonna happen in a million years!!

Re:No way in HELL!

[diamondmagic]

Um, what do think you're doing when you download a torrent?

What do you think you're doing when you request a webpage?

Who has unused drive space?

[BitZtream]

I'm constantly wanting more space, never do I have free space. Its a constant matter of managing what I don't delete. I guess I'm a data horder.

On that same note ... do I really want someone's kiddie porn on my drive with all the legal issues that go with that? No.

Re:Who has unused drive space?

[Bengie]

A lot of people purchase computers with the option of upgrading from 500GB to 2TB for an extra $30. Then they install Office and a few games, leaving them with 1.5TB+ of free space sitting idle until they purchase a new computer a few years later.

Re:Who has unused drive space?

[Hadlock]

One of the major online retailers last week had a 5TB USB 3.0 external drive for $129 how much data do you have??? My file server is setup with about 8 TB of space which is plenty it turns out.

Re:Who has unused drive space?

[CaptainDork]

So you're out of the demographic.

That does not apply to everyone, right?

Re:Who has unused drive space?

[Oligonicella]

SIxty-four dollars for a T. Massive storage not relying on internet access or someone's machine crapping out. If you have a computer and internet, that's well within your demo.

Re:Who has unused drive space?

[CaptainDork]

OK, but what about 100 petabyte?

Even sillier

[YrWrstNtmr]

They 'pay' you in pseudo Bitcoin.
"Now to rent out something means that there is a compensation for services rendered. This comes in the form of Storjcoin X. Storjcoin X (SJCX) is a token that allows people to buy and rent storage as well as being traded on exchanges. It is a Counterparty asset and uses the Bitcoin blockchain for its transactions."

Re: Even sillier

[Fwipp]

How is this different from FileCoin?

Re: Even sillier

[super3]

We do not use network consensus because it opens you Sybil attacks. Our code is available on Github, free and open source. FileCoin seems to YC backed, and taking a more closed approach.

Re:Even sillier

[coofercat]

It was gonna be called Stoojcoin, but got changed right at the last moment.

No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[ip_freely_2000]

No way I'd want to support some a-hole keeping some kind of illegal garbage on my system. Is the company running this idea going to indemnify in all jurisdictions? Is some FBI guy going to kick in my door to grab my drive for the contents of some kind of nastiness? Just a bad idea.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

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. Twenty years ago, the response to a peer-to-peer hosting network would have been "give me some of that". Today, it's "imagine how the police could fuck you over if they wanted to".

How much more will it take to admit to ourselves that most Western nations are now police states?

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[YrWrstNtmr]

Years of propaganda? That, and also assholes who will use this for their own means, and screw the innocent user, simply because they do not care.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[maorb]

IANAL but the system could be designed such that your system CAN'T have child porn on it even if someone else has added child porn to the distributed network.

Imagine for a moment that all files are encrypted in 64KB blocks, then imagine that the peer-to-peer system, lets say it's torrent based, stores them in 32KB chunks. Lastly, the system does not store any two sequential chunks on the same computer (effectively the even chucks would be like one torrent, the odd chucks a second torrent, and only the originator of the data even would know which torrents correspond to each other). Since 32KB of the 64KB block are not on your computer (and your computer doesn't even know how to find the corresponding other 32KB chunks), the data on your computer cannot be processed in such a way as to result in child porn, thus you are not in possession of, nor distributing illegal content.

Well, it's a pipedream anyway. A lawyer would probably say that since it can be turned into child porn by adding a specific set of additional data and then decrypting the resulting file it constitutes child porn itself. Which would sort of imply that in a more general case that any set of binary data that can be found in a larger but illegal set of binary data is illegal to share if it's likely that someone somewhere will combine the two sets of data at some point in the future. Dang, when I word it like that it even starts to sound reasonable because of the 'likely' clause.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[Voyager529]

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:
"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" - ...who would be in this category?

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.

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[thegarbz]

That, and also assholes who will use this for their own means

You mean like store files on a cloud service they paid to use to store files? THOSE ARSEHOLES!

Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive....

[STORJX]

You can have a look at our FAQ (http://storj.io/faq), there is a section on Illegal Material on Storj where we propose shard graylisting. Anyone could make a graylist indicating the unique hash of a shard that is associated with certain decrypted content. Then, the farmer could decide to opt-in to such a graylist if they don't wish to be party to distribution of such content (e.g. child exploitation, violent terror videos, etc.). On another note you wont have any entire file ever stored on your HD but simply pieces (shards) of them. So if you were to try and read them they will make no sense as they are only pieces of the puzzle (the entire file).

A "new" Idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wuala has had this years ago (and disabled it in the meantime) and the VolunteerGrid that worked with Tahoe LAFS was using this idea as well.

The volunteer grid has had problems with availability (despite high redundancy settings and uptime requirements of 95% for each node)..

So it is not new and it is by far not easy!

Re:A "new" Idea?

[preaction]

Freenet has had it for even longer.

Legally difficult

[15Bit]

In the UK at least, you can go to jail for not giving up the decryption keys/password for data stored on your hard disk. As forgetting the pass phrase is not a legitimate excuse, i doubt they would accept the idea that it is someone else's data. So in the event that the police have any excuse to investigate your hard drives, this is a instant ticket to jail.

