Permanent.org – Nonprofit, secure cloud storage
permanent.org
permanent.org
> This is our mission – to preserve and provide perpetual access to the digital legacy of all people for the historical and educational benefit of future generations.
Okay, if that's your mission, how does "secure cloud" come into that? How will future generations benefit from my data if it's secure? Do "future generations" include the present NSA and advertisers? What's your actual use case?
There are a lot of ways this could be good or bad, and without some clarity people are going to (perhaps correctly) assume the worst (as is evident in this thread).
integrity i.e. ensuring that data received, changed, and removed is exactly as expected and accurate per the requirements for the data over the lifecycle of the data.
availability i.e. ensuring that the data is accessible/usable for the use cases intended.
That said, confidentiality could also be relevant for a system of truth such as this one. There may well be certain data elements that one might want to restrict e.g. only to people who share genetic history with an ancestor. (as an example)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Key_conce...
if it helps.
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edit2: security (confidentiality) in permanent.org elaborated: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-...
But for what its worth, they talk about security of data in accessible (albeit lacking) lay terms here: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-...
Not known to me yet is whether these claims have been validated.
My take: As long as they're not crystal clear with what they mean by that, I don't trust them. And to be honest, even then I probably wouldn't trust them with some confidential data. The very first step would be to open up about each point OP mentioned in his post, and we can go from there.
Regrettably, you're right. That's why we're employed.
I'm not defining it, if you re-read my post you'll see that I'm asking how they define it.
This actually makes sense -- if the goal is long-term set-it-and-forget-it, it solves the problem of getting a new credit card every few years & forgetting to change this service. It also eliminates any recurring payment-processing fees.
The back-of-the-napkin math checks out: accounting for storage, data-transfer, and business overhead, if they pay around $0.20 / GB / year, and they charge $10, then with 0 interest they would still have your files for 50 years, which is probably longer than your children will have your password to this service.
I still wouldn't trust it -- I have a pavlovian response to the combination of "permanence" and "give all your data to this new internet service". Maybe it's irrational here, but still, this product is at the wrong layer of abstraction for me personally :)
The concept of (consumer-grade?) permanent data storage triggers some response from him.
I believe there are people who won’t forgive text drive / Joyent for their dishonesty and sincerely we must never trust the leadership at Joyent with anything as long as they roam the earth.
https://www.chargebee.com/blog/lifetime-plans-its-time-rethi...
In my case:
food: losing all my data (or it becoming incredibly difficult to access / control / afford)
bell: uploading all of my data to a new internet product.
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Most companies have unsustainable business models (grow forever).
For startups, this is especially true (rapid growth forever).
This is a new internet company, but their whole shtick is that they have a sustainable business model. Given that data, maybe my bias is unfair.
How many people have their Geocities site pulled from them?
I think this foundation's mission is great. I'm not expecting things to be "permanent". I already know that there is no such thing as anything that is permanent, including our lives and our health. If there is no such thing as absolute permanence in anything, then I can throw that idea out and look at the rest of what they are offering. To me, it is irrational to think that just because someone _doesn't_ say their stuff is "permanent" doesn't mean you can trust them as well.
What I see in this foundation is something that supports the internet that is not controlled by Big Tech. I think about my children and where we are going in our society, and I think that is something that I value. I valued it enough to have already pledged a donation for the price of two latte.
Yes, nothing is forever, but with some luck this could live as long as our civilization..
Assuming some interest on the endowment is one way this could work out, falling costs of cloud storage is another.
Who knows what S3 prices will look like in 50 years?
These people use museum endowment as an analogy, but especially judging from that analogy I don't think they have any idea how this thing works. Storing someone else's data forever is completely different from how museum is run. The analogy is so ridiculous that it's not even funny.
Where this analogy may apply is sites like Waybackmachine, because they're at least doing it for the greater good. But I'm pretty sure these guys will throw away some random guy's private file archive the moment they run out of money.
Normally I'm all for silly experiments that come from ignorance, and I'm fine with various consumer startups that come and go along with their user data, because sometimes this ignorance leads to success. But in this case these people are playing with someone else's data AND asking for money, and claiming to store these forever in my view is no different from a scam artist. Intentional or not, this to me is no different from a scam.
I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical.
Apart from that I agree this non-profit competition should only be used to kill industries that charge an exorbitant amount for there services. At least many of the popular cloud storage companies are as “non-outrageous-profit” as it gets. They make money from efficiency/dedup or other management efficiency
It's almost like a conman claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine and asking people for money, and furthermore, going around criticizing all the other people who build and sell normal machines are the bad guys for selling inferior products.
No, they're not. They're claiming they will permanently store private data for a one-time fee.
