Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbox but I imagine it's there.
For the equivalent of $500 in credit you could self host the entire thing!
However if you actually follow the 3-2-1 rule with your backups, then you need to include a piece of real estate in your calculation as well, which ain’t cheap.
All my ripped media could be ripped again: I only actually have a couple of Tb of un-lose-able data.
Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest match on AWS is ~$1050/mo and I still have to back it up.
The only outage in 2 years was last week when there was a hardware failure of the primary ssd. I was back up and running within a few hours and had to leverage the full 3-2-1 backup depth, so I am confident it works.
If i was really desperate i could have deployed on a cloud machine temporarily while i got the hardware back online.
The rest is basically a nice custom PC minus a cool case and a high end GPU. A 9950X is $500, a 2x48GB kit is maybe $200. A few hundo more for a mobo, PSU and basic case.
Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.
Just on electricity costs alone, this is good value. My electricity costs are 22.86p/kWh which is pretty cheap for the UK. That means that if having that drive plugged in and available 24/7 uses more than 37W, it's more expensive to self host at home than rent the space via a server. Also, I've not needed to buy the drive or a NAS, nor do I have to worry about replacing hardware if it fails.
There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.
I don’t understand the logic here so I’m going to assume I’m being obtuse. Doesn’t that just mean that’s their standard price? Why or how would you ever pay more?
I guess with Servarica, they have their standard deals, but for Black Friday deals are generally thin margins, but still enough to cover costs. Typically every year, they have special deals that are a bit different to their previous offerings. As a result, some people prefer the previous deals, some prefer the new ones, so they keep them all going. It's a bit unusual. They've also got a few interesting deals, like start with N TB and it grows a bit every day. If you keep these more than about 3-4 years, these are probably better value for money, but I think you're paying too much in the first few years. It's interesting if your primary use case is incremental backups.
Hosthatch's deals are a bit different as they're usually preorders and at almost cost with basically minimal support, whereas they keep their normal stuff in stock and have higher support levels.
I should also add that I've not personally used Servarica, even though they look interesting - just because they only have a Canadian datacenter. I have 4 Hosthatch servers spread all over the globe so that I have more redundancy in my backups. I only buy them when they have deals, assuming I don't miss them as they're only for 24h.
Having privacy is a reasonable goal, but VPNs and SSL/TLS provide enough for most, and at some point your also just making yourself a target for someone with the power to undo your privacy and watch you more closely- why else would you go through the trouble unless you were to be hiding something? It’s the same story with Tor, VPN services, etc.- those can be compromised at will. Not to say you shouldn’t use them if you need to have some level of security functionally, but no one with adequate experience believes in absolute security.
The beautiful thing is: they are :-)
If A uses a cereal box cipher and B has a cereal box cipher, B can can make sense of encoded messages A sends them, A can ask about the weather, and B can reply with an encoded response that A can decode and read. B is able to read A’s decoded query, and B knew what the weather was, and responded to A with that information.
Security is not magic.
Yes, they can read both. But it's just gobbledygook to them. If you send them a "nonsense" query, they can reply with a "nonsense" response which is actually carefully computed to be something you can make sense of. But they can't make sense of it other than that it should be a relevant to the query you sent them.
Something that normally takes 30 seconds now takes over 8 hours.
That is not an option with FHE. You have to go all in.
There are plenty of viable schemes like proxy re-encryption, where you operate on a symmetric key and not on a large blob of encrypted data.
Or financial applications where you are operating on a small set of integers, the speed is not an issue and the output is valuable enough to make it worth it.
It only becomes a problem when operating FHE on a large encrypted dataset to extract encrypted information. The data extracted will need to offset the costs. As long as companies don't care about privacy, this use-case is non-existent so its not a problem that its slow.
For military operations on the other hand, it might be worth the wait to run a long running process
I’m not at all a fan of Python, but perf is the least of my concerns with it.
the parent post is right, confidential compute is really what we've got.
This is a large part of why you have to convince people to hide things even if "they have nothing to hide."