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Plug: the brain of your devices

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Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#31

Post by tteam »

samstokes wrote: post #23

This seems like a very ambitious project, which is great. It does seem at risk of boiling the ocean. They're taking on: * NAS device with encrypted file storage and UPNP * setting up a VPN * client software for said VPN on each platform (or at least installers that can configure each platform's native VPN support) * multi-device file sync * whole -device file sync, with client software for each platform, presumably w…

All these are already done by our Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) and TonidoPlug project and it is available and it works.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#32

Post by a3_nm »

flexd wrote: post #24

"Ever needed to send hundreds of pictures to a friend? With Plug, we invented a technology to transfer files instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number. That’s also part of our job to simplify storage." How exactly are they planning to make that a reality? Say I've been out filming with my GoPro and my friend wants the clips, or I've taken some photographs with a DSLR (which are at least >5MB in size per…

I suspect that by "transferring" the files they mean "transferring a token allowing the recipient to access the files from your plug". From there, under their (debatable) underlying assumption that accessing files from a plug from your device is fast, it's as if the data has been transferred: recipient can view the files on their device, except they're being fetched from your plug (and maybe copied to their own plug in the background).

(Caution, this is just speculation.)

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#33

Post by VikingCoder »

samstokes wrote: post #23

This seems like a very ambitious project, which is great. It does seem at risk of boiling the ocean. They're taking on: * NAS device with encrypted file storage and UPNP * setting up a VPN * client software for said VPN on each platform (or at least installers that can configure each platform's native VPN support) * multi-device file sync * whole -device file sync, with client software for each platform, presumably w…

And they're talking about some form of replication on multiple drives plugged in to a hub, and they're also talking about replication if you have two Plugs in different locations.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#34

Post by blhack »

Yes. Store hundreds of movies and hundreds of thousands of pictures on plug and access them anywhere![1]

[1]: So long as you have an absurdly fast internet connection at your house, and also have an absurdly fast internet connection wherever you are that you're trying to use this thing...and aren't on an airplane, or in the car, or on a train...which is when you would generally want to watch movies on your tablet.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#36

Post by pyre »

blhack wrote: post #34

Yes. Store hundreds of movies and hundreds of thousands of pictures on plug and access them anywhere![1] [1]: So long as you have an absurdly fast internet connection at your house, and also have an absurdly fast internet connection wherever you are that you're trying to use this thing...and aren't on an airplane, or in the car, or on a train...which is when you would generally want to watch movies on your tablet.

On the other hand, store things on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask... If it's in your home they don't have an easy interface to it, they have to physically infiltrate your residence, which costs a lot more and, presumably, will require more than a passing interest in you to happen.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#37

Post by prg318 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #27
samstokes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FUSE wouldn't do what they claim to do. FUSE would let them create a Dropbox-alike, i.e. a separate partition whose contents are synced to the Plug. Using FUSE to intercept all I/O on all files would require you to migrate your entire directory structure to their FUSE filesystem; probably a rather unfriendly setup procedure. If their description is to be believed, they're presumably installing a kernel module which h…

That would be the "Translucent File System" from Sun, patent #5,313,646 ( http://www.google.com/patents/US5313646 ). Back when Sun was building a new source code control system (code named Avocet) they wanted a way to create a 'view' of the branch which included stuff from NFS servers and stuff locally. The problem is subtly tricky in some ways (creating 'whiteout' to delete a file which exists in one layer but not t…

A similar technique is also used in IBM's Rational ClearCase suite. It uses a proprietary networked filesystem to provide a dynamic view to users. It was an interesting attempt at a solution for version control and I'm sure that its in use today.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearcase

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#38

Post by runjake »

pyre wrote: post #36
blhack wrote: post #34

Yes. Store hundreds of movies and hundreds of thousands of pictures on plug and access them anywhere![1] [1]: So long as you have an absurdly fast internet connection at your house, and also have an absurdly fast internet connection wherever you are that you're trying to use this thing...and aren't on an airplane, or in the car, or on a train...which is when you would generally want to watch movies on your tablet.

On the other hand, store things on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask... If it's in your home they don't have an easy interface to it, they have to physically infiltrate your residence, which costs a lot more and, presumably, will require more than a passing interest in you to happen.

> on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask

That's assuming they just don't have complete access to everything anyway, as Guardian seemed to indicate today is the case with SkyDrive. Even if NSA or the FBI[1] is not interested in you specifically, they still might mine your data.

1. These leaks and especially today's Microsoft leak indicate substantial cooperation and intelligence sharing between NSA and the FBI.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#39

Post by tolmasky »

pyre wrote: post #36
blhack wrote: post #34

Yes. Store hundreds of movies and hundreds of thousands of pictures on plug and access them anywhere![1] [1]: So long as you have an absurdly fast internet connection at your house, and also have an absurdly fast internet connection wherever you are that you're trying to use this thing...and aren't on an airplane, or in the car, or on a train...which is when you would generally want to watch movies on your tablet.

On the other hand, store things on a 3rd party cloud storage provider that will happily hand everything over to the NSA whenever they ask... If it's in your home they don't have an easy interface to it, they have to physically infiltrate your residence, which costs a lot more and, presumably, will require more than a passing interest in you to happen.

Sure but then your hard drive fails (as they tend to do) and you lose all the data. Sounds like the right solution is just encryption on the client + 3rd party cloud storage.

Re: Plug: the brain of your devices

#40

Post by Nate75Sanders »

blhack wrote: post #34

Yes. Store hundreds of movies and hundreds of thousands of pictures on plug and access them anywhere![1] [1]: So long as you have an absurdly fast internet connection at your house, and also have an absurdly fast internet connection wherever you are that you're trying to use this thing...and aren't on an airplane, or in the car, or on a train...which is when you would generally want to watch movies on your tablet.

This is going to become less and less of a problem as time goes on.

There was a time when the idea of streaming high quality video and doing so using Flash, at that, seemed ridiculous, but it's ridiculously commonplace, now.

I often stream things from a VPS instance to my home via sshfs right now. Doing so over even 3G would work in many cases.

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