Let me put it this way instead. They are essentially saying they will pay for the hosting and data access usage and networking costs forever, and you can enjoy all these things for free forever, if you "only" pay an upfront cost. And that's a lie. There's no such thing as forever, especially if it's run by beings that won't be around forever. The scammy people behind this initiative will all die in hundred years. Without an economically viable model, it will all go.
In my eyes, what they are doing is essentially trying to make it big with a one time splash, and don't care what happens next. No different from all the scammy blockchain ICOs that promise "forever immutable storage".
Although the idea is to create a fund and operate off the interest. Let's look at their prices.
$1000 for 100 Gigabytes or $100 for 10 Gigabytes. Basically it's $10/GB. With like a very safe dividend allocation they can probably get a 2% annual return on their investments, which means they need to only spend $0.20/year on my 1GB of data.
They say their plan is perfect for phone or hard drive backups, and they offer continuous file migration. Let's say I completely replace the contents of my GB every 3 months. We can't use AWS S3 One-zone because they advertise "Redudant backup".
S3 Standard Infrequent access is $0.0125 per GB per month, so that's $0.15/year/GB. Maybe they can use AWS S3 Glacier although I'm not exactly sure how it'd work with the continuous migrations. That would be $0.048/year/GB which is a lot more feasible. Data ingress into AWS is free, but egress isn't. If we download our GB 4 times per year that's $0.04 in egress. There's also some costs for PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, GET, SELECT requests, so let's say that for our 1 GB it'll amount to $0.01 per year.
That means it'll cost us $0.098/year/GB for our storage service that we can only download from 4 times/year and does not give us millisecond-access to our data.
I'm sure they can find a storage solution that's cheaper than using AWS S3 Standard Infrequent Access so they still have a good response time for data, but overall it seems feasible.
If I'm looking for my blog, or my tweets, or a set of family photos and videos to live on forever, I absolutely want them under control of a foundation that outlives me and my relatives interest in maintaining that data.
Why don't you refute the argument and tell us why it isn't? You made some pretty bold claims, so I would be nice if you can back them up.
> if these people actually cared about people owning their own data, they would have released a toolkit or an application that lets each individual do what you've just described. Instead of asking for money.
The only way human beings can successfully store data (especially symbolic/digital data) for long terms is by creating institutions to maintain it.
Even granite tablet buried in a cave for 10,000 years will require a continuous series of institutions maintain the knowledge to successfully interpret it, otherwise you'll just end up with something like Linear A.
Where is this individual going to store their data? On the unreliable hard drive on their personal computer, which they never back up?
A toolkit or an application isn't hardware. Solving the problem of reliable long-term data storage requires hardware. Hardware costs money. Basically this service is competing with my ISP, my hosting company, etc. to be a long-term data storage provider.
Whether their math is sound, I have no idea. Whether it's a good idea I don't know either. I don't need "permanent" storage as in "for ever and ever and ever". But that's not necessarily a scam.
I think with a lot of things there's a J shaped value curve. Over long periods of time, things of small value (including literal garbage) become historical and archeological treasure.
Also this doesn't seems like it's really mean to be storage for random "junk":
> Permanent.org isn't just another digital box or drive. It's a digital archive.
> Upload your most important digital materials to your archive and customize the archive profile to represent you. Create multiple archives for other people and organizations. Then establish relationships to share materials between them and create everlasting connections. Collaborate with your community by adding members to any archive to curate a shared history.
That implies there's a certain level of curation that's supposed to go into the archive, so more diaries and important records than your "Downloads" folder.
Isn't that mostly because of it becoming a rare insight into a time that is long gone? With perfect preservation, would literal scraps of garbage from 10k years ago be individually interesting?
The question is if you can trust this non-profit?
Maybe if other credible non-profits were backing it.
OK, enlighten me. Because to me (an admittedly financial layperson) it makes sense. I give them a one-time payment, they put it in the bank with lots of others' payments and live off the interest. I don't see where the problem lies.
And yeah, I'm sure they will close down the minute they run out of money. That's no different than a for-profit doing the same as soon as it stops being profitable. To me though, this is way easier to understand how it could be around forever unlike the for-profit boys which have a totally different goal.
But regardless, we have no idea what backend they are using. Hell, I can go to S3 right now, put a gig out there, and a million hits only cost me pennies. And in theory, that cost will only continue to shrink.
I would like to see more details on this. Bandwidth-limited sharing would still be economically feasible up to a point.
If they have run the numbers and are careful to leave a generous safety margin, I can see this working out. Eventually it will fail, as everything does, but it could last a very long time before that happens.
One more thought: if they are successful, they may accumulate a substantial endowment, at which point the primary risk is capture of that endowment by unethical board members. They have a good board right now, but will that always be the case? Time will tell.
You don't have to make any assumptions. It's right there on the web page that was linked to:
"You choose what files or folders you want to share, who you want to share them with and what level of access that Archive should have."
