Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

I can't quite grasp what this is (as in, what the software is, is that a server, a client, or a combination of both), or how could I get started in using it.

>Your data should be alive in 80 years, especially if you are

Is there any special significane for 80 years? And exactly how is it safe? The "Download" sections have me installing the server on my box, and my hdd certainly won't survive 80 years.

Under storage, it says that

>Implementations are trivial and exist for local disk, Amazon S3, Google Storage, etc.

How does encryption work? I can't seem to find out at which step the encryption is done (client side, or server side?). The home page mentions it's "private by default", considering that I don't know that much about security and cryptography in general, how safe would I be in using this, for whatever purposes that it could be used for.

Mention under potential use cases: filesystems backups and Document management CMS. That's ... interesting.

I am not authoritative, but a glance at the documentation suggests encryption is not explicitly part of this spec. Since a blob may be anything, one instance of a blob can be a file encrypted by external means.

I believe Private by default just indicates that objects are not exposed until they are shared: like a file system is private by default and a Github repo is not.

Looks like there is an encrypt module that uses AES-128: http://camlistore.org/pkg/blobserver/encrypt/. The modules are composable so you could encrypt your remote replicas of the main store (or hopefully all of them?)

Brad Fitzpatrick talks about it as a "data dump truck". You put everything you have into it, and it takes it when you want it to go.

What's cool is that you can abstract where it's stored... want to use S3? Point your data there. Google Drive? Point your data there. Instead of the user interface and middleware of syncing and storing being directly tied to a storage backend (a la Dropbox, Google Drive), Camlistore allows you to separate it.

At least that's how I think of it... I might be wrong. :)

Just an FYI, its still pretty unfinished, so that's partially why the website/documentation isn't more clear about its purpose.

I imagine that description getting better when they start wanting more end users to use it.

Right now they have a bunch of pages which are html with 0 css styling, cause it ain't done yet. Despite these things, I find camlistore extremely cool, and look forward to it's growth.

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