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Would You Rent Out Your Unused Drive Space?

Posted by timothy on from the how-plausible-is-your-denial? dept.

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."

26 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Nope by Anrego · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Nope by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Besides, who has free storage space!?

    2. Re:Nope by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    3. Re:Nope by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    4. Re:Nope by blackest_k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

         

      --
      Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
    5. Re:Nope by fustakrakich · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    6. Re:Nope by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:Nope by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    8. Re:Nope by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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!"

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    9. Re:Nope by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
    10. Re: Nope by blang · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      -- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
    11. Re:Nope by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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  2. Not a chance. by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Wuala used to have this by ButcherCH · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    --
    Do or do not, there is no try.
    1. Re:Wuala used to have this by Donwulff · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Wuala used to have this by Oligonicella · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  4. No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive.... by ip_freely_2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive.... by grumpy_old_grandpa · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:No thanks to kiddie porn on my drive.... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  5. Legally difficult by 15Bit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Freenet has existed since Napster by preaction · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And that is all this is.

  7. devporn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    1. Re:devporn by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  8. I'm Charlie by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I'm Charlie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  9. Re:Same in US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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