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Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

dougbelshaw.com

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Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#91

Post by flurpitude »

sp332 wrote: post #48
cpursley wrote: post #5

Chicago? Last time I checked, that city is within the jurisdiction of the United States and not immune to national security gag letters. No thanks. Swiss based Wuala.com is a much better solution.

That might protect your "data at rest", but communicating with a foreign endpoint makes your "data in motion" even more vulnerable to NSA spying. http://www.zdnet.com/the-lunacy-of-trying-to-avoid-nsa-spyin...

It protects you against a certain kind of threat, namely the National Security Letter that can force a US-based company to install backdoors in their system while forbidding them from telling anyone that they have been forced to do so. If SpiderOak had been compromised by the US government forcing them to install a backdoor, they would be forbidden by law from telling anyone about this. They would not be allowed to remove the clauses from their service description that claim no-one is able to decrypt your data.

This is the special risk of dealing with US-based companies. They can be forced to install decryption backdoors or hand over their users' data while continuing to tell the users they are unable to do so. So you must assume no US-based service is truly secure.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#92

Post by r00fus »

tekacs wrote: post #45
levosmetalo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info, but I said ubiquitous exactly because I need something that "just works" on each one of Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. And I'm not aware of any open source solution there, hence have to use Wuala.

Linux & OS X: encfs Windows: encfs4win Android: Cryptonite iOS: Boxcryptor Granted Boxcryptor isn't open source, but otherwise you get yourself a full encfs-compatible Dropbox stack.

IIRC, Boxcryptor isn't specific to iOS, I have it running on OSX at home, and I believe it also runs on Windows, though I've never had a reason to put it on my VM.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#93

Post by rarrrrrr »

cpursley wrote: post #5

Chicago? Last time I checked, that city is within the jurisdiction of the United States and not immune to national security gag letters. No thanks. Swiss based Wuala.com is a much better solution.

I certainly understand the sentiment given recent events. :(

For what it's worth, SpiderOak Blue is often purchased by enterprise customers as a "private cloud", where an organization can run the server side components locally.

By the way, if I recall correctly, Wuala is owned by LaCie which is owned by Seagate, which is US based. IMO, open products are the solution. We're making it a priority.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#94

Post by rarrrrrr »

mb_72 wrote: post #81

All well and good ... until Spideroak stops syncing, customer support can't explain it and you're told it will be ... get ready ... at least one month before one of their tech guys can look at the problem. I was with Spideroak for over a year before this happened to me, and I switched to competitor's product. sure, no real security, but at least it's backing up my files.

I agree our ability to scale support is a problem. Very sorry it didn't work out for you. Unfortunately on our side it's a big challenge to provide detailed troubleshooting with individual users, especially if they are not paying. We took Patio11's advise and offer a money back guarantee for paid users, but we also do try to investigate and support them much better.

Since the product is zero knowledge, we can't just look at the server to see what a problem might be. Trobleshooting involves analyzing logs from the end point devices, find out all the relationships involved in the sync (one machine is Mac using case preserving insensitive unicode form D, the next is Windows with relevant regional settings, another is a Linux NFS server, a FAT32 volume that doesn't preserve certain characteristics and has a limitations for MAXPATH, etc.)

It often take a couple of hours of analysis to understand what a specific situation's problem might be, and the median case is that it comes down application level things that SpiderOak can't do much about other than explain to people why syncing (for example) Quickbooks files between two open and running instances of Quickbooks at the same time is not going have the effect they desire. Or any number of combinations like that. People put very weird stuff in filesystems.

In any case, sorry it didn't work for you. We did recently finally resolve a couple of long standing edge cases in the Unicode sync logic in the 5.0.3 release. Let me know if you'd like to give it another try. In any case, thanks for your interest in SpiderOak.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#95

Post by dajbelshaw »

temuze wrote: post #89

Cached/mirror: http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1033629403347&mkt=en-US&set...

Thanks, it's the first time one of my posts has made the front page of HN and it kind of took me by surprise.

The cache should be able to deal with it now, but I appreciate the mirror. :-)

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#96

Post by VuongN »

@Doug: have you tried our (free) product: http://ncryptedcloud.com? We currently work with Dropbox and will eventually with Google Drive & SkyDrive. Our product works with Windows, Mac OSX, iOS & Android. We also have the Cloud Web Portal which allows you to see your secure file via web. Keys are generated client-side. We use open standard. We don't have access to your data AND you can securely share your files with other people (nCryptedCloud user or not!).

I've written about the problem of cloud security and cloud privacy here: http://vuongnguyen.com/personal-business-cloud-security.html.

We're just a startup who was trying to solve our own problem with the cloud security & privacy. Would love to hear from you.

-V.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#97

Post by dajbelshaw »

SilliMon wrote: post #86

The best cloud security solution is one where you control the encryption keys AND stuff is encrypted on your device BEFORE uploading to the cloud. We tried SpiderOak but the security was hard for our users. We ended up using Syncdocs which encrypts Google Drive. It lets our team share and use Google Docs normally, but secure folders we need to keep encrypted. They also disclose their AES encryption source. http://www…

I think the new 'Hive' feature makes things a whole lot easier. Just drag-and-drop (as you would with Dropbox) :-)

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#98

Post by dajbelshaw »

VuongN wrote: post #96

@Doug: have you tried our (free) product: http://ncryptedcloud.com ? We currently work with Dropbox and will eventually with Google Drive & SkyDrive. Our product works with Windows, Mac OSX, iOS & Android. We also have the Cloud Web Portal which allows you to see your secure file via web. Keys are generated client-side. We use open standard. We don't have access to your data AND you can securely share your files with…

Thanks! Appreciate the link. I have looked at some third party add-ons, but don't want to use two cloud products when one will do.

I will take a look at ncryptedcloud.com though in case it's useful for people I advise. :-)

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#99

Post by BlackDeath3 »

kudu wrote: post #76

Although having your data encrypted everywhere is a good idea in principle, using closed-source tools like LastPass and SpiderOak Hive isn't a good way to do it since you have no way to verify that the data is encrypted well or at all.

A question I have whenever I see this come up: do people who say this generally do their own personal code audit of the open-source tools they use? How can you trust anybody else to do it for you? Do you compile all of the code on your own? Can you trust your compiler? How far do you go with this line of questioning?

It seems to me that for many people, using an open-source tool does more to provide peace-of-mind than actual security assurances.

Re: Why I'm saying goodbye to Dropbox and hello to SpiderOak Hive

#100

Post by dschep »

VuongN wrote: post #96

@Doug: have you tried our (free) product: http://ncryptedcloud.com ? We currently work with Dropbox and will eventually with Google Drive & SkyDrive. Our product works with Windows, Mac OSX, iOS & Android. We also have the Cloud Web Portal which allows you to see your secure file via web. Keys are generated client-side. We use open standard. We don't have access to your data AND you can securely share your files with…

Any chance of a Linux client?
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