Re:Legally difficult

[Anonymous Coward]

Just another reason to not visit the UK, not that people in the UK or anywhere else have much of a reason to visit the US these days. I can't say I'd recommend it anyway, and I live here.

Funny how things that happen all the time are not a legitimate excuse, unless of course they happen to law enforcement. Forget your password (in the UK), potential jail time! Law enforcement "forgets" to share evidence that might cast doubt on your alleged guilt (in the US)--well, that's OK. It must have been a legitimate mistake.

You're not aware of one of the warehouse full of legal codes you're supposed to obey on a daily basis? That's no excuse. Why didn't you memorize something that nobody in the entire legal profession knows in its entirety? Law enforcement arrests you for something that's not actually illegal (like filming the police), they don't suffer any consequences even though that's either ignorance or willful ignorance of the law.

Side comment: it's really time to end this "ignorance of the law is no excuse" bullshit. That particular bit of claptrap has no legitimacy in today's society.

Re:Legally difficult

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK at least, you can go to jail for not giving up the decryption keys/password for data stored on your hard disk. As forgetting the pass phrase is not a legitimate excuse, i doubt they would accept the idea that it is someone else's data. So in the event that the police have any excuse to investigate your hard drives, this is a instant ticket to jail.

While agreeing that this does not sound like a good idea, forgetting the pass phrase can be a legitimate excuse. In many cases the claim has been rejected as improbable - for example where a computer was in daily use but the owner claims to have 'forgotten' the pass phrase on the same day that a warrant is served.

(8) Where, in a case in which a disclosure requirement in respect of any protected information is imposed on any person by a section 49 notice—
(a) that person has been in possession of the key to that information but is no longer in possession of it,
(b) if he had continued to have the key in his possession, he would have been required by virtue of the giving of the notice to disclose it, and
(c) he is in possession, at a relevant time, of information to which subsection (9) applies,
the effect of imposing that disclosure requirement on that person is that he shall be required, in accordance with the notice imposing the requirement, to disclose all such information to which subsection (9) applies as is in his possession and as he may be required, in accordance with that notice, to disclose by the person to whom he would have been required to disclose the key.

(9) This subsection applies to any information that would facilitate the obtaining or discovery of the key or the putting of the protected information into an intelligible form.

Re:Legally difficult

[ihtoit]

they'll arrest you for something else, like obstructing a police officer, obstructing a highway, ignoring a posted "no stopping" or "no loitering" sign, blocking a public thoroughfare or emergency exit... at which point they have probable cause to seize your camera for evidence and keep it for as long as they want to.

Re:Legally difficult

[ihtoit]

traumatic stress has been known to cause permanent selective memory loss.

Remember this response for the next time you're told that anything you do say will be taken and used in evidence:

"PLEASE DON'T HIT ME AGAIN OFFICER!"

Re:Legally difficult

[allo]

You're having plausibly deniability. And they know it.
Not plausible as in "we know, every truecrypt user has a hidden volume", but as in "we know, that the protocol does not permit you to have the encryption keys"

Re:Legally difficult

[allo]

There may be other reasons. Like my passphrase had 30 chars and was on a piece of paper, which i flushed down the toilet just a minute ago.

I don't like that idea, but...

[BigThor00]

While I wouldn't want to rent out space on my hard drive, what if I could get everyone in my family to work together and share some HD space and have a family Virtual SAN? That would be cool. Then I can control who is using the space, not everyone in my family does use all of their hard drive. I can put family pictures in the Family SAN, and automatically everyone can access them. While I don't like the original idea, there are potentials for it.

Re:I don't like that idea, but...

[Bengie]

I can put family pictures in the Family SAN, and automatically everyone can access them.

Most file systems are not meant to handle multi-master or even single-master-multi-reader.

Re:I don't like that idea, but...

[Bengie]

He said "I can put family pictures in the Family SAN, and automatically everyone can access them". SAN is a block device shared over the network. It is a very specific type of network storage. If he meant a "file share", then he meant a NAS.

Re:I don't like that idea, but...

[Pikoro]

What you want for that is btsync

No...

[steveo777]

It's a pretty cool idea. And the algorithm would be fun to explore, but the individual overhead alone on this systems isn't worth the time or money for the minimal payout. How much could you possibly, reasonably expect to pull in? A few bucks a year? Certainly not enough to offset your new bandwidth and power requirements.

You'd be better off building a small SAN in your basement and selling cloudiness to people you know for the maintenance costs. A while ago I helped some friends set up a small mesh of Drobos and other cheap SANs where they could deposit their photos, etc, at each other's houses. Four people had four copies of their data in four physical locations. Everything was encrypted and everyone got the same space. So long as they keep everything on and plugged in...

Re:No...

[captjc]

The problem is it is a terrible idea for a service because as it has mentioned by practically everyone in this forum, storage space is cheap, bandwidth is expensive, and kiddy pron. However, for a company to use on internal networks, it would be a pretty neat idea. It would be an interesting way of turning leased or purchased corporate PCs into cloud-based thin clients while still utilizing the (generally) large hard drives most laptop and desktop machines come with. It also means not needing a data center in every campus to house local cloud storage for employees as every computer on the network would be a (hopefully) redundant node of the local storage cloud.

