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Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

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Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#32

"""Do you plan to open the source code? Currently not. Opening the source code of Wuala would consume quite some time and effort, and commitment to maintain it. If you are a software engineer and would like to see how Wuala works, feel free to apply for a job at Wuala.""" ಠ_ಠ So.. an alternative, but not the solution we need.

Don't open source it. Just give read and build for personal use permission. That should be enough.

I don't think that I will be able to trust secure trough obscurity solution.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#33
It's from Lacie, so no thank you. I bought a Lacie drive and proceeded to copy all my stuff onto it. Before I could get comfortable with it (so within the first six months of purchase) and before I backed up my stuff, the drive failed. I contacted Lacie about it and they proceeded to try and sell me a service whereby they'd recover my data for €300. That would've brought my total spend on the drive up to around £400. I begged and pleaded with them, pointed out how unsavoury such a business practice was and all to no avail. The drive has just been sitting down since with the data unrecovered. Personal memories, music, films and professional data too. I've tried to recover the data but that didn't work and I honestly feel ripped off. As a result, I've vowed to never do business with Lacie again and to warn everyone of how unscrupulous they are. Beware of Lacie and their subsidiaries.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#34
post #30

"""Do you plan to open the source code? Currently not. Opening the source code of Wuala would consume quite some time and effort, and commitment to maintain it. If you are a software engineer and would like to see how Wuala works, feel free to apply for a job at Wuala.""" ಠ_ಠ So.. an alternative, but not the solution we need.

> "If you are a software engineer and would like to see how Wuala works, feel free to apply for a job at Wuala." A non-answer if I've ever seen one. What about someone who applies for a job at Wuala, gets rejected, but still wants to look at the source code?

And that's the only use case that bothers you?

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#35

Wuala is great, but the short summary is a bit misleading. There is a real risk of government agencies forcing LaCie to push you a client update that removes encryption, in an older version of their T&C / product info, this was mentioned explicitly.

I also don't buy the whole premise of US government - bad, EU governments - good.

When push comes to shove, governments everywhere will have no qualms about invading people's privacies en masse.

Human nature is the same everywhere. Power corrupts everywhere.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#37
post #9

I recently tried replacing Dropbox with Wuala because of privacy concerns. I failed, and in the process realized how successful Dropbox has been in creating an awesome user experience! I'm still looking for a locally encrypted Dropbox-alternative. So if any of you are making one, please speak up :) (Edit) I should specify that it was the user experience that made me give up on Wuala, and any proper Dropbox alternativ…

On my "somebody should create this, and I might eventually" list is an open source, P2P, optionally server-backed, encrypted Dropbox replacement. Bittorrent's Sync almost gets there, but isn't open source. I haven't really looked at it, but ownCloud might do what I want.

The ownCloud sync client for OS X pins one cpu core to 100% usage on my fairly new i7 mbp, which effectively drains the battery quite quickly if you don't notice.

Then it also seems to do a full scan of teh entire folder each time it sync's, if you then have for example your iPhoto library (usually a few GBs) there, the sync process will consume lots of CPU and tend to be out of date across devices.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#38
I'm not a security expert neither do I understand cryptography hence the question: I assume they are not using the original password to encrypt data. They are generating a symmetric encryption key and encrypt it with the original password, storing it along with the encrypted data on their servers. The question is how secure the encryption on symmetric key? What if it is easily brutfocable?

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#39
I used Wuala for couple of years, when it was free and allowed earning a much larger quota by sharing own drive space to host other user's data. I used it to keep around 100GB of my personal data. Used to be good while it lasted. Encrypted, distributed, redundant. Then LaCie bought it and turned it into a Dropbox clone. Now I use AeroFS, also tried TorrentSync. Both a roughly equal. I just felt lazy changing from already running and tuned AeroFS to anything else. If you have 24x7 homeserver at home it is very hard to justify paying for storage at dropbox or skydrive or google. I built my homeserver on the latest Atom, so it is frugal (~10W) and completely silent (no fan, SSD). It's dualcore 2.1GHz and has enough grunt for simultaneous NAS, torrents, and plays 1080p mkv to the attached TV. No place for Wuala in this arrangement anymore.
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