A million hits on a 1 gig file would cost you $50,000.
I've also posted some skepticism about what they're doing, but the difference is that I'm asking questions rather than making assumptions.
Why are you making things up at this point?
But when it comes to private data hosting, for each repository there is exactly one person who wants it to stay alive.
Lastly, archive.org never started out asking people for money promising something the impossible. These guys will hide behind the word "promise" when they want to exit scam or just give up after a couple of months after taking people's money. "Hey we only gave you a promise, we never said we will guarantee and even pay back money if we can't keep the promise", this is what they will say.
You don't get to redefine a word and then claim it fits the definition. Scam is intentional deception, which is most certainly not what's happenning here.
"Non profit" has nothing to do with it. Thinking any service is permanent is pretty naive.
A subjective look at the world suggests that institutions which have preserved artifacts (including digital artifacts) over a long time scale have been likelier to be non-profit than for-profit.
It seems you have some political beef with this being a non-profit.
Luckily, those are not your only two choices - there are cloud storage providers that are simultaneously privacy minded[1], technically sophisticated[2], and honest about their business practices[3].
[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
[2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html
Nonprofit mainly means that they're not a company beholden to shareholders, and that they can't be sold or acquired.
If something like permanent.org is setup intelligently they can even have a plan for a backblaze demise (god forbid) and use the fund to migrate to another provider(s) in that case.
Assuming we're talking about storage in perpetuity without the need for maintenance, the fund would need someone trusted to administer it.
I personally wish there was an inexpensive, trusted place for me to deposit a large sum of money, and have it automatically paid to service providers to maintain my domain/hosting/online identity in perpetuity, or until my deposit/endowment runs out.
This sounds like what I want, only just for data.
B2 is $0.06/GB/year, while a regular HDD would cost ~$0.03/GB/drive-lifespan.
At 10TB, you're paying $600/year on B2, a price at which you could outright buy two 10TB drives and stick them in a larger NAS setup with ZFS or a simpler RAID-1 array.
https://www.duplicati.com does that for free being open-source thing, all platforms supported.
Are you sure about that? I'm no expert, but I thought it was advisable to power up spinning platter disks at least every so often, once a year say?
And where are you keeping this backup, same box?
Is there a specific reason why you would need to do that? I'm not really aware of any.
> And where are you keeping this backup, same box?
This is ultimately up to you, depending on what kind of redundancy you deem necessary and whether you have multiple physical locations where you could store the said drives.
SSD’s definitely do this.
Even if hard disks don’t do this, mean time to repair is a crucial parameter in raid durability calculations. If you spin the drives up once a year, the mean time to repair is 6 months. Most raid systems are likely to lose data if it takes more than a few days to repair.
This was a cost analysis, mostly for those that can't afford B2. You can buy two drives for the cost of a year at Backblaze and have N+1 redundancy.
> You're paying Backblaze to ensure that GB can be accessed in the future
No doubt, which is why I prefaced this with "If you don't need to have your data in the cloud".
> The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications and rendering Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or other functional equivalents. Use of the Service for serving video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.
This is a clever exploit none the less (not a pejorative).
[0] https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet-you-didnt-know-that-y...
The "device" you use today will, in all probability, not be usable after a number of years, no matter whether you spin it up regularly and maintain it in a working condition.
I have backups in countless floppies, diskettes, Zip drives, 9-track, QIC, DAT, SCSI, ...
I would love there to be an option available at Backblaze B2 pricing, without a massive invasion of privacy. Right now I'm using Linode's Object storage, which is priced at $0.02/GB per month which is still reasonably priced for my needs.
> We may terminate or suspend access to our Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms.
Is this normal? So I guess this is not a good place to store a copy of my encrypted password file?
Or am I misunderstanding and it means that they can terminate my account only if/when I breach the Terms?
Pretty clear cut, any reason whatsoever.
Which is fine for a free service, but is going to be a pretty big drag on the number of people willing to "donate" $1000.
These terms and conditions are ridiculous if they want to be compared to museums and universities.
When one lodges their collection with a museum "in perpetuity" I'd expect the museum to have a disposal clause that lets them dump non-profitable works?
Works gifted to nations seem to get sold off occasionally, I'd guess that's by virtue of renovation clauses that allow the receiver a veritable carte blanch?
This isn't really meant to benefit you. This is meant to benefit our children. If the foundation survives longer than my own life, then I can put files that may be of value to my children and great-grandchildren. It would be up to them to value the preservation of their own digital history and cultural heritage to continue supporting this mission.
Both the founder of the Internet Archive and someone from the geaneology industry are among the board. I can see this idea being cooked up as, "hey, what if we were able to offer regular people their very own micro Internet Archive?" "What if we were able to pass on digital photos to be discovered by our descendants the way we have been able to discover photos from the late 1800s and 1900s?"
