The Cloud I'd Like to See | Hacker News Reader

The Cloud I'd Like to See

machine-theory.com

61 pointsNelsonMinar40 comments

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Jungle Disk (https://www.jungledisk.com/) is pretty much what the article describes:

* Files are stored in a provider of your choice (current options are S3 and RackSpace)

* Encrypted using a key stored locally

* Looks like a local disk

* Files are cached locally according to a set limit

Unfortunately, the implementation is too sloppy.

At least on OS X, the server is accessed using a local WebDAV server that proxies all of the file access. The WebDAV server is a piece of crap that was extremely slow, and would periodically, mysteriously drop its connection, which would cause Finder to stall and complain. (I reported this problem to the Jungle people, but they were not able to figure out the problem, even from the debug logs.)

The caching does not work in practice. It seems to not support streaming -- if you try to access a file that is not in the cache, it will download the entire file before you can read a single byte from it. (Actually this is merely a hypothesis at this point: I tried using Jungle Disk for my MP3 library, but whenever I tried to play a non-cached file, I had to wait half a minute for the file to be downloaded. This problem may be because MP3 files often store their song metadata, which players like Spotify use, at the end of the file, and Jungle most likely does not support seeking into uncached files.)

There is no reason why a service such as Jungle Disk could not work, but it's all in the implementation.

If you really want to see something, you have to come up with who would build it and why. The market generally doesn't want to pay much for software, but are willing to pay through the nose for services. If you don't think through this part you really are just whining, and quite often are even doing so to people who already agree with you.

This means that there is very little money available to build something like this (where one of the key properties was "use the provider of your choice for the data") unless it at least goes through a single centralized middle-man first.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that it would have a purely negative effect on this space: at this time, companies offering similar devices are able to make enough money to, well, spend it on R&D in this space.

In a world where the revenue stream becomes a combination o "dumb hosting" and "software" you will see fewer features, less reliability, poor scalability, and generally a slowing down of this entire area of the storage market.

Which, of course, then means that all of the other comments in this article regarding "rethinking the filesystem" is almost certainly not something you will see from this kind of project, whereas I'd be floors if Dropbox wasn't looking at that right now and we all know Apple is (albeit using profit from integrated hardware, not hosting).

To vastly oversimplify, this stuff happens in one of two ways: like email or like Facebook. (Like linux or like iOS. Like SQL or like SAP. Like the web browser or like Photoshop.)

In other words, a standard protocol, plus adoption, creates lots of opportunities to make money as a service provider and by building capabilities that are extensions and integrations. On the other hand, a network-effects monopoly creates opportunities to scale by monetizing lots of users in a centralized way, and to play a gate-keeper role for other participants in the ecosystem.

I can imagine "the next generation filesystem" work taking either form.

I get the impression that things like email don't happen at all these days.

Right; in fact: exactly. The challenge, again, is to come up with who will build it any why (or, to put it differently, who will pay for it, and again why). Additionally, as this is becoming increasingly interwoven in this thread: how further innovation of the core protocol will be funded.

Really, my problem is that the original article comes off as a whine to the universe about something that isn't actually something that is fleshed out enough to happen. We've all had these ideas... some of us have even built companies trying. Most of these failed, with the successes remaining small due to an inability to effectively monetize the offering.

That's why I use the term "challenge": if you want to write an article like this, it shouldn't just be "this would be cool": such a simplistic article is simply condescending to the numerous people (which may in fact be "all developers") who have had the same vision.

(some unrelated-to-that-but-following-up-on-your-post parentheticals on innovation:)

(Linux doesn't innovate what it means to be an operating system: the goal of that project is to be a world-class implementation of proven designs. The few interesting mechanisms they have added were taken from other dying environments, like Solaris.)

(E-mail was an attempt to standardize a bunch of existing incompatible practice, and in the zillions of years since it was standardized, Exchange, Gmail, and Facebook are the only real examples of attempts to innovate on the design, and their innovations were possible due to gatekeeper benefits.)

Please let me know if this is unsafe, because I do it: on OS X I keep two small encrypted Disk Volumes for two classes of files that I consider confidential.

These are only 10MB each, and I realize that when I change a file in one of them, DropBox has to update a 10MB file.

Does anyone know anything wrong with this, security wise? (I just keep my own private files stored this way, not customer files which are only on my encrypted OS X FileVault file system.)

If you're exceptionally paranoid, an adversary with access to your encrypted .dmg on Dropbox may be able to deduce sensitive information by analyzing the changes in the file. It doesn't necessarily mean your data is at risk, but maybe it could point your adversary to the bits of information you change most often. This would be true with any encrypted file using any algorithm.

That said, unless you've gained the attention of a TLA (that's Three Letter Agency), it's a minuscule risk and I really wouldn't worry about it.

Can you point me to any papers about how this sort of attack would be done?

"But I still have a couple hundred gigabytes in my home directory that I pull across to every new computer I set up."

