Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    Hosting your own data is trivial

No it's not. For a reason you've already recognized but glossed over. Backups. Even really tech savvy users have a hard time keeping backups going correctly. And not doing so means you have to worry about hardware failures and software errors accidentally wiping out your data. Not to mention the growing industry of somebody taking your data hostage.

If you want to remove the incentive for people to move their data onto a Provider who manages the whole protection, backup, and availability side of their data for them you will have to provide a user friendly peer to peer solution for them somehow that doesn't require calling the tech-savvy {brother,sister,uncle,grandson,...} to set it up for them.

It's a testament as to how hard that is that no one has figured it out yet. Dropbox is probably the closest in that they keep the data on you box for you and allow you to pay directly for the service. But they still have a copy of the data that they can access if they should have a change in priorities.

We already solved the peer-to-peer solution along time ago - it was called TCP/IP.

At least, The internet was supposed to be peer-to-peer. It was for a while. Hosting data yourself - possible because your local computer was an equal peer on the network - worked wonderfully.

Sharing some photos with a friend was as easy as sending them a URL[1] to your local server. Yah, it slowed down your internet every time someone wanted to access the data, but that was fine because you only sent it to a couple friends. Better hosting was only needed if you wanted a larger audience or if you had some special requirements.

Unfortunately, a lot of people - either intentionally or from ignorance - ended up conflating "NAT" with "firewall" and generally popularized the idea that giving up your status as an equal peer on the internet was important "for security". This became the excuse to put off IPv6 until v4 addresses started to run low which took over as the reason to hide everybody behind a NAT.

A common response to this is that setting up a server is still technically complicated - the average user still won't understand how to setup Apache or how to configure DNS. Even with proper addresses, these technical issues will stop self-hosting from becoming popular! This used to be true, but... software gets easier to use over time. The only reason we haven't seen progress easier to use server software is.... who would run it? The people who understand NAT enough to bypass it don't need "user friendly" server software, and everybody that needs it cant access their server form the internet.

sigh - Walker's imprimature[2] was right. NAT was (or will be) what reestablishes barriers to publication and turns the internet back into cable tv.

[1] Traditionally, the "URL" was actually an IP address, and the file server was probably anonymous fTP.

[2] http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

Take a look at btsync and syncthing.

You are sort of making my point. They store the data on their devices and leave encryption up to me. How is this better than dropbox? It looks basically as easy to use as dropbox but how is it a step up?

They dont store your data.

If we are talking about the same thing (https://www.btsync.com/en/faq/)

Then they explicitely state that they store the data on their own servers. Is there another btsync?

EDIT:

Actually rereading it states they allocate space on their servers which sounds like they store data on their servers but I suppose it's also possible they might not.

Unfortunately btsync.com is a service offering of the bt sync software. Check out http://www.getsync.com/

The only thing BT seems to store is your location (so they can connect any peers which use your key) and potentially the mechanism for authenticating the key the other device uses to connect (it could be done client side but I dont think so).

A has files and gives B the key to the sync location. B enters it into btsync and chooses a folder. B downloads A's files over an encrypted channel directly from A's computer.

Add more people to get more to get multiple seeds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com