Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.albasani.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Tim Watts Newsgroups: uk.comp.os.linux,comp.os.linux.misc,uk.d-i-y Subject: Re: Opensource slowing down? "GoogleDrive" private cloud Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2015 07:55:01 +0000 Lines: 78 Message-ID: References: <4khjsb-2oj.ln1@squidward.dionic.net> <54f73bc4$0$38615$b1db1813$5ba256c5@news.astraweb.com> <54f75264$0$62485$b1db1813$71902154@news.astraweb.com> <54f75977$0$23035$b1db1813$62b0a5a8@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net 6NyB7g68wqxogOQl460szA//yBdzIvXlJmBl9LhMCpbEvE3JLS X-Orig-Path: squidward.dionic.net!not-for-mail Cancel-Lock: sha1:mTtpYVzzJuJepbvCXrDEDyV7EOk= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:13917 On 04/03/15 23:47, Theo Markettos wrote: > In uk.d-i-y Tim Watts wrote: >> On 04/03/15 19:13, Dennis@home wrote: >>> On 04/03/2015 18:55, Tim Watts wrote: >> >>>> Unless you know of an file manager app that does on the fly encryption? >>> >>> https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/onedrive >> >> Wow. Was not expecting that. >> >> That is actually a potentially serious nutcracker there. >> >> Thank you. >> >> If not my entire media collection, that could be a good contender for >> shared documents (finances, etc). > > As I see it there are two parts to the problem: storage and syncing. > > Storage is covered by the NAS. That's the master copy, everything should > migrate there. You can nuke all the other copies in the world and you'll > only lose the most recent changes. You can do a bulk download > quite easily over gigabit ethernet/wifi/USB/SATA. > > Tools like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox aren't a good idea for the > master copy: they're small and they're at the wrong end of the internet. > They're also vulnerable to 'ransom risks': if they announce pricing for next > month will be $500pm, what do you do? +1 to that... > Another risk is site failure: fotopic.net went under and it turned out the > bandwidth bill for sucking all the photos off it was beyond the means of the > company that had just called in the receiver because they had no money. > Likewise Code Spaces got hacked and the attacker just deleted all their > files - there was nothing left. The message from this is that if a cloud > provider goes under, it's simply gone, you don't get your data back. And whilst Drive is *probably* not going away soon, Google have form for randomly pulling projects at short notice and for selling stuff on. > However they could be useful for transit. For instance, git is a nice > protocol because every working copy contains a full copy of the history. > That means I don't care if github goes under - I have everything locally. > So github is simply a nice website for publishing the sources, and if github > went away it wouldn't be much effort to republish elsewhere. > If the files are encrypted you also don't need to worry about privacy > (though metadata is still an issue, and always the devil is in the key > management). > > So I could see how something like this could work - Dropbox et al are just a > transit provider for sharing stuff back to base. This also means they're a > commodity conduit - if Dropbox are charging £silly, just switch to OneDrive > (or whoever). The one thing I don't see this doing is sending a request to > the NAS saying 'please put file XXX in Dropbox so I can see it' - maybe > there's a way round that. Or maybe you just say 'you can only view the > photos when you're at home'. It would be fun to sniff the conversation between Drive and my computer - with a minimal client so I don't see all the web supporting stuff. I *wonder* if it is something that could be reverse engineered into a home server... > > On the wider philosophical question, I found it depressing to read of an app > for sending encrypted SMS where the developers are tightly wedded to the > Google Play infrastructure, while seemingly not realising the tensions > between these two directions: > https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127 > As that thread demonstrates the issue is somewhat complicated, but I'm not > surprised that many mobile developers don't understand the risks. > (That app developer has softened their position somewhat in later posts) > > Theo >