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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

> You could run a managed cloud e-mail service where only the users hold the encryption keys, too. How is this a hardware problem?

This is the key question, in my mind. There's only one reason I'd want to own the hardware—to manage/add/create my own services and handle my own backups because I don't trust a company's involvement in these[0].

If this is so tightly controlled that I can't add my own services and I can't restore a backup without Helm's involvement, why do I even want the hardware?

[0] I don't mean that I don't trust them in a privacy sense. I mean that I don't trust them to make sure the backups are actually working and able to be decrypted and restored. Or be able to be restored without their software/hardware. There doesn't seem to be any transparency wrt/ these concerns.

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This is a valuable and useful criticism and we're going to talk about this at our next board meeting.

How do you know who to trust? You surely have to trust someone. It feels generally true that we can trust Apple since we pay them for hardware and their ongoing business interest is in protecting their revenue streams through their hardware and iOS app store, which means you are aligned.

Generally for Helm that's a good case. That's why we charge money for this hardware and software: it aligns interest.

Free cloud services are not truly free and that's what most people seem to be OK with... but not all people.

This is the classic trade-off. Open source software you can read the code but usability suffers. For the people on HN, most people can run their own servers, but for normal people that's not an option.

Apple has managed to create a computing environment that is highly usable for normal people. This is what Helm is trying to do too.

So, we're in agreement that this sort of thing should 1) be paid for, 2) not readable by the provider, and 3) maintenance-free for the user.

I still don't understand why this is a hardware play. There are advantages to owning the hardware but none of those advantages seem to apply here.

The hardware feels like a bit of an albatross.

If you want to truly control your data, you've got to control your hardware too. See: Lavabit.

But going all the way to the end of that tradeoff is so expensive. It seems like a Helm VM would be 90% as secure and also 90% cheaper.

But with Helm, we don't control the hardware, do we?

I don't see how we should automatically trust them because we "own" the hardware. If its not open source and able to be verified by third parties, what does it matter if we have the "keys"? $500 for proprietary hardware just seems odd considering the goal here.

How could it NOT be a hardware play? Then how else can you verify and trust that you know what code is running in some datacenter in who knows where?

https://cloud.google.com/shielded-vm/ ?

It doesn't matter what code is running server side, as long as decryption happens client side and the keys are never transmitted to the server.

What’s the intersection between people without the know-how to run their own servers and the people who understand what tech companies do with data well enough to feel that this is a big enough need?

In my experience, the average person doesn’t really understand what GMail or Facebook or whoever do with data or the extent of their knowledge about individuals. Even basic things like lookalike audiences or retargeting across the web regularly blow people’s minds.

I hope this project is successful, partly because that would show that people do understand these things enough to view Helm as solving an urgent need. I wonder if we’re there yet.

We use duplicity for backups so there's nothing proprietary in our approach. There will be more transparency coming in a series of technical posts about how the product works, what open source software we use, etc. Appreciate the feedback - we'll keep this in mind as we move forward.

I understand that this is a new product launch and you can't have all answers to all questions front-and-center on the website on day one. With that in mind, kudos to you and garry for being so active in these threads.

I definitely look forward to these posts!

Thanks!

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