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AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

blog.aerofs.com

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#81
post #73

3 things. 1) I kinda feel like AeroFS has taken so long to come out that Dropbox occupies a huge chunk of mindshare. It's almost as if AerosFS will need to spend a bunch of time answering the "why should I switch" question. That said, I would love to see AeroFS succeed as I am less than keen on Dropbox less than stellar handling of security in the past as well as their general security model. 2) This leads to my seco…

OTOH, most businesses don't yet use Dropbox (much) today. If AeroFS's market is the enterprise, they're competing with Windows file sharing/SMB/Samba, NFS, etc., not so much with Dropbox. It's a bit skewed in Silicon Valley and in the consumer market.

A bunch of my enterprise clients seem to be fairly familiar and they seem to all have come through the personal use route.

If the target market is enterprise, companies like Box compete there and supposedly have more controls. That said, Box does not have filesystem integration, the last time I checked.

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#82
post #67
post #63

For me Java is a no no because of all the update and security problems with it. Beside it isn't a lightweight and fast platform. I know many people that waisted a lot of time with Java software upgrading problems because of broken backward compatibility. The other problem is the pricing model. If I host everything and use my own bandwidth, what do I pay for ? Software development and upgrade ? This is very expensive…

Even with Java this is miles more secure than something like Dropbox or other Cloud Storage where you host all your data on someones elses server. So yeah, Java as a technology choice might not be perfect but which other tech is flawless anyway ? Id argue that properly securing your servers/clients is a much bigger problem than someone exploiting the AeroFS software. Pricing is for Teams only which makes sense, for e…

Thank you for the princing clarification. I missed that, my bad.

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#84
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too keen on the fact that AeroFS runs on Java as I would prefer to run Java free systems as much as possible (Go version would be nice =) but am willing to live with it if that's the only option.

Exactly, I removed java from all my computers about week ago. And since I am having my personal debian server, I installed ownCloud 5 on it for filesyncing.. and I am happy so far.. the clients are in C++

Every single release of OwnCloud includes security fixes. From XSS to SQLi. I have very little confidence in that PHP project from a security point of view.

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#85

Possibly Offtopic - If you are going to link directly to blog posts of companies (especially if they have been in private beta) could you PLEASE have a "What is $product" bit. Either one or two lines in the initial part of each post or preferably in an easily noticeable sidebar. I had to go to the main site before I could figure out what aerofs was.

I've recently started using AeroFS although my invite email was gathering dust in my inbox for a long period of time and it was exactly because I couldn't figure out (in few second) why I should use it.

Well, this is actually a relatively different service compared to Dropbox and plethora of other store-your-files-in-the-cloud types. There is no storing of files in the cloud. However, it does the machine-to-machine sync very fast.

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too keen on the fact that AeroFS runs on Java as I would prefer to run Java free systems as much as possible (Go version would be nice =) but am willing to live with it if that's the only option.

We're working on it (a Java-free system, not a Go version, sorry ;) See my response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5484566

Yeah it's still considered Java. While it's been working wonderfully, this still bothers me a little bit. And why not a Go version?

Any chance to open the protocol so other people can work on different clients?

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#88
post #57
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a spec of your security model? I really hope it's not a homebrew solution but something based off existing protocols. In either case, since the security and privacy is your primary feature, a full disclosure of hos it works inside is a must.

A proper writeup is in the works, but to cover the basics: we know not to implement our own crypto. :) Passwords: we apply scrypt() before any use or storage. We never store the plaintext. Device-to-device: standard PKI. We have a CA, and the CA's cert is bundled with the client software. Devices generate 2048-bit RSA keys at setup time. They then generate a PKCS10 CSR which our CA signs, provided you give a valid us…

ECDHE used?

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#89
post #2

This is awesome. AeroFS does everything I want in a file sharing system -- I can either run it entirely on my own machines on LAN and potentially VPN, or at a company on a network also not connected to the Internet, or I can use it as a direct Dropbox alternative (although it lacks some mobile clients and API support). I've been using it for ~a year or two in beta, as well as all the other alternatives. I still use D…

How do you run it on a network disconnected from Internet? That's a very interesting scenario for the company I work at. I assumed that you need to login with AeroFS credentials when setting up clients and servers, is there an alternative?

Depends on the size of your company, we'd like to explore this a bit further. Shoot us an email at business@aerofs.com and we'll follow up ASAP

Re: AeroFS (YC S10) exits private beta

#90

Nice! Just installed. I love the feature list. The fact that is was easier to install and has a nicer UI than Dropbox was a nice surprise :) Since AeroFS never stores the files, the upload speed must be determined by the upload speed of every team member who is sharing the file, yes? At the moment, how good is AeroFS at chopping up the bandwidth to get good speeds among, say, four users with upload caps of 1 mbps? Ho…

You don't need to do this for dropbox, it has a native indicator.
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