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Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

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11–20 of 55 posts

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#11
post #4

I guess you have to first install and register plug on the mobile device before you can use it. This would forbid connecting from any random computer.

A USB device can boot the needed software when it is plugged in, and the device can have its authorisation interface (say a numeric keypad). It should be able to interface to Windows and OSX devices without much rigmarole.

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#12
The usage of "anti-PRISM" is becoming meaningless. It's like the new rockstar node.js on rails ninja. Just a buzzword. If you think that using your own server instead of DropBox, switching from Gmail to another email provider, and encrypting the content of your files and emails will protect you from PRISM, well, you just don't understand at all what PRISM is all about.

First, nothing prevent government to listen to what happening on the backbone cables (and they do, we now have the confirmation, they don't just ask a finite list of service providers for the content of their users). Hiding the content is one thing, but what these government programs mostly consist of is to recreate people's networks. This is the main point. Sure it's always good to encrypt stuff, but it's not sufficient to be called anti-PRISM. Most of the "anti-PRSIM" thing I read about are not anti-PRISM at all, it's just used as a buzzword. And it's a shame that a community such as HN fells for this.

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#14
Okay so you just plug this in to storage on one side, and internet on the other. Then it works on LAN, but apparently also outside your LAN? They showed that in the video. So there must be some sort of udp/tcp hole punching to get through the NAT?

And then the files sync at the speed of my 832kbps upload speed? So much for "one memory on all devices" when you barely reach 100KB/s reading speeds from your "memory", divided by the number of users/devices, except for any cached files. But the whole point was: no more moving, copying, downloading or uploading, so caching files (which they showed) is in direct violation with that vision and should not needed to be used.

Seems this product is just not for me and it's going to disappoint a lot of users (500k backed shows they put a lot of trust in it). I'm happy to store things in a cloud, but files will be encrypted before transmission and it has to be open source software (preferably even already existing utilities).

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#15
post #10
post #5

Closed source, low performing hardware. Who would want this?

>Closed source This is THE dealbreaker for me. I felt so excited to see Plug. I was ready to sign up to Kickstarter to back my first product. It's a plug-and-play NAS, a data solution I've been trying to find. I really, really wanted to use it. But I can't for ethical reasons. I hate to sound like I'm preaching open-source but it's unacceptable anymore, although I will give them credit that it's a step in the right d…

> I hate to sound like I'm preaching open-source

Why feel bad about it? It gets straight to the crux of the problem. If you're running closed-source software that is presumably taking updates from a third party outside your control, how much of an improvement is that over SkyDrive or Dropbox?

As far as I can tell the only problem with these services is snooping by intelligence agencies and the consequences of that (potential espionage, etc.). One could hypothetically argue that the NSA would be less willing or capable to snoop on data that is stored inside hard drives in citizens' houses - but from the outside we can never know that.

We need to have pretty damn good confidence that we have control over our own gear and data, and that means using open source software that is popular or interesting enough for third parties to review it.

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#16
It's an inexpensive way to create a SAN with some software to tie stuff together. Assuming your router doesn't already do most of this, I suppose it could be useful for home users. I find the anti-Prism claims to be getting old quickly, and probably dubious in this case considering users with no security knowledge are being encouraged to create a single access point to all of their data. This obviously resonates with people, but I'm rather surprised at the success so far.

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#17

It's an inexpensive way to create a SAN with some software to tie stuff together. Assuming your router doesn't already do most of this, I suppose it could be useful for home users. I find the anti-Prism claims to be getting old quickly, and probably dubious in this case considering users with no security knowledge are being encouraged to create a single access point to all of their data. This obviously resonates with…

That's the beauty of marketing, you don't have to tell users the whole truth and you can make it look extremely easy to use. I'm curious to see how this will work out for users in the real world.

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what people say about Apple Macintosh systems?

Yes, except for the "low performing" bit. And also "who would want this" because everybody...

s/everybody/some people

Re: Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter

#20
So its a closed source freedom box project with smaller scope, through it has an prototype app-layer for the phone and other similar devices.

I really hope someone would just make a competing kickstarter project to make a similar app-layer for the freedom project.

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