Dropbox planned to be added a PRISM provider

[Melvin Carvalho]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

Concerning issues for read / write commodity storage providers ...

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 7 June 2013 13:01, László Török <ltor...@gmail.com> wrote:

just my 2cs: use a cloud storage service where YOU generate your keypair, my favourite is

https://spideroak.com/

Hi Laszlo

Do you know how they protect passwords from brute force attacks?

Something like this, perhaps?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/CryptoIdeas/01-PBKDF-scrypt

 

Laszlo

2013/6/7 Melvin Carvalho <melvinc...@gmail.com>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

Concerning issues for read / write commodity storage providers ...

--

László Török

[pir...@gmail.com]

It reminds me how Mega works... isn't it?

By the way, how difficult would be to create (an maintain) an open
source clone? The main advantage of Dropbox is that's easy to use, but
that's could be replicated...

2013/6/8 Melvin Carvalho <melvinc...@gmail.com>:

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--
"Si quieres viajar alrededor del mundo y ser invitado a hablar en un
monton de sitios diferentes, simplemente escribe un sistema operativo
Unix."
– Linus Tordvals, creador del sistema operativo Linux

[Nick Jennings]

The main advantage of Dropbox is that it's extremely stable on multiple platforms and never has any merge issues. That's very very hard to do, especially the details surrounding multiplatform+OSversion support. Even Google Drive isn't close to Dropbox in that regard. The devil is in the details.

[pir...@gmail.com]

Well, they have been working very hard for several years to got it, it's true is something to have respect on... Anyway, I was thinking about using Git or something simillar...

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 8 June 2013 03:44, Nick Jennings <ni...@silverbucket.net> wrote:

The main advantage of Dropbox is that it's extremely stable on multiple platforms and never has any merge issues. That's very very hard to do, especially the details surrounding multiplatform+OSversion support. Even Google Drive isn't close to Dropbox in that regard. The devil is in the details.

Far from a perfect solution, but isnt Ubuntu One open source and cross platform?

[Nick Jennings]

Yes, there's Ubuntu One, an open-source alternative.

...  although I find it odd that under the platform support list is:

Windows, MaxOS, _Ubuntu_, Android, iPhone & iPad

Not really making an effort to use the "Linux" name :)

[Jon Spriggs]

Ubuntu 1 isn't open source, the back end is entirely proprietary. Also, Ubuntu never refer to their project as Linux any more.

--
Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs

[pir...@gmail.com]

So, this confirm a 100% FOSS alternative should be developed.

It's known how it works, uploading only file chunks and doing de-duplication on the backend, maybe it would be done using TTH as P2P networks does... BitTorrent Live would be another option and maybe open source, although I don't know how it works and also don't know if it's the best option... :-(

[Hugo Roy]

Le sam. 08/06/13, 17:43, pir...@gmail.com <pir...@gmail.com>:

> So, this confirm a 100% FOSS alternative should be developed.
>
> It's known how it works, uploading only file chunks and doing
> de-duplication on the backend, maybe it would be done using TTH as P2P
> networks does... BitTorrent Live would be another option and maybe open
> source, although I don't know how it works and also don't know if it's the
> best option... :-(

I may be wrong, but bittorrent sync is not published as free
software, and they even have patents on it . . .

--
Hugo Roy | Free Software Foundation Europe, www.fsfe.org
FSFE Legal Team, Deputy Coordinator, www.fsfe.org/legal
FSFE French Team, Coordinator, www.fsfe.org/fr/

Support Free Software, sign up! https://fsfe.org/support

[Nick Jennings]

There's also something similar in bt-sync, anyone tried it yet? p2p syncing (no central cloud service)

[Nick Jennings]

https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp

[pir...@gmail.com]

Thanks for clarification Hugo, as I told you I don't know how it works (and didn't know also it was patent encumbered...)

[Justin Cormack]

On 8 Jun 2013 16:53, "pir...@gmail.com" <pir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for clarification Hugo, as I told you I don't know how it works (and didn't know also it was patent encumbered...)

