New tech stuff

[andrewducker]

New find of the day - wua.la - distributed online storage. Back your files up to _everywhere_.

I can see it working, so long as it's successful - it's a very neat idea. You upload your files to their servers - and also to other user's machines. When you need to download them they're downloaded from somewhere else in the 'grid', unless those other machines are off, at which point they're pulled from the central servers. This saves them a lot of money.

The whole thing's encrypted, and files are broken into chunks, so nobody else can rifle through your files.

And the neatest thing is, so long as they've designed it well, the more successful they get, the cheaper it gets for them to run.

Anyone else bumped into it yet?

Comments

[derumi.livejournal.com]

So now we really don't know where the porn on our machines came from? Is encrypted illegal stuff found on my machine still illegal?

[andrewducker]

Random chunks of encrypted stuff that even _you_ can't tell is porn is probably safe.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Nice idea that will likely fall down on two things. Either:

a) o-one will trust having thier files on someone else's system, o matter how good the encryption is claimed to be
b) it just becomes the next bitTorrent or Limewire as the sharing facility gets taken over by the P2P community, and if the RIPA or BPI start digging then what happens if the courts grant them the power to go demanding decrpyted files from all? Or what if I'm hosting someone else's files as part fo the grid and I'm actually holding material that is illegal. Am I respoonsible? Could be a legal nightmare.

[andrewducker]

How would they tell that a random chunk of data on your PC was illegal? Especially as, from the description, you won't even have full files - just chunks.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

So if I'm holding someone else's illegal data but I can't tell so I'm not at fault, and someone else has illegal data that they "own" but it's not on their PC, so they're not actually in possession of illegal material then is no-one breaking the law?

Can't see courts / music industry allowing that to go ahead. Shame really cos it's a fine plan.

[andrewducker]

Short of banning encryption, I can't see how they'd stop it.

Especially as other versions have been around for a very long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Yeah, seen Freenet and the whole darknet concept before. Think it's oly going to be a matter of time before governments are bullied by corporation money into giving the courts the power to go after these on the suspicion of holding illegal / copyright infringing materials.

"Give us your encryption key or go to prison" is not far off something that was mooted a few years back by the government anyway when they first saw the likes of PGP as a threat and were demanding some sort of key escrow system. It eventually got dropped from the RIPA act but I wouldn't' be surprised to see the prevalence of things like this and darknets leading to calls for it being resurrected.

[andrewducker]

Of course, the point here being that you don't _have_ the key for the files on your hard drive. You do have the key for your files, but they're held in the central repository, and on other people's machines,

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Yes, but if someone else owns illegal files, is forced to decrypt those files and part or all of any of them are found to be on my machine (presumably there is a central index somewhere so that the system can retrieve those files for a user, so they can be traced to my machine as one of the storage points) then am I am accomplice?

It's like saying "Can you take this bag through customs for me? I'm not going to tell you what's in it but don't worry, I've got the only key." OK, maybe that's not the perfect analogy but it's the willingly allowing someone else to dump something on my hard disk that I cant' see that I'd be uncomfortable with.

In a perfect world where we all trusted each other it's a great idea, as are Freenets in general, but until the legal position was clarified, I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. Maybe I'm just too net paranoid :)

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for the first complaint:

"Whaddaya mean, I can't get to my files because someone else turned his machine off?"

EITHER wua.la has enough storage for everyone out there (and asking for storage on people's machines is just a secondary backup), or they don't... and having the wrong machines off will make access to files impossible.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Look at the prices they're trying to charge for extra storage. I suspect they'll make their money by people impatiently upgrading to more storage at a price significantly greater than what it costs the company to have all that storage available.

Also, if they business model is built around many people across the Internet having copies of all of these files, they've also suddenly got, for free, off-site backup. They probably only need to back up the recently-changed / not widely distributed chunks, which if all goes well is a minute fraction of the total storage.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

They would need to back up their index, otherwise what's on everyone else's machine would be useless.

[skington.livejournal.com]

The index must be tiny compared to the rest of the file store, though.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

That is true.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Yes, they have enough central storage for everybody.

What saves them money is that if someone's machine with an online copy of a requested chunk is online (althogether likely given the percentage of users that leave their machines on and online) it can be retrieved from that machine, saving the company network bandwidth. As, for example, Flickr have demonstrated, actual storage is cheap; net bandwidth is expensive.