That seems... like a lot. Maybe I'm used to the space constraints of tablets/netbooks/SSDs, but I've been pushing everything not inherently tied to my local machine to a home NAS (e.g. a Kurobox or Buffalo NAS) for years now.

I'm less interested in version syncing since I don't use a large variety of devices. I just want something I can set up at home, as a user, and be able to access via a Net connection. But I also want every bit of security that he as a technical person desires. I want all this to reside on hardware in my home, not somewhere else where the government can examine it without having to notify me first. And it must be dead simple. Put software on PC (or a Mac), point to directories, put client on remote device (tablet or phone), and BAM! done. And I want to be able to download locally, even video -- not stream. Now I will sit and wait for Godot.

I think Godot is Joey Hess: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan...

This reminds me of OceanStore:

  > OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to
  > scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent,
  > highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an
  > infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers.

http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/info/overview.html

It's not productized and pretty difficult to discern the project's status BUT they do seem to publish interesting papers / update their site every so often.

That's a good perspective of what the client-side functionality should be. I've had an idea on what the hardware-side or "the cloud" should be for a while...

The strangest thing about "the cloud" as it stands today is that it's really just Amazon, Google and Apple with giant server farms. Something goes wrong with the server farm, the whole thing crashes. This is not "the cloud".

At some point in the near future I think someone will work out a way to construct a true cloud that has the ability to harness any node on the Internet.

Think something like SETI@home, BOINC, Folding@home but where clients install a program, set aside how much space (in GBs) they'd like to offer and they get rewarded over time (money, points, currency, prizes etc).

As I upload things to this true cloud, the files are split, encrypted and distributed around this cloud in such a way that backups are made, redundancy and security is inbuilt.

If I'm storing 10GBs of other people's files, I can't access them since they're only partial segments and they're encrypted. If I turn off my computer, the file owners can still access their files from other nodes hosting backups. And files are hosted on nearby nodes to ensure speedy access.

It would be a rather difficult software engineering problem to solve, but ultimately this is the future of the cloud.

We were building a system like this back in 2009 or so as a competitor to Dropbox (we called it P2P storage cloud). We had a competitor you might want to check out: http://www.wuala.com/

Looks like they've gone the traditional route. What stopped you from continuing? Were there technical issues?

I just came across this which seems to be what I was talking about: http://www.symform.com/

When I first saw camlistore (http://camlistore.org/) it jived with much of how I pondered the foundational bits of "the cloud I'd like to see". Private by default, distribut(ed|able), share-able, index-able, version-able dumb content blobs who are described by other dumb content blobs of the same nature.

They might be getting some of the programmer interfaces right enough to give folks a chance at getting some user interfaces right.

I'd like to understand what he(?) means by "time as a first-class construct", separate from versioning. He goes into a lot of detail about the encryption requirements, but not that.

Overall, I fully approve. I don't think it's just a nerd dream; I'd like to see it become a neccessity. It's just going to be hard.

Another wish to add to that: independence from any one cloud provider. So if amazon has a power failure, or Dropbox gets asked to turn off your account, or MegaCloud gets raided by your favorite 3-letter acronym, all your files are still there. And you did not need to upload your data 3 times (in other words, there is a protocol where cloud providers sync their data for you).

Not sure if this is technically feasible, though - for example, what happens if an interceptor gets hold of service 1 and tells the other services to delete everything as part of the synching process?

Article also mentions the wish to tell cloud providers to search through data for you (without you needing to download everything) while withholding the decryption key from them (that's how I read it, anyway). I'm not sure this is possible either.

> all my files in the cloud, encrypted by me, accessible from any program on any of my computing devices, cached locally as needed, and served by providers that I choose and can freely migrate between.

Author forgot to list several important req. that are implied. Being able to update/add files. Being able to "manipulate" files with arbitrary software across all devices.

That last one is the real problem needing solving. All files in cloud, universally accessible is solved. It's called HTTP. Except there is not universal en/decryption across all devices. HTTPS + server side en/decryption might work.

Server side encryption needs you to trust the server, 'though.

At my office we often discuss this exact topic and most of us want exactly the same cloud. It seems like a purely "nerd" solution though. Dropbox has the market cornered because not technical users get it and it works. On multiple occasions we've come to the conclusion that this is a nerd dream and out of the computational desires of the average user. The question becomes will the gap between "average" and "power" user only get larger or smaller with simple cloud services at the forefront? Also, we've come a long way with API's but I don't know of too many services that allow competitor interop.

The reason I don't think this is just a "nerd dream" anymore is that general trends in the broader world are sharpening the need for really good cloud storage for everyone.

Like a lot of folks here, I'm sure, I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I built a peer-to-peer backup proof of concept in 1999, for example. (But knew, even while writing that code, that there bandwidth wasn't cheap enough for enough people for such a thing to take off.) The thing is, until very recently, my needs diverged a lot from all of the non-techies I know.

