Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

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> That's a safe place for them, right?

Fuck no! Double fuck no!

Do people actually think that? That's beyond ignorant/naive. Data in the hands of a for profit corporation, safe? Did you read the terms of service / limitation of warranty? The short version is "fuck you and your data". It's not safe from loss at the whims of market/share holder needs/etc. It's also not safe from being compromised either by internal employees or external hackers. It's also not protected by most of the Bill of Rights (those mostly apply to government vs people not business vs people). It's easily supeoned, if the business doesn't just turn over the data on request.

Safe is encrypted on multiple devices geographically (and preferably jurisdictionally) separated.

The lowest acceptable level that can still be considered safe (a very loose definition of safe) is; a copy in plain/open formats on a device I physically control/hold(my desktop harddrive), and a copy somewhere else. Mom's house, Dropbox, yahoo mail, etc.

> Do people actually think that? That's beyond ignorant/naive.

Yes, people actually think that! Have you met 90% of your (ok, Google or Yahoo's) customers? Barely anyone tells them to worry about saving their data locally and these companies actively ask you to load your data into them listing safety as a feature. "It's in the cloud!" blah blah

You can call people ignorant/naive when Google/Yahoo/Hotmail et al. display prominent "Your data is going away in 6 months AND HERE'S HOW TO GET IT." Emphasis on the "here's how to get it" otherwise they're suddenly at a loss of how to get their data back.

Most "normal" people don't assume there's a moratorium on data. Data is forever. You put it on a floppy disk, it stays there forever. All you can do is lose the disk. Same thing with flash drives. Same thing with online services.

The different here is, as you said, safety is pushed even harder with the cloud. There's nothing to lose anymore. The people who are savvy enough to realize that storage can and does die are now being told that people far more competent at it than them are managing backups and such. Why would you think your stuff would go away? Who is telling you that it might? I don't think it's ignorant/naive at all.

I do think that what Google is doing sucks, because I don't think it costs them much/anything when they're handing out 7GBs to anyone with a Gmail account. There's orders of magnitudes less Groups than Gmail users, and Groups was a great way of organizing small project teams privately, in a way that Sites isn't (eg. mailing list, files, pages all in one place).

To us engineers/founders/people with knowledge on how the software business works, it might be obvious, but not for the average Joe. Google (or Yahoo) will be a name brand and they'll hold high expectations of them, especially with Google's "Do No Evil" mantra.

That's "Don't Be Evil," actually. I think that's a pretty important distinction in tone.

Don't worry, I'm sure the NSA has it on a server somewhere along with the rest of our communications.

I'm looking forward to the day when we have a widely used p2p archiving network like OceanStore or Free Haven. Then we can stop worrying about this stuff.

My Master's Thesis covered exactly that. I'm currently working on commercialising the idea, so you can expect a "HN - Review my startup" within a year :)

If you don't mind linking to your thesis I'd love to read it!

Sure, but it's in Swedish. If you still want it I can e-mail it you.

I can see how a Dropbox-like P2P filesharing system could be beneficial for groups, but how would a P2P network benefit individuals trying to safely and securely archive personal documents?

Encrypt the documents. Put them on a distributed hashtable, using something like Reed-Solomon codes to distribute them over the network, so you're only taking about twice as much total storage as the document itself but you're very resilient to nodes disappearing. Maybe add some kind of resource exchange system so you pay for the storage by participating in the network.

Google the projects I mentioned and you'll find a lot more detail on these sorts of ideas. Both projects intended to build permanent, uncensorable storage at global scale. It's not a totally solved problem yet but there's been a lot of interesting engineering.

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