Re:No...

[steveo777]

That would be interesting, indeed.

I've never seen a corporation spring for anything greater than the smallest HDD available, though, so the returns wouldn't be too substantial for anyone on a long-term refresh, though I have seen .5 and 1TB drives shipping recently (and you'd probably want to keep your hands off the SSDs for now). Assuming 100 nodes at an average of 100GB of free space allocation each is perhaps 2TB of questionably reliable storage (10TB of very volatile data). You couldn't allow heavy access to the distributed storage during the day (tanking r/w performance for users). If the licensing and maintenance are very low cost, you could slap 1TB drives everywhere and dedicate half that space for distributed storage. Per 100 users there would be roughly 10TB of relatively redundant space that could be used for, say, deep archives of encrypted backups, logs, or whatever.

Or hell, save space by dedicating a 2nd HDD in every box to distributed storage. A descent SAN will kick its ass any day, but it could potentially cost 1/10th of the price.

Bitcoin buzzword

[Anonymous Coward]

TahoeLAFS/Freenet were too mainstream?

Also it depends on the internet connection speed

does there software need full admin rights to run

[Joe_Dragon]

does there software need full admin rights to run and what about hackers useing holes in this software to read other data on your system / install software on to your system that you don't want on there?

It's been done already

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.symform.com/how-it-works/free-storage/

Freenet has existed since Napster

[preaction]

And that is all this is.

Re:Freenet has existed since Napster

[Kernel Kurtz]

Freenet was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the headline.

This isn't a new idea.

proper incentivisation

[fustakrakich]

Only if all liability is removed. The encryption bullshit won't protect you from the rubber hose and contempt of court.

Re:Drive space is cheap, this idea is idiocy.

[fustakrakich]

It's not really idiocy if the cops come and steal your computer. It's a little like an offsite backup.

Would You Rent Space on Someone Else's Hard Drive?

[Flwyd]

A primary goal of any sort of cloud storage is high availability: when your own system is unavailable, you want to be pretty certain that you can get the cloud copy.

How many copies of your file would you need to store on random people's hard drives to feel confident that in three years (when you spill beer on your computer) all of those hard drives are still functional, haven't erased your data, and are connected to a computer which is connected to the Internet?

With enough copies of your data floating around, you can probably recover it. But would the cost of renting that many people's disks be reasonable, compared to backing it up to two or three cloud providers?

TOS

[OFnow]

Violates TOS for many of us. Plus upload speed horrible from Comcast. (and the other posters are mostly right too: this is just a bad idea.)

Buzzword alert

[Anonymous Coward]

The project is doomed due to the use of words like "incentivisation".

So, it's Freenet with a dumb monetization strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

Been using Freenet for a while. For proper anonymity the thing has to be slow. Additionally the monetization strategy is dumb because you should charge for BANDWIDTH instead. Think about it, I'm sure you'll agree... Otherwise, please allow me to stream the contents of my NAS from within your Internet connection to my mobile devices 24/7.

Here's the thing: I see the trend, and it's the right way to go. If all the routers and machines on the net were DHT peers with caches, we could solve the deduplication problem of data storage while simultaneously reducing the required bandwidth. These solutions like in TFA and Freenet do not work so long as they are only hosted at endpoints. There's no reason the cute cat video I just emailed my neighbor about shouldn't be pulled from my local browser cache, or the next upstream router/server which contains it. That's the way the Internet already works, minus the ability for my surrounding peers to query me for the content.

What I have described is basically how NASA's DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking) works. We can't have it because then spying would have to be done between every node, not just along trunks, and govs don't like that -- Especially when you consider that such a system would make shortwave radio store and forward mesh networking possible (one time hardware fee w/o service fees to access, and too expensive to snoop, so both ISPs and govs hate that idea and have basically outlawed packet radio for the masses).

TL;DR: Nice try, but you have to fix the legislature first. Data is just a number. No string of bits should be illegal to have possession of, and the public deserves an unregulated slice of that cellular / digital TV bandwidth to tinker in.

Some files I'd like to store on your computer

[penguinoid]

pussies
boobies
hot naked chicks
naked kid pictures

You get the idea. Even if you are acquitted of having any illicit files on your computer, what's it worth it to you to risk that they might find you guilty, or even that they might seize your computer for a few years while the other guy is on trial? Or just the increased cost in bandwidth, electricity, and wear and tear on your hard drive?

(for the humor-impaired moderators: all those links are safe for work)

Re:Like a "peer cloud", store my data there eh?

[reboot246]

No need to rent out your wife. She's already renting herself out and just not telling you about it. She's keeping all the money and having all the fun.

Are you worried now?

Re:does there software need full admin rights to r

[Bengie]

Put it in a BSD Jail, make the FS permissions read only and only give execute permissions to their program, and only allow their program to write to the FS.

No.

[Morpeth]

No. That is all.

NOT A FUCKING CHANCE IN HELL!

[Chas]

Nope.

NOT going to play that game. Even a little.

Not playing the "Who's liability IS it?" game.

Because all it takes is one nasty lawsuit to fuck over someone for life.

devporn

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya... my last drive purchase took me 6 days to fill. It was a 3TB drive.

