With Bitcasa, The Entire Cloud Is Your Hard Drive For Only $10 Per Month

techcrunch.com

12 points·mikeknoop··4 comments

> "And because the data is encrypted on the client side, Bitcasa doesn’t even know what it’s storing." ... "If you have an MP3 file, someone else probably has the same one, for example." ..."Using patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques and encryption, Bitcasa keeps costs down (way, way down, but that’s it’s secret sauce), which is what makes it so affordable."

If the data is encrypted such that "Bigcasa doesn't even know what it's storing." then how is it possible that it knows that my MP3 file is "the same one" as "someone else"? In order to know my MP3 file is "the same one" it has to somehow know what it is storing.

Each file could have an unencrypted hash key.

Then BitCasa _can_ tell what files you have.

Here's a hypothetical scenario. Suppose Random Joe's machine is searched by the MAFIAA , and they find some videos downloaded via torrents. Then the MAFIAA guys just have to compute the same hash that BitCasa does on these files (or blocks), and submit a subpoena to BitCasa for the users who have files with the same checksums.

For a cloud service to be truly appealing to me, it must offer full client-side encryption. In other words: no one (short of, maybe, the NSA and its zillion quantum computers) should be able to tell what files I have; not even their names.

I call bullshit on "the average user has only 25GB of unique data". My family generates at least 5GB a month in hi-def video. I'll happily sign up. I'll also grab a corporate account to use as an FTP site for our 100GB+ per week of encrypted SQL backups that we throw around.

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