Not sure that I care about US patents as I don't intend to store data there. De-dupe doesn't work well with crypto anyway.

Justin

[Hugo Roy]

Le sam. 08/06/13, 17:47, Nick Jennings <ni...@silverbucket.net>:
> https://github.com/bittorrenttorque/btapp

Not sure what you mean with this. But this does not seem an
official release from BitTorrent, and it does not seem to be about
bittorrent sync.

http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/8816-will-syncapp-be-open-source/

[Hugo Roy]

Le sam. 08/06/13, 17:05, Justin Cormack <jus...@specialbusservice.com>:

> On 8 Jun 2013 16:53, "pir...@gmail.com" <pir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for clarification Hugo, as I told you I don't know how it works
> (and didn't know also it was patent encumbered...)
>
> Not sure that I care about US patents as I don't intend to store data
> there. De-dupe doesn't work well with crypto anyway.
>

I am not sure these are only US patents. They may well be in other
jurisdictions, I can't remember.

[P S]

On Jun 7, 2013, at 18:57, "pir...@gmail.com" <pir...@gmail.com> wrote:

It reminds me how Mega works... isn't it?

By the way, how difficult would be to create (an maintain) an open
source clone? The main advantage of Dropbox is that's easy to use, but
that's could be replicated...

Some information in this article and comments:

http://lifehacker.com/5993596/how-to-set-up-your-own-private-cloud-storage-service-in-five-minutes-with-owncloud

[pir...@gmail.com]

Yes, I was asking for something like this, and also there are
providers that offer free (small) accounts :-)

2013/6/8 P S <pair...@gmail.com>:

[dinosaur]

git-annex assistant already is a 100% FOSS alternative to Dropbox:
http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/

[Fabio Barone]

thanks dinosaur, that looks quite interesting!

2013/6/8 dinosaur <dino...@riseup.net>

[Lucas Gonze]

The achilles heel is using git for binary files. Git is designed for text.

[pir...@gmail.com]

What about fragmenting the big git files? Maybe the git blobs plugins
works this way?

2013/6/9 Lucas Gonze <lucas...@gmail.com>:

[Lucas Gonze]

I don't know that a binary equivalent of patching really makes sense. There's a reason why diff just says "binary files differ."

But I think that git is the wrong strategy for this job. Dropbox etc don't store diffs, they overwrite. With binary files that's even more apparent but it still applies to text files.

[Nick Jennings]

On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 2:41 AM, Lucas Gonze <lucas...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't know that a binary equivalent of patching really makes sense. There's a reason why diff just says "binary files differ."

But I think that git is the wrong strategy for this job. Dropbox etc don't store diffs, they overwrite. With binary files that's even more apparent but it still applies to text files.

I agree, what you would need would be something provided a lot of the qualities of distrubuted filesystem with snapshotting, growing storage volume, and a lot hardware. With snapshots, you can store you files with any filesystem level tool (ie. rsync) and get the fine-grained history. With git, you'd be slowing down operations with an insanely large & growing git repository.

There are some open source possibilities like Lustre, or GlusterFS (though it's slower as it uses a fuse layer, and I don't recall if it supports snapshotting).

To get something like that going it means either a centralized service as an open-source business, or do it yourself (not at all easy for someone setup with no experience in this area).

[dinosaur]

git is indeed the wrong strategy for this job, and that's where
git-annex comes in. http://git-annex.branchable.com/how_it_works/

On 06/08/2013 05:41 PM, Lucas Gonze wrote:
> I don't know that a binary equivalent of patching really makes sense.
> There's a reason why diff just says "binary files differ."
>
> But I think that git is the wrong strategy for this job. Dropbox etc
> don't store diffs, they overwrite. With binary files that's even more
> apparent but it still applies to text files.
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 4:43 PM, pir...@gmail.com

> <mailto:pir...@gmail.com> <pir...@gmail.com

> <mailto:pir...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> What about fragmenting the big git files? Maybe the git blobs plugins
> works this way?
>
> 2013/6/9 Lucas Gonze <lucas...@gmail.com

> <mailto:lucas...@gmail.com>>:

> > The achilles heel is using git for binary files. Git is designed
> for text.
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Fabio Barone
> <holon...@gmail.com <mailto:holon...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> thanks dinosaur, that looks quite interesting!
> >>
> >>

> >> 2013/6/8 dinosaur <dino...@riseup.net <mailto:dino...@riseup.net>>

> >>>
> >>> git-annex assistant already is a 100% FOSS alternative to Dropbox:
> >>> http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/
> >>>
> >>> On 06/08/2013 08:43 AM, pir...@gmail.com

> <mailto:pir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> > So, this confirm a 100% FOSS alternative should be developed.
> >>> >
> >>>
> >>
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>
>
> --
> "Si quieres viajar alrededor del mundo y ser invitado a hablar en un
> monton de sitios diferentes, simplemente escribe un sistema operativo
> Unix."
> – Linus Tordvals, creador del sistema operativo Linux
>
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[Lucas Gonze]

I stand corrected-ish.

[Vincent]

There are already several Dropbox-like projects, which sometimes use Git and ownCloud. It might be better to collaborate on that.

http://sparkleshare.org/
http://www.syncany.org/
http://seafile.com/

--
Vincent

[Nick Jennings]

Thanks for those links.

It looks like syncany is loosing steam and might be switching to a sparkleshare backend. So that leaves Sparkleshare (git backend) and Seafile (not sure what componets make-up it's implementation, but it does keep a revision history, I assume for binary data as well).

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

What's the actual topic of this discussion? There are 4 main fully
open source alternatives to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and my
thoughts on them:

ownCloud: http://owncloud.org (disclosure: as you may know, I’m a
longtime volunteer and now work for the company)
Files and sharing at the core of an app platform – it’s more
comparable to Google Apps than just Google Drive. remoteStorage
support is hopefully returning some time in the future. A company was
founded to back it, and after initial doubts I think it’s the right
way to be sustainable (business model is company support). We
specifically do _not_ offer a hosted instance because we do not want
user data. Sync clients for all platforms.

SparkleShare: http://sparkleshare.org (I know the developer personally
and he's cool)
Simple file sync. Uses git as backend, so you can set up your own or
use Github/Gitorious (in which case they can check your data again).
This came out of the Gnome design team. Sync clients for desktop, and
mobile ones are not planned.

Ajaxplorer: http://ajaxplorer.info/about/ (the dev and I mailed often)
Based on a »file manager« paradigm. Sync clients for mobile and a beta
for desktop.

Seafile: http://seafile.com (don’t know them but they seem good)
Also have sync clients for mobile and desktop. They also offer a
hosted instance, which I presume is quite a big amount of work. While
I hope I’m wrong, from experience curating http://libreprojects.net
and seeing projects stop being open source, I think they might go
fully hosted and closed source at some point.


As said, the server component of Ubuntu One is proprietary and Syncany
hasn’t been developed in some time. Spideroak and Mega might be
»encrypted«, but they are still closed source and hosted so we can’t
trust that.

[Nick Jennings]

Thanks for the list Jan, I was wondering if ownCloud has history in their sync data service?

[pir...@gmail.com]

Incidentally, ownCloud has added data encryption just two weeks ago :-)

https://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11471

2013/6/11 Nick Jennings <ni...@silverbucket.net>:

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt]

If by »history« you mean history of a file as in git versioning, then
yes: https://github.com/owncloud/core/tree/master/apps/files_versions
(shipped by default)

[Michiel B. de Jong]

On 2013-06-12 09:32, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
> Spideroak and Mega might be »encrypted«, but they are still closed
> source and hosted so we can’t trust that.

in that area we should also mention tahoe-lafs. it's a piece of
software that only makes sense if you have multiple servers you can
spread data across ("redundant array of independent clouds"), but if
that is your use case, then they seem to be the best alternative out
there for spideroak and mega.

Zooko's company leastauthority.com offers both hosted instances and
consultancy. It comes with a gateway which you run on localhost and
which exposes a web interface. I met up with Zooko on monday, the guy is
an absolute legend. :)


Cheers,
Michiel