Sounds like you used this helpful command:

cat /dev/porn > /dev/hdd1

Re:devporn

[JMJimmy]

LOL - nice one.

What can I say, between my STEAMy addiction, my "linux ISO" habit, and my xmas archive there's just not enough storage let alone backup storage.

Re:devporn

[mspohr]

Do you know that it is very easy to get any Linux ISO from any version/distro from this "Internet" thingy? Why are you hoarding Linux ISOs? Are you afraid the world might end and you'll need to save it with an old Linux ISO?

Re:devporn

[JMJimmy]

Do you know that it is very easy to get any Linux ISO from any version/distro from this "Internet" thingy? Why are you hoarding Linux ISOs? Are you afraid the world might end and you'll need to save it with an old Linux ISO?

I can't tell if you think I'm actually archiving Linux distros or not. Lately I've been finding it hard to find certain "distros" and when I do they're HC with NL/swede/asian scripts. Especially older/less popular ones. The latest greatest stuff is super easy to find that's for sure, but even that is starting to thin... I mean how is Cordelia Chase's latest "linux ISO" not everywhere by now.

Re:devporn

[hairyfeet]

He's talking about warez, the excuse every warez site and protocol uses has been "we also share Linux ISOs" trying to use the old VHS "some non infringing uses" standard as an excuse.

Re:devporn

[Anonymous Coward]

About 18months ago I installed OpenElec on my Raspberry Pi. It worked quite well, and late last year I upgraded to the latest version. Support for my WiFi dongle had been dropped, grrrr, so I did some poking around and couldn't find a solution. Since the previous version worked just fine I wanted to go back to that....and I can't! It's been removed from the servers and despite some extensive online searching it is no longer available.

Re: devporn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a codename for porn, I guess

Re:devporn

[hairyfeet]

Cordelia Chase? As in Charisma Carpenter? What about her? I haven't seen or heard anything by her since her Playboy pics.

Re:devporn

[JMJimmy]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt41...

Yes, please!

[crow]

I just set up a file server (NAS4Free), and it currently has tons of extra space. I would be more than happy to get something back for the extra space until I need it.

For security, I would hope they set up the file servers as Tor dark sites, so even if the encryption fails, there would be no easy way to track down where the storage is.

Re:Yes, please!

[bloodhawk]

I setup a large NAS for myself recently too (24TB), loads of free space which I would happily rent out. But be buggered if I will share out my bandwidth which is many times more valuable than the space on my NAS.

Re:Yes, please!

[bloodhawk]

why even bother? it isn't like that space is valuable. The most you could conceivably get for it was the lowest online cloud provider charges, which for most people is ZERO. why would anyone actually be willing to pay money in this scenario when there are so many free options that you can put your encrypted content into for free. Google drive, onedrive, dropbox etc etc

Sure, I'm game

[50000BTU_barbecue]

I have a Commodore 64 setup here with a 1581 and two SFD-1001s... That's about 2.8 megs of floppy storage space I can free up.

How much you want to pay?

Re:Sure, I'm game

[iggymanz]

My ForTran IV code rarely goes beyond column 55 of the punched cards....

The future of Information and storage.

[IcyWolfy]

THe arguments above are missing the point of this development.
It's fear that's the root of all evils, and prevention of advancement.
And the fear, however irrational/illogical on your personal scale is the only obstacle of advancement for all.

This isn't just about putting others' files on your computer, in broken encrypted pieces.
It isn't about the legal ramifications of having random unreadable bits on your hard-drive shard.
What this is, is the future of truly unlimited storage for everyone.
By creating a P2P storage solution, it's creating an "Internet" of storage space that everyone in the world can use.
It can render the local hard-drive solution solely a "cache" of files, but all the files, all the items you access will live on across the network.

If it's done correctly, It will allow one to lose your hard-drive completely, and have all your files instantly available.
Available from any computer interface anywherer in the world at any time.
And, depending on your decryption keys, or more specficially, your custom data-access identifier, you can have multiple file-stores, that are independant, and not related in any way. Or even co-mingling.

This has the prospect of leading the future into a truly data-everywhere situation.
The only item that needs to be resolved, is how to make this information publically available after some time.
History is being lost by the Encryption, and the loss of private journals, of private note-writings, and such.
And over time, it is those items that need to be protected and spread across the world to give insight into who you were, and into your thoughts, dreams, and different views on the events of your lifetime.

But, that can be handled after.
By doing this, we can pretty much guarantee that information can never be lost again, (which is different from ever being exposed.)
Which is a good thing.

Re:The future of Information and storage.

[kschendel]

"truly unlimited"? so we now have enough storage to compute all the states of the universe from its start, and other even more interesting problems?

Please.

This is a terrible idea, and simply stating platitudes like "it's not about legal ramifications" (hey, it IS) doesn't make it a good idea. What about bandwidth? what happens when I decide that I need that extra storage after all, and I delete your junk? Not to mention that the sites with enough storage to really make a difference to any significant number of other people are in fact the ones typically running out of space. Not to mention that space generally isn't the problem.

Not going to happen.

Re:The future of Information and storage.

[Ol Olsoc]

If it's done correctly, It will allow one to lose your hard-drive completely, and have all your files instantly available.