When viewed from that lens, about what happens to data after you die, $10 is a cheap gamble. This isn't really a promise made to me. This is a promise made to my kids. It may not be a promise that the foundation can keep, but I value contributing to my kid's heritage enough to risk $10.
I am still going to keep my Google Cloud and Dropbox, and whatever. But the 1 GB I have from this foundation is for a time capsule, stuff I really want to have a shot of passing it down. My kids won't care about my cat memes, or my passwords, or stupid videos. But they may want their baby pictures. They may want their grandpa's and grandma's dissertation.
When I die, my Google Cloud drive will shut down. But if things work out with Permanent.org, those files will continue to be there. I won't have to burden my kids directly with its upkeep. And perhaps, when they are older, they will come to value having access to it.
Maybe they have not sold their vision well enough. But I guess, they only need just enough people who gets it to kick this off. They are already 75% of the way there.
Institutions that last a long time plan for changes in management. Contracts are part of that. I think I understand their vision, but they need to put themselves out there and be willing to be hauled into court to make "permanent" happen. If that's not what they are saying, then I guess I just don't understand.
In cases of severe data loss or organisational insolvency, I'm thinking that there might not be an organisation to haul to court.
What might work for the end users of such an organisation is transparency of some sort, including the publication of regular financial statements and board minutes.
Personally, I think the consumer protection and litigation has not done the US much favors, culturally speaking. It's gotten to the point that people think that Kickstarting pre-funded products have the same kind of guarantees. I have seen people get ragingly upset when their $5 kickstarter contribution amounted to nothing. I blew $1000 on a kickstarter project once knowing I may never see it again. (I got to go to a nice party out of it and got to meet Neal Stephenson and other fans; that was enough value for the $1k; they definitely did not deliver everything they promised).
It is why early-stage investment opportunities had been iffy -- unsophisticated investors treat what are essentially investments as if they were consumer products with the same kind of consumer product guarantees. It was why the SEC was founded in the first place, to protect "widows and orphans" and other unsophisticated investors ... and why regular folks get locked out of the better opportunities. Because somehow, our consumer mindset does not include an education on being an investor. There are no guarantees, just balancing risk and rewards.
With permanent.org, I'm investing into a future, not buying a product. I've thought through the risks and I made the decision for myself. I mean hell, during this pandemic, I have seen people want guarantees on even things like that their health. Get this treatment, save your life, or your money back? Demand service and sanitization supplies from hospitals, because the customer is always right? And now, I see this bizzare reaction of fear, derision, and ridicule on this non-profit vision. I'm not saying you are ridiculing this, mind; there's already enough of it from other commenters.
Don't get me wrong, I know there are plenty of scams around. It isn't as if I have not been conned before. However, it is often my pride, not my wallet, that has been hurt. I've seen much bigger cons, some even legitimized, with clear public harm. ... Enron causing brownouts to manipulate energy prices. Residential real estate valuation bubble ponzi scheme that is somehow normalized. The travesty called "No Child Left Behind Act" that shifted education further away from educating kids and teaching them to critically think while being emotionally intelligent. I can go on. Permanent.org's flaws in its marketing and messaging, its ambition to try to fund this through an endowment, is such a tiny blip when compared against the much bigger systemic problems and legitimized scams. If someone doesn't want to donate to permanent.org, then don't donate. Why are people getting so upset over this promise of "permanency"?
If they can remove my files for any reason, how can I trust them not to delete my files? This clause does not make any sense for a service like this.
If they don't have confidence in their own plan beyond the one year of their DNS, why should I?
Are they just fishing for $100K and then they'll possibly make some real plans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_miss...
From: https://lookup.icann.org/lookup
Name: permanent.org Registry Expiration: 2020-06-11 18:55:23 UTC (First post on news.ycombinator.com)
Or that the companies themselves wouldn't be merged?
Pretty sure there's no shareholder value in paying to preserve data for someone who's not paying fees and is not going to sue because they're dead. Those companies (or any for-profit entity) absolutely cannot be trusted to provide a service like this; their profit motive means they'll cheat, sooner or later.
The market failure here is the classic "market for lemons" problem. Too many people have been burned by "forever" pricing that turned out to mean "a few years", or the bankruptcy or acquishutdown of a company. So any new entrant will face intense skepticism, no matter how sincerely they are trying.
So far the only permanent pricing that's worked for me is my grandfathered permanent Pinboard account, and that has a bus factor of one and a bit.
This is exactly the sort of policy that a "permanent" storage facility must promise never to enact. The whole point of something like this is for stuff you don't need regularly but want to keep forever.
Every year or so I log into the dropbox account that has a copy of my wedding photos in. I don't need to look at them, but I want to keep them.
