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Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

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Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#51

Post by simgidacav »

ff10 wrote: post #46
Toshio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Switzerland is a non-EU country. Switzerland has a long tradition of civil liberties, rights and participation. This results in regular legally binding referendums on the one side and tax evasions from civilians of other countries on the other.

The fact that they have been "good guys" until now doesn't say anything about the fact that they will be "good guys" forever.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#53

Post by VexXtreme »

Keyframe wrote: post #44

Company may be in Europe, servers might be in Europe, you might be in Europe. Nothing guarantees you that your data won't be routed through US where it can be tapped into. That's the primary issue for me with the whole PRISM scandal.

Data is encrypted client-side before being sent so I believe this is a non-issue.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#54

Post by simgidacav »

Toshio wrote: post #35
lazyjones wrote: post #29

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.

I think there's an analogous between power and hardware/software failure.

When power is centralized corruption effects are worse, exactly like when software is centralized failure effects are worse. Distribution is the answer. Distribute power, in a way in which it cannot be exploited.

I'm not an expert in politics, but I guess that communism had this kind of principle, but it totally failed in implementing it.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#56

Post by thejosh »

sabret00the wrote: post #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.…

Buy WD, Seagate, Samsung drive and have it fail, then try and ask them to recover your data for free.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#57

Post by VexXtreme »

ff10 wrote: post #46
Toshio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Switzerland is a non-EU country. Switzerland has a long tradition of civil liberties, rights and participation. This results in regular legally binding referendums on the one side and tax evasions from civilians of other countries on the other.

Like the time when Swiss banks conveniently decided to forget their tradition of "civil liberties and rights" and en masse turned over their clients confidential personal information and financial records to the US authorities? They've already acted like America's little bitch once, what makes you think they're not going to do the same again?

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#58

Post by corford »

maggit wrote: 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…

Spideroak or a private BitorrentSync setup are both good choices imho

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#59

Post by morsch »

joosters wrote: post #50
josephagoss wrote: post #5

It requires Java?

Yes, just installed and then immediately uninstalled after I got the 'install java' prompt :( It's not Wuala's fault, but forcing me to put java back on my desktop is a big hurdle. It's going to take an absolutely amazing piece of software to make me deal with that horrendous bug-ridden security hole again.

I don't trust the Java sandbox to protect me while running arbitrary code. So I don't use the Java browser plugin.

But I don't see how the desktop runtime is a security hole (you're running binaries you trust outside a sandbox) and I very much doubt it's any more buggy than your average Python, Ruby, Node.js, etc. runtime. Or, for that matter, your average native library.

Re: Wuala: Secure Cloud Storage

#60

Post by kryten »

sabret00the wrote: post #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.…

This is normal for Lacie. I've dealt with them in the past. They are a premium repackaging outfit of some of the lowest grade hardware you can get. They used to prey particularly on Mac users in the early 00's.

However, you should have backed up your stuff in more than one physical place and never assumed that the disk was entirely reliable.

Buy a quality drive enclosure and a quality hard disk, put them together yourself and make sure you have a half decent backup strategy.

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