So when everyone loses their hard drives completely, isn't it going to be sort of hard to find a place to put your data?

Re:The future of Information and storage.

[IcyWolfy]

It's for the the full mobility of the data everywhere.
Beyond a single tier provider like drop-box, but spread across every infrastructure storage.
And as advances in storgage increase, those would be deployed and handled the increased load.

The vision is to ensure that day-to-day life goes on, but everyone still needs a hard-drive for local offline storage, boot-up, caching, and the like.
Storage media will not be disappearing so long as ubiquitious internet access world-wide does not exist.
Thus, there will be a market, companies will still have infrastructure.
It's about having every device in the world suppling redundance storage space for multiple copies of data.

Re:The future of Information and storage.

[IcyWolfy]

The negative attitude is what stops ideas from flourishing.

You have no complete files on your computer, just random bits and blocks. At some point, the compression techniques will improve to ensure that data can be reconstructed from these disparate pieces.

Bandwidth is transient, you use your bandwidth, and it's just a passive background task that's always going onwards, and as more units come online into this world, the less bandwidth each unit is required. The files and file systems are designed to handle losses, machines and boxes dying. The blocks are spread across multiple devices and are always kept redundant, so that the chances of data becoming lost approaches zero. If the primary source of your target block is gone, route to another storage loaction of that particular block.

It's is not about large companies supplying all the space (albeit, some will) it's about -every- device offering up space, cpu, hardward, and bandwidth to ensure that the flow of information can never be stopped, becuase it's ubiquitous.

Re:The future of Information and storage.

[Ol Olsoc]

It's for the the full mobility of the data everywhere. Beyond a single tier provider like drop-box, but spread across every infrastructure storage.

The tech in me understands and thinks the idea is cool. But I won't use it, because the practical side of me doesn't need or even want access the world over except for a very few things. In addition, I do not trust encryption, a minor issue. But mostly, I just do not need it. And I don't care to give up my local drives for the minimal advantages of access anywhere.

The question is asinine

[TrollstonButterbeans]

If there is any money to be made in "unused" storage space, the LAST people who could economically offer space for the lowest cost is a consumer.

No cutting edge cost management, no benefits of scalabiliy.

And who would want to rely on a average consumer's potentially virus infested, unsecure storage space.

And people who responded to this as if it even could be a serious suggestion didn't think, should be socially reprimanded for being gullible.

Re: The question is asinine

[blang]

You wouldnt rely on just 1 such consumer.
Evey file or piece of data would have to be shared by many enough nodes that the risk of losing a piece of data becomes infitesimal.

This already exists

[melted]

See e.g. Symform.

Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space?

[grep -v '.*' *]

Unused drive space?? Sorry, what's that?

No.

[Chris Mattern]

Let me clarify: HELL, no!

Betteridge says...

[Livius]

No.

For the many reasons already cited.

Re:Same in US

[Billly Gates]

You are a sex offender by just having it. Therefore already a criminal and assisting organized crime.

Liability is too much for me

why?

[nospam007]

It isn't worth the while for the few days it is unused.

Not for me because

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I've owned a computer long enough to know it works better when you're using less than 70% of your hard drive. After a certain point, the harddrive starts harder work to find places to write instead of nice continuous blocks. Now by all means, use 80% of your harddrive if you must, but try not to.

Hmm,,,,

[Ol Olsoc]

this sort of assumes that:

1. encryption works

2. What happens when Jerry Sandusky is caught, and the police demand your drive.

Plausible deniability

[ruir]

To pedophile priests. How christian!

I'm Charlie

[ArsenneLupin]

Funny how we all shake our heads at the Muslims, who kill over pictures, but considering this whole kiddie porn madness: we're not any better. It's just pictures. Cartoons even in some cases.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno and YMMV.

Draw what you want. I have no problems with cartoons, or even very realistic drawn/painted/whatever imagined images depicting all kinds of crazy shit. In my country, even written stories depicting or discussing underage sex is considered illegal by the letter of the law. Which I happen to agree, is madness. Sexuality doesn't just lie dormant and 'switch on' when you hit 18 or 21 or whatever the law says is cool in your neck of the woods. And discussing it in art form is probably healthy. Much of it wont float my particular boat but I don't think that should make 'art work' illegal.

BUT. For a while I worked in a role where I was exposed to kiddie porn.... And, well, I wouldn't think of it as art. To my mind it was just evidence (photo and/or video) of folks actually raping kids. It really wasn't cool. And if it puts a dint in the practice, I don't think I'd characterize aggressively pursuing leads, as madness.

I know you can't put the genie back in the bottle, but if you haven't seen it, you might have a skewed or misinformed view of what kiddie porn actually is. You might think its pictures of kids and adults having sex. But its not.

If you're really not sure, imagine someone you really dislike, from a social group you're not into, quintessentially the last person on earth you'd consider in being with in a sexual context. Imagine that person, with the help of a several buddies, kidnapping you and doing what ever they wanted to you, while you struggle futilely, scream in pain, and as your strength ebbs, plead, weeping and begging them to stop. Only they don't stop until they're all spent. And the whole time, you're under studio lights and there are people with cameras in your face and circling you taking pictures and videos of it to share your pain and humiliation with the world at large. And now imagine its happening to your 8 years old self.