Aside from the title the first thing you read is "The Democratization of Permanence" - from my probably dumb, mostly mainstream with a bit of tech self this just screams "You're gonna need your thinking cap on for this one"
Can't you just say "we host files and it costs like 50 bucks a year" or whatever you actually do? Once you've done that you can whip out your thesaurus and put whatever you want on the page, just answer the question first.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pri...
Backblaze does do more than "just store data" but that is their core business and operational concern. Just glancing through this it's easy to see that just retaining data at scale is difficult and expensive.
> By making this decision [to raise prices] now, we are ensuring we can continue to offer unlimited backup and keep improving our Computer Backup service.
I'm doubtful that this organization could generate enough passive income through an endowment to sustain itself. They do have a chart on endowment growth relative to storage growth. I wonder if they've hit the point where the endowment return is greater than their total expenses yet.
A one-time-payment like this would seem more possible if there were any restrictions on who's data to back up and how much. You can't just look at the interest of a one-time payment and say "yup that pays for storage on those bytes indefinitely" because for every byte of storage someone paid for there might be many more that are used for free.
Nothing is ever permanent. I've seen so many services come and go, that I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. My 25+ years of data is on a local NAS and on an offline copy at a trusted location.
I'm quite skeptical about relying on VC-funded or publicly-traded cloud services. An actual non-profit could be a lot more reliable: as long as expenses are less than income, there's no pressure to grow, and it could go on forever.
The big thing I'm skeptical about is growth in data needs. 5GiB free iCloud was more than enough 5 years ago; when I upgraded my iPhone, suddenly all my videos take 8x as much space. $10 for 1GiB forever storage sounds OK now, but what happens in 20 years when a single photo is 500MiB?
An interesting side effect is that people are calculating the endowment interest in this thread (a hard thing to do when rates are near-zero and there is a real risk of negative rates in the next 50 years), while the big factor is that storage prices drop dramatically over time.
Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
That's a good point, but I don't think in their favor. At the rate that they're charging, you could prepay for 36 years of storage on S3 (neglecting bandwidth charges, which I know are substantial).
Compounded with your point that data storage costs are tanking, I would actually expect $10 to go even further. Which is also not to mention that they're planning on paying for their costs on interest from their endowment. Turns out I can also put my money in something that generates a profit.
I just don't see the point. They seem like they're trying to build S3 but without any profits, which at best makes them a marginally cheaper option, and at worst, a more expensive and less well featured S3.
https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/maintaining-acces...
On a macro scale, 20MB is still pretty difficult to store "forever", especially if you need to involve a significant number of trusted people, over a long enough period of time (basically forever), to ensure that it's around.
However, realistically, I don't think we can assume that storage prices will drop forever. That depends upon continued advances and breakthroughs in science, engineering, and commercialization efforts. I recognize that, ironically, Big Tech help drive storage prices down. It may be a generation, or five, or ten, but the tech advance boom won't go on forever.
I don't know if the foundation will be around at that point. It is pretty ambitious, and perhaps, they may have to change their charter. The founder of the Internet Archive is on the governing board of this foundation, and I can easily see this idea cooked up as, "hey, what if every Joe and Mary can have their own micro Internet Archive?" "People have photos of their great great grandmothers 100 years ago, but everyone's stuff is no digital; what if they could have saved that for their kids? Would they have a place to stash it even after they die? ('cause, you know, no subscription fees) Can you depend on Facebook to memorialize that?" (One of the people on their board is involved in a geaneological company)
I think it is a good vision, although their plan is not without risk. (But what isn't?) We're also depending on our descendants to value these personal, mini vaults of data to keep donating to preserve it (if the endownment model does not work). But you know: we would be dead and it would not be up to us to value and preserve our own history.
I am really surprised at the amount of backlash I see on this forum for it.
Nothing in our throw-away society is. It could be with some radical changes. But that's another story
> While the endowment model of the Permanent Legacy Foundation is designed to keep yourmaterials into perpetuity, it is not designed to be a high-traffic heavy-bandwidth hosting site.With the exception of approved nonprofit partners, we do not allow references of embedded15Permanent Legacy Foundation Manifesto materials on external sites for, and we must reserve the right to throttle or block abusive traffic
[1] https://www.permanent.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Permane...
> We will never mine your data, claim your copyright or invade your privacy.
That sounds great and all, but I don't want your word, I want cryptographic guarantees. Are there any?
EDIT: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... doesn't mention anything, so I guess not.
It's in your power to do your own mangling before uploading. The same with redundancy: don't put all your eggs in one basket (fancy promises or not). Good luck!
It actually makes perfect sense the company would want to provide the tools that protect you from them. Take Signal for example, it's a messaging app that does beautiful integration of E2EE into the message transfer product. It's much better than e.g. OTR-plugin developed by Goldberg, Borisov et. al. for Pidgin etc.
