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Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

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Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#31

Post by alexchamberlain »

dpark wrote: post #8

They give me half of a 2TB drive? Doesn't that mean that I'm getting only one copy of my data stored outside my house? So if a power surge fries my equipment, there's one copy of my data spread across a couple dozen other machines. I guess that's fine as long as no one but me experiences any failures... It's possible that they're just overselling, and they expect most people to use only a couple hundred megs, which w…

Maybe they're hoping compression helps a bit? Having said that, I reckon most people won't fill up their drives...

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#32

Post by the_paul »

typicalrunt wrote: post #21

Interesting idea, but this worries me: When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It's actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system. So 1TB is filled with other people's data? What about security? Dropbox had a simple security issue that potentially leaked all users' data. But now, the data is on your drive. You could mi…

This is one of the most straightforward possible applications for cryptography in data storage- no worries about key negotiation or cipher negotiation or PKI infrastructures. And yes, they're encrypting your data before sending it anywhere- that's pretty explicitly mentioned everywhere the service is explained.

So, if you're asking whether you're legally liable for the content of data on your hard drive which you have no possibility of decrypting, um, the answer is "no".

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#33

Post by [deleted] »

wmf wrote: post #22
dpark wrote: post #17

Actually, you know who could probably sell this? Comcast. Make a single device that serves as a cable modem and also has this storage angle built in as either a "free" service with the bundle or as a small upsell.

I think Comcast wants to reduce upstream congestion, not increase it. Edit: I'm talking about upstream on the last mile.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#35

Post by dpark »

cbs wrote: post #20
jpschorr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why dropbox has lan sync: https://www.dropbox.com/help/137

That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain. And looks like it doesn't have lan-only drives, I maintain a box serving up samba shares specifically because the work files in a specific project work files would blow my bandwidth cap for the month in 2 round trips.

> That has a few big catches, including maintaining an internet connection and being in the same broadcast domain.

Are those actual big catches? Those seem like pretty reasonable constraints. What machine do you have attached to your LAN that can't access the internet? And the network restriction is probably just fine for >99% of their customers.

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#36

Post by divtxt »

dpark wrote: post #16
divtxt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they had gone with At least 2 copies offsite - that was one of my first thoughts too. Then I remember that I used to do backups at most once a year until I moved to the Mac and Time Machine. (edit: clarify sentence)

How do they guarantee at least two offsite copies? That would require that they give everyone 1TB out of 3TB. Unless they're also storing on their own servers, in which case the consumer-housed device seems pointless. And two copies is still pretty low for flaky infrastructure. They're basically setting up your data as a torrent cloud, except there are no seeds if you lose your equipment, so you're trying to download…

What I meant was: I wish they had gone with at least 2 copies offsite. Sorry for the ambiguity.

And you're right - 2 copies would mean 1TB out of 3TB.

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#37

Post by kijin »

jtolds wrote: post #30
kijin wrote: post #3

So, the company gives you a 2TB external hard drive for free, on the condition that you use 1TB to store your own data and 1TB to store copies of other people's encrypted data? Sounds interesting, until you get a huge bill for bandwidth overage. I have barely 100GB of bandwidth to spare every month (out of a total of 300GB/mo), so if that hard drive gets filled in less than 10 months, we've got a problem. They're eff…

ISPs pay for bandwidth leaving and entering their network. inter-network bandwidth is actually free for them, so it's very likely spacemonkey could prefer peering with other users on the same ISP.

That would certainly help, but there's a limit to same-ISP peering. For example, I use a relatively small ISP, so not many people are going to be using the same ISP that I do. Even if you use a larger ISP, you're screwed if even a single person dumps 100GB/mo of data on your SpaceMonkey drive.

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#38

Post by kijin »

the_paul wrote: post #32
typicalrunt wrote: post #21

Interesting idea, but this worries me: When you sign up for Space Monkey, you get a physical networked hard disk with 1TB of storage free for you to use. It's actually a 2TB drive; the rest gets used by other people on the system. So 1TB is filled with other people's data? What about security? Dropbox had a simple security issue that potentially leaked all users' data. But now, the data is on your drive. You could mi…

This is one of the most straightforward possible applications for cryptography in data storage- no worries about key negotiation or cipher negotiation or PKI infrastructures. And yes, they're encrypting your data before sending it anywhere- that's pretty explicitly mentioned everywhere the service is explained. So, if you're asking whether you're legally liable for the content of data on your hard drive which you hav…

Depending on the jurisdiction, you might still be liable for other people's encrypted data stored in your property. Whether anyone can prove that you have any particular piece of incriminating data is a different story of course, but law enforcement agencies in certain countries have a nasty tendency to skip proofs.

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#39

Post by sek »

dpark wrote: post #27
wmf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Comcast wants to reduce upstream congestion, not increase it. Edit: I'm talking about upstream on the last mile.

Why? If anything, I'd expect them to have plenty of upstream bandwidth, given that typical traffic patterns are primarily downstream.

They sell the upstream to hosting providers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

Re: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

#40

Post by wmf »

jbellis wrote: post #25
wmf wrote: post #24

This has been shown not to work: http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/TFS.pdf (section 5.1) I wonder how they think they're getting around the upstream replication bottleneck.

Upvoted, but I skimmed 5.1 and missed the "shown not to work" part. Can you be more specific?

Whenever a device fails or goes offline, the data that was stored there needs to be re-replicated from the source. But figure 6 shows that even with a 2 Mbps "turbo" uplink you can only replicate ~25 GB; if you have more data than that, replicas will fail faster than you can recreate them.
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