File synchronisation

http://retout.co.uk/blog/2010/12/26/conduit

by kgarten • 16 years ago

11 18 16 years ago

retout.co.uk

gnosis6• 16 years ago

"If anyone mentions Dropbox to me one more time, I will scream. I'm sure it's a wonderful solution, but I have deep misgivings about handing my data over to someone I don't trust."

It's really disturbing how eagerly most people are willing to hand over personal information to corporations; whether it's data to the likes of Dropbox, movie viewing preferences to Netflix, book reading preferences to Amazon, all of one's email conversations to Google, and a list of who one's friends are to Facebook.

I could go on and on listing information that the vast majority of people give away about themselves without a second thought to get some "free" service.

And the saddest thing is that few people care, or even think about what they're doing.

Hopefully, as the general public becomes more computer literate, and groups like the EFF and ACLU educate them on the privacy implications of these technologies, their attitudes might change for the better.

locopati• 16 years ago

In some cases, there's a bit of self-interest. I tell Netflix about the movies I like because the recommendation system works better for me that way and improves the quality of the system in general. So, it's not a total something-for-nothing, but there is a lot of trust involved nonetheless.

gnosis6• 16 years ago

"I tell Netflix about the movies I like because the recommendation system works better for me that way and improves the quality of the system in general."

Well, if you use Netflix you don't really have a choice, do you?

Say you didn't care one whit about their recommendations (as I don't), but want to use their movie renting service. You still have to give them your name, address and credit card number. And they'll promptly stick you in their database and track every movie you rent. You might not be telling them what you thought of the movies you watch, but there's still a lot of information given them just by the choice of movies you rented. And the way the system is designed, there's nothing you can do about it short of not using Netflix in the first place.

Amazon is pretty much the same way. In fact, virtually all of the commercial internet infrastructure based on credit card transactions suffers the same fault. From your ISP being able to track every internet connection you make to vendors tracking what you buy from them.

And even when you're not directly tracked by a service (because you haven't given them your name, address, phone number, or credit card number), they could still potentially track you through your IP address (not to mention stuff like OS fingerprinting, browser fingerprinting, history and cache exploits, cookies, etc..).

Of course, there are ways of at least attempting to get around these tracking mechanisms. But relatively few people know of them, few care, and even fewer people bother to use them.

qntm2• 16 years ago

I had misgivings about Dropbox too, which is why I only sync one file, namely a 1GB TrueCrypt archive with all my data inside it. I hear Dropbox added TrueCrypt support in some fashion in their latest release, but I haven't investigated that yet.

pgr0ss• 16 years ago

If you are sharing with other people, something like encfs would be better:

http://www.arg0.net/encfsintro

Encfs encrypts file by file, so you do not have to worry about multiple people editing (and possibly corrupting) one giant file.

gnosis6• 16 years ago

One thing to keep in mind if you give others encrypted data is that the encryption might be practically unbreakable for now. But there's no guarantee it will stay unbreakable in the future.

Given foreseeable advances in technology, along with unforeseeable breakthroughs in both technology and cryptoanalysis no one can really say how long it will be until your data is compromised.

But what we can probably predict with some certainty is that at least some of these data storage companies will keep the encrypted data you send them for as long as they possibly can. And they may even share it with others.

Xuzz• 16 years ago

I consider myself pretty computer literate, but I have absolutely no issues with this. I support the EFF, but I think campaigning against this is both backwards and never going to succeed.

gnosis6• 16 years ago

Never is a long time.

Sure, it's probably not going to substantially change in the near future. But I think making people aware of the issues and why they matter is a good thing. Hopefully, with education and time people will start to care and maybe things will change.

In fact, things are already changing. Not so long ago almost all Americans were completely computer illiterate, and you had to be pretty exceptional to even have an email address or own a computer, much less care about electronic privacy.

Now most Americans own or at least have a computer, have email addresses, and are reasonably computer literate compared to how they were before the internet boom. And there are exposes on various privacy and security issues in the printed news and even on television.

So slowly people are becoming more aware. I expect this trend will only continue to increase now that more and more of the population are born in to the internet age and with a computer virtually in their crib almost from the day they were born.

Some of the most idealistic and privacy conscious people are the ones that are closest to technology and who are most adept at manipulating it and shaping its future. And their numbers are also growing as the general population becomes more computer literate as a whole, and as there are more and more abuses of privacy by corporations and the government.

So I would not count the chickens of a privacyless age quite yet. Remember that not long ago most people thought the collapse of the Soviet Union was as incredibly far off in the future (if it would ever happen at all). And there are still people living who at one time thought that Segregation would never end. And yet both Segregation and the Soviet Union did end. Things did change. They changed drastically in ways that many did not foresee even a decade before.

mrb• 16 years ago

The solution is quite simple: use Dropbox to synchronize a single binary file that is a LUKS-encrypted Linux filesystem (or TrueCrypt or whatever).

This meets all the requirements this person is asking for. All his systems could even be mounting the image using different passphrases (IIRC LUKS allows up to 8 different passphrase for the same image). It will work well because Dropbox will of course synchronize the deltas and not transmit the whole image every time a single byte changes.

Only downside is you can only have 1 client mounting the image at a time... Perhaps some clustered filesystem could get rid of this limitation (that would be an interesting use of them).

kljensen• 16 years ago

Isn't that a pretty big downside? Maybe I'm alone, but I use dropbox mostly for collaboration.

pan69• 16 years ago

Maybe he should look into using Tarsnap (tarsnap.com).

Vivtek• 16 years ago

First comment on the post mentions Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/index.html), which I'd never heard of - but looks pretty sweet for some things I've been meaning to do.

Shorel• 16 years ago

iFolder, originally developed by Novell. (Or so I heard.)

http://ifolder.com/ifolder/features

File synchronisation

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