No. Simply turning a blind eye... to my mind that would be madness.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how we all shake our heads at the Muslims, who kill over pictures, but considering this whole kiddie porn madness: we're not any better. It's just pictures. Cartoons even in some cases.

Well, it is "do as I say not as I do."

http://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm

I am not going to argue what constitutes "porn" or "age of consent" and whether distribution hurts or helps child abuse...(when it is copyrighted music/movies, digital copies "hurt" the MPAA and RIAA...yet, when it is "bad pictures" distribution finances + helps the abusers...)

I merely point out there is a huge double standard here.

I have no sympathy for child abuse, but yes, pictures are very different from doing such acts.

I am amazed you got modded up, quite honestly!

Re:I'm Charlie

[Beeftopia]

Pictures of a long dead prophet and caricatures of top officials and warlords. Versus images of real sexually victimized children.

One image is political speech, the other are sexual scenes with those who cannot give consent.

Both are images of course, but images can capture all manner of human experience, from the banal to the brutal.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that the cause of my befuddlement is nothing more than my own failure to detect sarcasm in your post.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the existance of old pictures that's the problem. It's all the pedos on pedo forums screaming for MOAR MOAR MOAR new pics and vids. So NEW material is then made in response to demand, even sold. That means kids getting new instances of RAPE being done to them to meet demand. This is terrible.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Guy From V]

You know you love it.

Re:I'm Charlie

[ArsenneLupin]

You know, Muslims are feeling that their prophet is as real as your cartoon children. And the prophet didn't give consent either. Rather he gave explicit dissent. Islam has strict rules about any depiction of the prophet, whether unflattering or not.

No, anytime we criminalize possession of mere pictures, and attach disproportionate punishment to it, democracy suffers.

Re:I'm Charlie

[thegarbz]

And if it puts a dint in the practice

That's kind of the problem I have. I would imagine some fucked-in-the-head paedophile would be better served looking at children online than actually going out and touching them in real life. I'm genuinely interested in the following:

- Does a ban on viewing content decrease the creation of the content?
- Does viewing the content make you more of a paedophile? I imagine it would be hard to do a proper behavioural trial for this stuff.

If so then I'm all for it. If not then I'm afraid that we as a society are locking up people for thought crimes. This goes more so in cases where the legal age for sex is one thing but the legal age for taking a picture of it is another (such as where I live, 16 vs 18). This goes triply so where the laws are written in ways that don't take into account that teenagers will be teenagers and that some of them are ending up on sex offence registries for having a selfie sent to them by their current girlfriend.

Some countries have really lost the plot, but on the whole I get the feeling that a lot of other countries are slowly following suit.

Re:I'm Charlie

[greenfruitsalad]

thanks a lot.... i was eating!!!

i guess, now that i have offspring, i'm even more sensitive to this sick shit.

Re:I'm Charlie

[deroby]

- Does a ban on viewing content decrease the creation of the content?
- Does viewing the content make you more of a paedophile? I imagine it would be hard to do a proper behavioural trial for this stuff.

I think it's safe to assume that making something more 'mainstream' will make it also more acceptable. Whether watching child-porn will make Joe Average more lenient towards the practice or not.... personally I don't think so. But I do think that it will make (some) people who are 'on the edge' will get some sense of support out of it and making them take the next step as after all, so many others are into it too.

Re:I'm Charlie

[thegarbz]

Make what 'mainstream'? Sexual intercourse with a child is illegal and won't be mainstream regardless if we arrest people who view the resulting footage.

That said even if it made Joe Average more lenient towards the practice I don't fully see that as a bad thing. We have seen some atrocious witch-hunts and lives ruined under false accusations because people magically assume that everyone who gets investigated is an immediate danger to their children. It would be good if we could revert to a mental state were people could at least relax enough to let justice run its course before demanding that the accused move into the middle of the pacific ocean as far away from civilisation as possible.

Re:I'm Charlie

[Coren22]

Actually, that is not Islam. Sunni Islam allows no "Idols". Shiite Islam happily allows pictures of M. and Allah, and whoever they please.

The problem goes back to the very roots of Islam. When M. died, the Shiites followed his son-in-law (who M. had designated as his replacement) , the Sunnis follow a leader elected by the followers of M.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://islam.about.com/cs/divi...

BTW, I use M. because there are numerous spellings of his name, and I wouldn't want to put the wrong one and offend anyone.

Re:Same in US

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a sex offender by just having it.

This. In some US jurisdictions, you are added to the sex offender registry on indictment, even if you aren't convicted. And then you have to work like hell to get yourself off of it if the charges are dropped or you are found not guilty. The burden is on the accused, when it should be on the State.

Source: I worked in law enforcement for a decade and a half, and a good bit of that time was spent working with the sex offender registry on the back end.

dkj

Another reason why NO: Solid State Disks

[williamyf]

I guess if you missconfigure, all those remote users hammering on the 'shards' stored on your SSD will do wonders to its rated life...

No

[msobkow]

I won't host your child porn for you.

I'd love to put shards of my files everywhere

[davecb]

I could use high-reliability backup that isn't on some single-point-of-failure company like Kim's.

