Plug anti-PRISM solution raises half a million dollars in 9 days on Kickstarter • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by gonzo » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

> using several patent pending technologies.

One hopes these are their patents, that they aren't granted, etc.

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

#52

Post by wWIwsijeC20 » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 6:46 PM UTC

millerm wrote: post #36

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 g…

> 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

With open source software, too, you have to trust someone. In this case this someone is the people who review it. Of course it's always possible to check the source code yourself, but I doubt that most people would invest the time to audit a codebase that has been worked on for two years or more, by several developers. And even if they invest the time, chances are that weaknesses are overlooked (see, for example, Cryptocat). And even if the source code does exactly what is claimed to do, how do you know that the compiler works correctly? Does the machine code really correspond exactly to the source code?

It always comes down to trusting _some one_. With open-sourced software, that person is usually "someone on the internet". With Plug, you have to trust the people who produce it. It is their business interest to provide a relatively secure product, and from kickstarter they got a lot of resources to put into this.

I for one would rather trust a company with a financial interest in providing a secure product, than a couple of volunteers who are in it for other reasons.

Edit: Grammar

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

#53

Post by mcovey » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 11:17 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #22

This is a "USB NAS Dongle", with different software. The hardware is already made and available. Here's the manf listing for the Wanser-R: ( http://www.mrt-communications.com/WANSER-R.html ) Here's the Alibaba page for the MRT communications NAS Dongle device ( http://www.alibaba.com/product-free/103191249/NAS_Dongle.htm... ) Here's an Amazon listing for something similar ( http://www.amazon.com/Addonics-NASU2-NAS-Ad…

I figured that's what it was. I was shopping around for one of those early this year and it looked like they're just not very widespread, and the few models that are easy to get have some serious issues. I decided to get a raspberry pi instead since it is in the same price range and can serve the same purpose, plus a lot more.

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

#54

Post by dal » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 10:28 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #19

dal wrote: post #5

Closed source, low performing hardware. Who would want this?

If the 100mbps connection is low performing to you, then I'm wondering what kind of files you want to stream.

What are you talking about? Quote from the kickstarter:

"Under the hood, the average transfer speed for your data will be around 30Mb/s"

That is megabits/s, pretty far from 100mbps. At home between my boxes I've got 1Gbps, why should I be unable to utilise that speed? That's just another argument to why it should be Free Software so I/we can run it on any hardware.

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

#55

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 9:07 PM UTC

dal wrote: post #54

lucb1e wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the 100mbps connection is low performing to you, then I'm wondering what kind of files you want to stream.

What are you talking about? Quote from the kickstarter: "Under the hood, the average transfer speed for your data will be around 30Mb/s" That is megabits/s, pretty far from 100mbps. At home between my boxes I've got 1Gbps, why should I be unable to utilise that speed? That's just another argument to why it should be Free Software so I/we can run it on any hardware.

Oh I missed that, point taken