What matters is transparency: Does the company allow you to verify their native client does proper client-side encryption, and does that FOSS code have reproducible builds. If yes, then it's much better the company spends some of the revenue from sold space into developing and auditing the client and its cryptographic implementations.
It's just kind of a gut feeling that centralization of power (i.e. possession of the data and knowledge about and control of the encryption mechanism) makes such a service a more attractive target to compromise.
Of course, if you really wanted to get the data of a specific person all you'd have to compromise is the encryption funnel regardless of where the data is stored. But I'm thinking, distributing control over the storage and the encryption is gonna make it a lot harder to do that because there's no single party that knows about both other than you.
At the end of the day, these people can just take all that money, keep some for themselves, and say "ok we tried our best but didn't work out, it was an incredible journey!" and be done with it. and nobody can hold them accountable.
If they really want to do their best to "guarantee" permanence, they should guarantee the debt relationship, so if the forever condition doesn't hold after a couple of years, they will be sought out and collected all the money they took.
What's to say that there would still be an organisation left to pay up the debt?
They'll probably need to hold some funds in escrow for it.
I have old 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, full of software written by my father during the course of developing his dissertation. He died several years ago.
My original plan was to take whole disk images of it and stash it in the commercial cloud, ... but I'm probably going to stash a copy on permanent.org instead. I have no idea if my descendents would care about it. However, it is a memorial that (if the foundation does what it promises to do), not something I would have to do upkeep after I die.
Pcloud for example charges a one-time lifetime 0.35 cents per GB, and their marketing language states:
"We have defined a Lifetime account as 99 years or the lifetime of the account holder, whichever is shorter."
Some thoughts on this:
It probably works better at scale if you control the storage infrastructure (to control the costs). If you are reselling Amazon, and 10 years from now they either raise the price significantly, or discontinue the storage you are using, how would you maintain the service without new (renewal) cash flow.
To solve this later in life you would want to / need to migrate the data to newer better more cost efficient storage. There are large scale costs associated with doing this. Dropbox eventually moved away from Amazon for these reasons, which provided balance sheet savings but it gets fuzzy when factoring the real world costs of owning and maintaining large scale storage infrastructure.
Offering 1 GB free and file sharing between accounts is an invitation for nefarious activities, and it seems like the only way they could manage that would involve breaking one of Permanent.org's core tenets ... Someone will have to look at the files to police it. Or the free 1 GB becomes a liability, not a loss leader. How will they do this?
Once they have your money and a few years have passed there might be an incentive for the organization to gradually degrade the service. Make it more and more difficult to use, in an effort to keep costs down.
And 10 years later when they lose interest in the project, what would stop them from selling the whole thing (cashing out) to a for profit firm ..... Looking at you .ORG / ICANN?
That said, storage is one of those things that feels as though it should be charged on a subscription basis.
A while ago one of my cards was stolen and I got a new one. It took a month before I realized my contact lens subscription had stopped. Luckily contact lenses are easy to get and I try to keep some extra around as well.
A bigger problem however was 20 or so years ago was that when I was drafted and I suddenly couldn't check my email for a while and after 14 days I lost access to
- my old address that everyone knew
- all my mail
- and most of my contacts mail addresses
Fixing that is a lot harder and I would be happy to pay a premium to be sure that some things stay around even if my house burns down with my NAS inside while I'm in hospital and my CC is cancelled while I'm unable to notice it.
BTW: feel free to post your suggestions. My best ideas are to ship encrypted disks to one of my brothers/sisters and parts of the passwords to two others In case I lose them or in case I die and someone needs wants access to my accounts.
If I store data with my family there's two kinds: the kind I encrypt because I don't want anyone else to access it and the kind that I don't encrypt because of I want them to be able to access it. Adding a fallible model with several people holding access might end up leaving your data inaccessible...
- What if the disks are stolen?
- Or hidden in a wall and forgotten only to be found by the next owner? Weirder things have happened.
- Or uploaded to the public internet by accident. Warning: (hopefully)[0] wild hyperbole ahead. While I don't have much to hide (today) who knows about the future. I'd rather not want to see my photoalbum indexed to death by clearview and results sold to a future Nazi/Communist/Peta regime who'll use the face database to track down my grandchildren to punish them because their grandfather hated Nazis/wasn't exactly too fond of Communism either/ate meat and owned a rabbit.
- also for anything in the second category I guess the correct solution is an online server + encrypted backups with passwords available for everyone. Or just use backblaze or something and hope I don't become unavailable until some of my kids or their kids are old enough to become sysadmins ;-)
[0]: but who would have thought 100 years ago that lists of people's faith would be used 20 years later to systematically track down people not based on what crimes they had done but rather based on heritage only to round them up and kill them?
