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

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

#31

Post by bpolania »

DanBC wrote: post #25
bpolania wrote: post #21

In this case what exactly does anti-PRISM means? How I see it it would be PRISM 2.0, since the NSA will now not only have access to your cloud files, now it will have access to your personal physical drives. will I need to have a Plug account to access my drives? Will I be able to access those drives from outside my house or office? Will my users/password for that account will be stored at some king of Plug centraliz…

It's a USB NAS dongle. > With Plug, all your devices are connected with each other thanks to a zero-configuration, private and encrypted VPN (asymmetric encryption based on RSA-2048/SHA-1 keys). We had excellent speed benchmarks on this network. It goes through any main NAT & firewall we tested, it's decentralized when possible, and it doesn't require any user configuration. It's safe and does the job. > When Plug is…

thanks!

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

#32

Post by ra »

The Kickstarter page [1] doesn't lean heavily on the anti-PRISM angle, so I think the title is misleading.

In this case "Anti-Prism" means (not cloud but) USB attached HDD storage!

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brai...

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

#33

Post by GammaDelta »

ancarda wrote: post #28
GammaDelta wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (p…

>Why feel bad about it? My experience with open-source software is somewhat a love/hate relationship. Most of the tools I use (vim, nginx, go, etc...) are amazingly high quality but others are seemingly poor - i.e GIMP vs Photoshop, Pages/Word vs LibreOffice Writer. They look pretty awful, they have unintuitive UIs and generally I have a bad time using them. As such, my attitude towards open-source software is it's "…

A common love/hate relationship I think; don't beat yourself up too much.

I think it's okay and even important to insist on open-source for a system like Plug even if you're not interested in using FOSS for all your computing. For many of the proprietary software examples you cited the "loss of freedom" is kind of nebulous (apart from the price tag!). The odds of a backdoor appearing in a product like Photoshop are relatively slim I think.

By comparison Plug is a perfect target - it is hosting documents and other data belonging to users who have likely made a conscious decision not to store it on the cloud. I don't think it's hypocritical to own a Mac and say that closed-source is not the right model for this application.

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

#35

Post by GammaDelta »

dano414 wrote: post #26
MortenK wrote: post #13

What could be really nice would be a kickstarter to get that poor Snowden out of Russia on a private jet and onwards to one of the countries offering him asylum.

yea-I agree. It seems like his story is getting buried?

I think Mr Snowden would much rather that we were discussing things like this than his plight. :)

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

#36

Post by millerm »

lucb1e wrote: post #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", di…

Just to clarify, the is no synching. The file requests are on demand. Only the metadata (oh, there is that word again) would appear when listing a file/folder. Just like the rest of the net. It's not a synchronization service but a file access system. That the reason you can have 1TB space on a phone. It's a NAS device, or is it a SAN? Anyway, it just a Linux server that connects to the Internet so you can get your goods. I'd rather they open up the entire OS and software though. People need to know this is secure and not just trust someone, again.

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

#37

Post by throwit1979 »

Um, there's also the client side of this.

You can lock up your data all you want, but with the NSA deeply embedded in telecoms and mobile device manufacturers, once you try to access said data in a manner consistent with the project's marketing, e.g. on an apple-engineered device running Verizon's comm middleware, the NSA gets your data anyway.

This is the same problem projects like Moxie's silent circle have. It's trivial for the authorities to grab data between the device's interface and the software - they don't need to decrypt a damn thing.

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

#38

Post by GhotiFish »

I fail to see how plug is anti-PRISM.

All your devices need to install plugs software, at which point you provide a login and a password, and bam, you now have full access to your files connected to your plug...

what?

So we go out and contact plugs central server, provide a username and password, and now we have remote access to all our files.

ALL of them. Plug syncs everything.

PRISM, the program that secretly told internet service companies to provide access and tell no one. and plug, the device that makes every single file you have visible on a network connection that they hold the keys to.

Plug is going to have to go a long way to convince me that they can't be compelled to release my credentials to a government authority, even if they said they never would and they really really meant it, that still means they have complete and total access to my life.

Anti-PRISM here isn't meaningless, it's outright wrong. Your product is only anti-PRISM if your product assumes the author can't be trusted in addition to not trusting the lines the data is sent on (At least they did that).

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

#39

Post by BraveNewCurency »

p4bl0 wrote: post #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 w…

No, I think this device is very "anti-PRISM".

PRISM means that the (US) government can ask MicroSoft/Google/Apple for your files stored in the cloud without a warrant. So you get no protection against "unreasonable searches" specified in the 4th amendment.

This drive is controlled by you and stored in your house (with no key stored in the cloud). So the 4th amendment applies, and the government can't just look at your files any time it wants.

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

#40

Post by DanBC »

throwit1979 wrote: post #37

Um, there's also the client side of this. You can lock up your data all you want, but with the NSA deeply embedded in telecoms and mobile device manufacturers, once you try to access said data in a manner consistent with the project's marketing, e.g. on an apple-engineered device running Verizon's comm middleware, the NSA gets your data anyway. This is the same problem projects like Moxie's silent circle have. It's t…

They claim the Internet connection between plug and the computer accessing that plug is encrypted.
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