Woah, sorry about missing last night: I returned home from work and slept from 8pm to 9am. I blogged in my dreams though.
Briefly, yesterday’s copious free time (ie a few minutes) was spent looking at Wuala (thanks, robwiss!), which is a neat popularisation of some of my pet issues: the infrastructure is a decentralised, fault-tolerant, file storage, with private/public/group access created with a cryptographic filesystem (see the Cryptree paper for details on that, and this Wuala-made Slideshare for a general overview of the tech.) It’s notable for having a user-friendly UI, capability to a run the downloader in a browser via a java client, and therefore have linkability (for instance, in theory you should be able to download the Ogg Vorbis version of the Living in the Edge talk here, once it’s uploaded.) It just went public yesterday, and it’s fun to play around with.
I have a few questions about it, which may be more down to my ignorance than Wuala itself: the source is closed, and so I don’t know yet quite how tied the infrastructure is to Wua.la the company (if Wuala disappeared tomorrow, would the network still exist?), or where the potential weakpoints in overall security might be. On the plus side, Wuala is clearly being used in earnest both for public and private sharing, the user interface does a great job of shielding the crazy cryptopunk shenanigans going on underneath, and it’s cross-platform (albeit via Java, which means it’s not quiite working on my PowerPC Ubuntu server right now).
Tahoe is a lot more transparent, but seems to have a different use case at the moment, which is private nests of stable servers used for distributed backup. But if you wanted to do a free software version of Wuala, that still looks like where you’d start (and Wuala is where you would get your inspiration/learn your lessons from).
August 18th, 2008 at 10:12 am
I share some of your questions. From what I could tell, if wuala’s servers go down, the whole system goes down. I believe they have most of the storage and they’re a bit tentative about how much they rely on the edge.
There’s some work to be done on their UI. For starters, I’d like to be able to customize my home screen. There’s a recently uploaded section that shows up on the home screen and more often than not contains thumbnails of scantily clad women. Not exactly work friendly. My ubuntu machine didn’t know how to open anything I clicked on. To open files I had to save them then browse to that directory and open them. Couldn’t find any way to configure program/file type associations. My redhat 5 machine at work did just fine though, so ymmv. My filesystem integration didn’t work right away but I didn’t play with it. Unsuccessful searches have no indication of progress. You could sit there for hours and not know there’s nothing to find.
Hopefully their priority is making the filesystem and os integration rock solid. The web 2.0y crap is nice but it’s not the real achievement. Hopefully their priority after that is to make the system as independent of their servers as possible.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am
PS – the wuala guys did a tech talk at google you might be interested in. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xKZ4KGkQY8
In it they discuss the requirement of 17% uptime (they show that machines with 17% uptime are reliable for storing data), potential security holes, and a lot more.
August 21st, 2008 at 11:33 am
I don’t want to be seen as trash-talking here: I like wuala and I want them to succeed. However, my current impression of their architecture is that it reminds me a lot of Mojo Nation circa 2000. In particular the detail that they actually rely on centrally managed servers while trying to take advantage of users’s machines is very familiar. So in all honesty, I don’t have high expectations for their success.
If I could have one wish for wuala, it would be that they would be more transparent. Open source, of course, and also, you know, open in all kinds of other ways. Then we could learn more from each other. They have made a couple of presentations and they published some technical papers in their former lives as grad students, so those are good starts.
Anyway, on the topic of Tahoe, I’m very interested in the possibility of adapting Tahoe to new use cases and I suspect others are as well. The strategy here is to have a well-understood, well-engineered, transparent, open, working, useful thing and then to extend it or build on top of it to make new things.
http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/UseCases
I’m not saying that this strategy is certain to succeed or is certainly better than the alternative, but at least if it fails I will have failed in a new and different way than my previous failures, such as Mojo Nation.
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 am
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