Alas, law enforcement would be unable to tell me from their worst enemy. OK if it's Canada, they can serve me with a warrant and reassure themselves that I'm not the they're looking for, but I fear the Excited States might not bother staying within the rule of law.

--dave
Hmmn, I owe the blog a discussion about this...

Re:I'd love to put shards of my files everywhere

[davecb]

s/the that/the that/

What happens if someone else's drive crashes?

[Dputiger]

One of the fallacies of modern cloud and backup providers is that they actually provide a backup service. Most, including popular services like Backblaze, Mozy, Carbonite, etc contain prominent statements in their contracts that absolve them of any liability in the event of data loss. Your recoverable value in the event they lose your data is limited to either 12 months of service or is explicitly defined as nothing.

Now plenty of people pay for service with these companies, so I'm not claiming they don't make some effort to provide a genuine backup, but we're *starting* from a position where they explicitly have no liability as defined in the ToS. Now, add in the idea of storing critical or merely important files on someone else's hard drive. What happens if the drive you're storing on is a 5400 RPM Quantum Fireball from circa 1999? When that drive fails, what happens to you?

It's the same lack of guarantee with a *further* risk factor. No thanks.

Re:What happens if someone else's drive crashes?

[super3]

Well all files are redundantly stored in small chunks around the network. We do realtime auditing of all those chunks, and recover any ones that drop. If you have a MegaUpload like incident, or a major datacenter/switch failure your files are bye bye. But on this network the files could be hosted at hundreds of different places. Traditional SLAs are pretty empty. They just say oops we have no liability. But with smart contacts being built we could do some cool stuff. At the protocol level if X hoster lost a portion of your file he would have to pay you $100, and the protocol would pay that out. We can create SLAs with actually financial teeth.

Re: Same in US

[blang]

So the executives of yahoo, google and microsoft are now all serving long prison sentences for child pornography?

This sounds like PAST/FreePastry

[Fireshadow]

As for bandwidth, what I don't get is how do you get your files back if you can't guarantee the people you rented disk space from actually have their machines turned on?

Short answer: See the blog entry on 28 OCT 2014. If the "shard" is properly distributed in enough places, then one can always get the file. They cite the privately verifiable scheme discussed here: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav...

Re:This sounds like PAST/FreePastry

[Fireshadow]

Bad form responding to own post. I clicked post before putting in the part about PAST/FreePastry I recall something similar technically six years ago for peer to peer storage. No direct experience with FreePastry or Storj. I'm trying to understand the technical differences here.
PAST white paper
http://research.microsoft.com/...
I'm guessing they licensed it out here?
https://trac.freepastry.org/wi...

these are the real reasons it will not fly

[blang]

Efficiency.
It is claimed that storj will be much more effective than public clouds.
No chance. Public clouds buy massive amounts of hw. They use every possible technology to squeeze more out of it.

Storj will, because of the inherently very unstable uptimez of the members, have to build in a lot more redundancy.
A single piece of data would need at least 5 parity nodes , lets say 10 nodes total. Both reading and writing would suffer.
And mindboggling amounts of bandwidth would be consumed when having to deal with someone takin their 5ftb off the net.
Also, the consumers would haveto disble their power saving modes. One couldnot run a system like this if most of the nodes were off he net half the time. Unless adding even a higher number of parity nodes.

So think of this as raid 5 with maybe 4 datanodes and 16 parity nodes. You might need 4 tb to securely store 1 tb.
A cloud provider on the other hand can use dedupe and a host of other tricks, and maybe need just 100 gb to store 1 tb of data, in addition to sourcing hard drives snd ssd at a fraction of what consumers pay.

Then there is the legal bits.
As a defense they compare the service to tor.
That nobody has been prosecuted for hosting a tor relat0y. And also cited that us govt. Is pro tor, citing us state debt buerau of democracy recommending tor. State dept does not care about usa consumers. State dept wants democracy advocates to use tor in myanmar and north korea. But it should be oretty safe to state that Dept of homeland security, cia, fbi, and all other agencies probably hate tor with a vengeance. Your data will be safe only as long as the oarticipation of this service is significant, stable or growing. Every time a signficant number of members drop out, theee is a risk that your data will get lost.

If a bunch of tor relays are knocked out, no big deal. Worst case scenario, maybe it slightly impacts response times. A bunch of storj nodes gets knocked out, because of a bad patch, customer dissatisfaction, a scary even if fake newsstory, a security breach, a bug in a windows 8 service pack, data will get lost. POOF! No longer retrievable. That kind of screwup only happens once. After that kind of event, there are no more customers or members, and the name is only whispered as cautionary tale.

While things might look ok now, there is also a fair risk that this service could be blocked off by isps, just as tor and torrents. If comcast and verizon both decided to take down storj, your data would be lost forever. There is no provision for a centralized backup.

Also your data would be lost as soon as you stopped making rsnt payments. Poof.

Lets say youre carted off to jail with no visiting rights for a month, because someone who had stolen your identity had some something really bad. Your checking account has been frozen for same reason. You get out from the fase charges, and get out. All your data ia gone poof. Unlike the storage facility where you keep your collection of first edition figurines, you data went poof as soon as you missed a payment of cryptocurrency to that confederacy if cryptonerds.