I store private data on my own hard drives, and when I want to make it public in the long-term, I upload it to Archive.org, which for now I have more confidence in than this service. The only time I see needing something like this is when I want something to be public after I die but no sooner, like a diary or secret confession or something.
That is, I'm interested in not having my family photos and personal files mined. To make it useful, I'd also want the service to handle encryption in a way that doesn't require me to self-encrypt and upload huge files all the time or anything of that sort.
As entitled as that may sound: If you want my money, you'd have to provide apps that integrate with the usual OS's, encrypting the data locally and seamlessly.
Now, they say they will use amazon for storage. That's a tough sell until I see what's the actual program looks like. I MIGHT be willing to trust a non-profit which existence is linked to ethical behavior. I will certainly not trust amazon without doing my own encryption. And if I feel like I gotta do that, I am not paying for an intermediate.
It came out of the library and archive sector, and focused on institutional customers -- libraries and archives with long-term archival/preservation needs. It was also non-profit. It of course seems attractive, if you really want to ensure long-term preservation, to set up a financial model that can somehow do this independent of the risk of the business continuity and budgets of the original depositors. And for cultural heritage institutions -- in the business of preserving incrementally more stuff every year -- it's a big advantage to budgeting if you can budget per GB you add to preservation storage up front, and never have to pay for it again -- so your yearly budget for preservation storage is just based on number of NEW TB's you are adding, instead of constantly going up with total number of TB's preserved, and thus this portion of your budget stays pretty constant instead of ever-increasing.
However, the DPN folded in Dec 2018, after fewer than 5 years of operation. It did not attain financial sustainability. (So all those up-front fees did not end up paying for perpetual storage after all).
You can read more about it's shutdown here:
https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-t...
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-prese...
This new attempt is focusing on consumer/retail rather than institutional customers. A different scale of market (and by their suggested pricing tiers, aiming for much less storage per-customer).
And there is at any rate no reason to think just because one effort failed another will have to. Not every try ends up at the same outcome.
But I'd think the story of that effort should hopefully be informative for this new one. I think it's not a trivial thing to succeed with this sort of business model. I'd find it a bit more reassuring if they were like "Here are people who have tried this before, and why we think we will succeed." Although the answer to that might just be "an endowment model".
I think the permanent.org website is engaging in a bit of marketing slight of hand when they say "We are leveraging the same funding models used by museums, libraries and universities for centuries." -- making it seem like this is a solved problem, we're just doing what's worked for centuries for libraries and museums!
There's really nothing specific to libraries, museums, or universities about "endowments". Non-profits of all sorts would love an endowment. (and maybe some for-profits somehow?) I know of few libraries, museums or universities whose entire operating budget is paid out of an endowment. Most institutions even with endowments (and not all do) need to seek ongoing funding or revenue for operations in addition to the endowment.
Only the wealthiest even approach it. Generally there is a correlation between how much of operating budget is endowed and how old the endowment is. "For centuries" indeed -- those institutions with the biggest endowments generally have centuries-old endowments, created by extremely wealthy people long ago. I think there are probably few, if any, examples of recently-created endowments funding all or most of the operating budget of non-tiny institutions. Let alone endowments created by aggregating fees from "customers" paying for service, instead of wealthy benefactors.
And of course, there is the different business here too, the need to be able to predict ongoing operational costs not just of hardware, and things like electricity and space and networking, but of course the staff time that we all know is a non-trivial component of most IT projects. And the need to be doing it competently, with effects on both budget and success at not losing data!
I think it's rather too hand-wavy to imply (and i think that is defintely meant to be the implication) "Oh, this is the model that libraries and museums have used for centuries to do similar stuff, so of course it's proven!"
That said, the model is certainly attractive if it works! It is hard to imagine ensuring very-long-term preservation with a business model that requires the content-donors to keep paying perpetually. (also a non-profit model seems appropriate to me for very-long-term preservation).
(I am a librarian/software engineer whose work includes archival materials and digital preservation).
What do you think about the role of IPFS and FileCoin in digital preservation? Is there a role?
I don't personally think very much of one, but i'm pretty down on blockchain in general. (Also not an expert at it, only have a surface-level IT guy understanding of it).
I could see some role in using blockchain to keep track of _checksums_ of preserved files (nothing in the chain except the cryptographic digests of files stored elsewhere), as a way to have a hard-to-tamper-with multi-party-decentralized preserved historical record that a particular file was stored at a particular time, and has not changed since (whether from error or mal-intent).
Just a record of what was stored when, not otherwise involved in the storage itself. If you want decentralized multi-party storage (which is cool, but I'm not sure it's necessary), there are protocols for that which don't require, or IMO have any reason to benefit from, blockchain technology.