But that's less and less true. These days, most white collar workers depend completely on their computers (and phones and tablets) to do all of their work, every day. Corporate IT investment in "collaboration" tools like Sharepoint and Dropbox is large, and getting larger every quarter. Having access to your files, and the files that your colleagues share with you, and the various static resources your company maintains on your intranet, is becoming more and more important. So there's a clear business driver to build more sophisticated storage, access and sharing capabilities.

And, relatedly, many non-techies now use multiple computing devices every day. The laptop-plus-phone-plus-tablet user profile is the norm for more and more people. My sense is that iTunes Match and iCloud and various photo stream implementations are the special-purpose, walled-garden, leading edge indicators that this stuff will, eventually, get built into all our platforms and that we'll expect some level of interoperability between platforms. (Just as AirPlay is the leading-edge indicator that in a few years we'll all expect to be able to push video around between all our screens without having to use any wires.)

This is exactly what Bitcasa does.

  * Integrate directly into the OS and intercept the filesystem calls
  * We encrypt client side using keys that aren't exposed to the server. 
  * Stream the content in real time like Spotify or Netflix and enable random access
  * Cache frequently used items locally
  * Works across multiple devices and platforms
  * We're building primary storage vs backup or sync

Its a well thought out system.

Full disclosure - I'm the founder and CEO of Bitcasa.

I think simple and automatic local caching is the hard part. Having access to your distant files isn't particularly hard. Take sshfs, samba, nfs, openvpn (or whatever equivalent you happen to know), mix them in a big bowl, put a server under your bed, and you're good to go.

But: 1/ Support on dumb mobile devices is generally quite bad 2/ Caching support is generally quite bad. No connection pretty much means game's over.

I think there are a number of "hard parts." Getting encryption right -- really right -- is always hard, and my "requirements" for full-text search and capabilities-based sharing make that even harder. And I definitely agree with you that the caching implementation needs to be really good to work properly. Scalable tagging (database-backed FS design and mechanics) isn't as easy as it looks at first glance, either.

But if I had to pick one hardest part, I'd vote for the UI. This stuff, at least the way I'm imagining it, is a significant departure from traditional file manipulation semantics. It's a file system plus the kind of user interactions that "web 2.0" and mobile apps have taught us all to expect. People won't use something that's not both really easy and elegantly designed. And there won't be enough adoption unless there's enough feature set coverage to appeal to lots of slightly different use cases.

I mentioned Dropbox a number of times in the blog post because I think they've done a remarkably good job at both implementation and user experience. That's pretty cool!

UI is indeed interesting. I've spent many years working on a solution to a similar problem (data, rather than files, although nodes in my app can contain attachments) and the UI is the part I've struggled with most. My most recent version isn't online (yet), but the basic design hasn't changed in the two years since I put this up: http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Interact/

It requires a central server, but has a redundancy mechanism built in, in that if server A is unavailable the client simply goes to server B.

It also has a panic password the hides/deletes data with a particular protective marking. Everything is encrypyed, and the server cannot identify any user, even given a user name.

The app can easily be converted to work with files. The thing standing in the way of that is time. I have a four-month-old son that expects board and lodging.

Besides security and caching, I think standards/interoperability are key.

I want my next-generation apps to work on a cloud filesystem of my choice, be it Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

That will be the most significant step towards a real cloud OS, and I bet someone's already working on it.

I'm less security paranoid; I would be content with universally accessable/syncable cloud storage at a reasonable price that simply worked and wasn't tied to some particular corporate entity's efforts to monopolize some market or another.

SpiderOak perhaps? I haven't used it heavily my self but it seems to cover at least the encryption requirements the author puts forward.

Having full-text search prevents you from having your own encryption, unless you want to hand over your key which makes it worthless.

This is incorrect. Full text search works by querying an index. The client has access to all of the encrypted indexed content, so it can easily build the index, encrypt it and upload it.

Cloud providers couldn't "give you" full-text search, but if it's technically possible and if clients implement it then it's essentially the same thing.

> encrypt it and upload it

if the index is encrypted with a local key you'll need to hand over it all the same to use it online...

You never hand over the key - you decrypt the index on the client-side when you want to search.

That's local search, not online. If you're syncing folders then spotlight/whatever already works locally.

You don't need to sync folders for this to work, though. When you search your data you still leave all of it "in the cloud", you just download a few relevant bits of the index database.

As far as the user is concerned this provides efficient full-text search without heavy bandwidth or storage requirements and without giving the storage provider access to any plaintext. Maybe this is still a "local" solution by your definition, but who cares? How does it fall short of an "online" one?

It falls short simply by not being online and requiring an app. Though it might be possible to do the decryption in javascript, I hadn't thought of that.

To each their own. For anything I'd want to encrypt I wouldn't trust a closed app or a web interface. It's just too easy for them to get private data across the wire. If I'm blindly running the Javascript they send me I might as well give them the key and be done with it.

My "best case" solution is a dumb protocol, a FUSE mount and maybe a local webserver for sharing, configuration and metadata. I don't really understand wanting to access files through anything but a filesystem (regardless of where they're actually stored), but I can accept that some people might.

Have you seen this? http://www.spacemonkey.com/

dropbox + encfs?

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