I don't have THAT much drive space

[johncandale]

Eh. This is a problem of scale. If you only need to store a little off site it wouldn't be worth it and if you need to store a lot it would be more useful to get a new drive or cloud service. The same problems come with bandwidth. Need to upload a little, hardly worth the extra set-ups, passwords, etc. Need to store a lot? Too much bandwidth.

"incentivisation"?

[jpellino]

How about "incentives".

Re: why bother?

[blang]

Well, if you needed 500tb, for 1 month? Rent it.
If you buy 500 tb now for 10,000 you can probably get it for 5000 next year. Why toss $5000?
Why rent anything? Because sometimes iwning is more expensive and inconvenient.
Same reason as you rent a car on vacation instead of buying one?
Same reason why you pay $5 to rent a beach chair.
Same reason id buy a car for 15000 and rent it out for $100 a day, while it depreceates only $5 a day.
Same reason why id buy 50 beach chais at $10 each and rent out to touristst for $5 a day.

There are tons of real reasons why storj is nt going to be a big sucess, and given enough time will become a huge calamity.
Disk is cheap now andwhy would anyone want to rent out ir why woud anyone want to rent, is not one of them.

Wrong question

[viperidaenz]

You mean rent your bandwidth, against pretty much every residential ISP contract in the world.

Lies

[Khyber]

"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."

Uhhhh, guess what? Anyone transferring the data is a third party by virtue of the transmitting server.

But you go ahead, and be a fool and think peer-to-peer doesn't involve a third party. You aren't the third party, just FYI. Those giving you the info are.

Christ it's like people don't think critically any longer.

Re: Same in US

[hairyfeet]

They have billions and law firms on retainer, you most likely do not. Remember there are laws for the peasants and laws for the elite and just as a poor man can steal $500 and go to prison while a corp can steal 500 million and get to dine with the POTUS so too can they do things you as a peasant cannot.

Er, Symform already?

[rnws]

How is this even news? Symform http://www.symform.com/ acheived this commercially ages ago and has even passed from start-up to aquisition (by Quantum http://www.quantum.com/ last year. Even better, Symform has either quid-pro-quo or commercial options and doesn't appear to be some dodgy-looking coin-factoring operation.

everything old is new again.

[NTT]

Aside from the part where you make money from your extra space, it sure sounds a lot like D.I.B.S.

http://web.mit.edu/~emin/www.o...

Re:Would You Rent Space on Someone Else's Hard Dri

[Cro Magnon]

I don't even blindly trust the professionals. I have stuff on Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft, but I also have it on my desktop and 2 laptops. No way would I trust everything to one random person's "cloud".

You missed the madness

[Slashdot Parent]

it was just evidence (photo and/or video) of folks actually raping kids. [...] And if it puts a dint in the practice, I don't think I'd characterize aggressively pursuing leads, as madness.

What you have just described isn't madness at all. I would argue that it makes perfect sense for law enforcement to treat child pornography as evidence of serious criminal activity (child rape) and to pursue aggressively the perpetrators of such a crime.

Unfortunately, there is madness in Western countries surrounding the issue of child pornography and pedophelia. Here are some examples:

1. In the US, any image of an unclothed child is considered to be a serious crime. There have been many documented cases of photo labs reporting photos of unclothed babies in the bathtub (in no sexual context) to the police, and then the babies were taken from their parents and the parents were charged with manufacturing child pornography, a sex crime.
2. In the US, while it is perfectly legal for 17-year-olds to have consensual sex with each other, if they happen to take a photo of this lawful sexual activity, they could be charged with manufacturing child pornography. Several teenagers have been charged with the sex crime of manufacturing and distributing child pornography for simply texting their boyfriend or girlfriend photos of their unclothed selves.
3. In Australia, adult women with small breasts are considered to be children for the purposes of child pornography laws, so they may not appear in any adult entertainment without it being considered to be child pornography.
4. In the US, all doctors and mental health professionals must report to the police anyone who comes to them seeking help with sexual attraction to minors. This discourages pedophiles from seeking the help that they need to avoid committing actual offenses against children. In our lust to burn the witches at the stake, we put real children at risk because pedophiles aren't getting the treatment that they need.

So, yes, our hysteria surrounding child pornography does rise to the level of madness. I'm not sure how we fix it, because it is political suicide to appear to be soft on pedophilia, but in the meantime, the madness is definitely doing more harm than good.

nice try

[surd1618]

You just want my bandwidth. sneaky sneaky...

Been Done

[Rene S. Hollan]

I once interviewed for a company, Synapse, IIRC, planning to do just that, using error correction to deal with lost/offline shards of data.

Re:Been Done CORRECTION

[Rene S. Hollan]

Symform, not Synapse.

Symform

[Rene S. Hollan]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...

Its already there

[allo]

And its called freenet.
You store encrypted chunks of data, you can access your data by its hash. It has some other nice features.

What about storageless storage?

[allo]

Imagine a system, where you have 1 GB of RAM full of data. you send it to two peers, which discard their storage and store your data. Everyone does it, every new member can inject up to 1 GB. The data is most the time on the network and some time in the RAM of different nodes.

Just like Tor ....

[jobst]

... with more legal problems, they know where you live and you loose bandwidth - but for those "problems" you get paid.