Again just my own not super well-informed opinion, and I'm hardly a blockchain expert (being pretty suspicious of it).
Let me see if my quick run-down here might spark something interesting.
IPFS itself is not a blockchain. It is a piece of distributed infrastructure that allows people to share and store content in a distributed way. There are parts of it that are similar to the old torrent protocol. The main thing with IPFS is that the people who care about keeping a particular piece of data alive can "pin" it locally on their servers. Everyone accessing it will query other people who have pieces of that content -- just like with bittorrent.
IPFS has no monetization or blockchain.
FileCoin is the blockchain. It was intended to be the blockchain run on top of IPFS, although it may work on other content storage/transfer schemes. The idea with that blockchain is built around "proof of storage". That is, I can request someone store some bit of data for me, and you can offer to store it in exchange for something of value.
Among one of the immediate things I wanted to apply IPFS to is this archive of digital material that contains a knowledge base for our current technology base. I have since lost track of that knowledge base. It was designed as a CD you can burn, and get all sorts of information. The idea was to preserve this information in case of something catastrophic happening to our civilization.
One thing about IPFS, and perhaps FileCoin, is that it allows for decentralized knowledge bases. Stuff that could be administrated at a local, community level, and yet federated with many communities.
An example: gardening. With the pandemic, there had been a lot of people interested in gardening for the first time. However, how you plant, what you plant, how you manage those things are depended upon local conditions. I live in the low desert, and what I need to do for here is different from my friend who live in the high desert, or in the SE US.
I think the level of technical sophistication of most cultural heritage organizations is such that I don't entirely trust them to get it right with tried-and-true non-novel technology... if I were in charge of relevant efforts (which I so so am not), I'd want to get some basics in place (including clear business models) before doing more than "side project leaning experiment" with such things. And then add in the novel technologies little by little.
One distributed-storage infrastructure that has some uptake in cultural heritage preservation, built on probably much less elegant and exciting protocols, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS
I think you could essentially replicate this by putting the $500 in a high interest savings account paying blackblaze from that and you'd have about ~100GB worth of storage on that setup today. Over time that ratio should get better.
I assume that he was running the calculations for the blackblaze B2 service which is $.06/GB/year for storage, so at 1.6% APR on your $500 principal that works out to over 100GB
For people with more than 10 GB of data, using CLI tools will make integrating with your product much easier.
I think there's a cloud storage provider that lets you use any tool you want over SSH ... including rclone and borg ...
It's not coming to me ... on the tip of my tongue ...
Buying a graveyard is essentially buying a piece of land (and maybe some very little amount of ongoing maintenance cost)
A web storage is not only for storing on a hard drive because unless you can reliably read from it, it means nothing. And THIS costs a lot of money, for maintenance and ongoing innovation to keep the costs down.
If storing someone else's data for free at scale was such an easy problem, none of the web startups would be going down.
If one thinks further, they'll also want to plan for the possibility of state-enforced exhumation or eminent domain, among other things.
I see from the live donation list that people are throwing money at it. Am I missing something, has someone trusted/influential tweeted this out?
Seriously though I couldn't see a public API - can anyone see it?
(Rclone author)
Only one of those people, Dean Drako, is also listed on permanent.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako
The address on the permanent.org contact page and the Form 990 matches one of his other companies.
Combine that with underlying costs (storage, data transfer, computing power) which are trending downward and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.
Say they raise enough to earn interest on their capital.
Say they make 1% interest per year.
Storing a GB costs $10. 1% of that is 10c.
How much does it cost to store a GB for a year?
Amazon charge ~1c/m for infrequent access and 0.4c/m for Glacier.
So somewhere between 12c and 5c a year.
The only network that could provide a reasonable guarantee of permanence would be a decentralized one, something like sia, but where the owner can pay for i.e. 100 years and lock the data in, so that no one can actually delete them.
$10 for a gig? 1 GB?
$1000 for 100GB? Are you insane?
I can buy an 8TB for $120. I could have 70TB of storage for the price of your 100Gb.
If I bought 2 HDDs up front, had a raid with duplication set up, and replaced 1 HDD every 3 years (imagining one failed every 3 years) I would still have almost 30 years of storage which is longer than you'll exist with this insane price model.
The real question is whether or not they compete with Archive.org, in the sense of sharing the same ecological niche. Archive.org does a great job but everything there is public, so maybe that's the differentiator?
There's a typo on some of the marketing copy: "A new paridigm".
This site will only cares to people who know about it and care enough to use it, while archive.org fossilize every site out there, from simplistic 10 line html file to wordpress sites to news websites.
What I want to know if this uses any form of zero-knowledge cryptography features or not.
I guess not - since it can pull data directly from FB.
I can understand why they don't want to add a big barrier to entry by requiring that.