notmyname

I like the quote "technology seems to be giving us back our rights even as the law fails to protect them."

The articles comment about social justice and a desire to change the world reminds me of a TED talk I watched a while back which is about the differences in "conservative" and "liberal" outlooks and the ways in which individuals in each group measure morality.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.ht...

Looks like a great app. I'm a dev for Rackspace Cloud Files, and I'd love to see Cloud Files support in OneWay. Let me know how I can help. My email address is in my profile.

I know of at least one S3 customer that uses a small (but significant) number of S3's total published object count. I would assume that there are more customers like this one.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1262254...

NPR ran a story on YouTube pulling the Downfall parodies and stated the videos were fair use.

Quite interesting, but I'd love to see a key to the colors used.

I'm wondering what the logistics of this would be. Say 1 customer is storing 100GB in a cloud storage service that does internal de-duping. A second customer uploads exactly the same 100GB of data. What is each charged? The whole 100GB*rate? Does each customer pay half? Do prices change for remaining customers when one "copy" of the data is removed? Without charging each customer for their total apparent storage use, I don't see how any customer can have any predictability as to their monthly bill.

Or it could be that AWS doesn't see S3 as a product per-se, but rather as an infrastructure piece that is a building block for other, more full-featured products. My understanding of S3 (and Dynamo) is that it/they started as tech used for running Amazon's internal systems. Someone realized they could get more revenue by offering their internal publicly and stuck a price tag on it. Services like de-duping, compression, etc. are more in the realm of Jungle Disk and tarsnap: third-party resellers that become a front end to the infrastructure provided by S3.

What S3 and other storage services sell is not space as much as reliability. No question: S3 is more expensive than a few file servers in your back room. Cloud storage services sell reliability and availability.

As a programmer myself, my first reaction to the headline was, "Oh no." Programs are simply tools, and I assumed this story would be similar to indicting axe manufacturers because of the proverbial axe murderer.

However, after reading the story, it appears that these programmers may have been involved in covering up or performing illicit activities. Their trial will determine if they are culpable. Overall, though, it's not something to worry about professionally or as a threat to an industry.

just set up an account on the website, then downloaded the iphone app. It doesn't seem to integrate too well with 1Password. I generated a password for the website, but the phone app wouldn't accept it until I made it simpler. The website and phone app should have the same password requirements.

Tech-wise, it's a solved problem.

I sign all of my outgoing emails using Thawte (now Verisign) certificates. The problem with encryption is finding the other person's keys. I have yet to receive a signed email from someone else, so I cannot send encrypted messages.

It seems to be a problem primarily with critical mass and secondarily from implementation. Not enough people use signed/encrypted email to spur others to using it. Additionally, certs cost something. Even free certs cost effort in understanding the need for them and figuring out how to generate/download/install them. Then there is the whole problem with "trusted" certs...

Implementation wise, things are only a little better. Once the certs are installed, (desktop) mail clients handle the signing/encrypting pretty well. But I can't sign messages from a webmail client or from my phone.

True, but one big "gotcha" to this is that there is no way to do a complete restore from a time machine volume. There is no iscsi initiator on the OS X system DVD (and therefore no way to select your TM backup for a complete system restore).

Seems to be very similar to Jungle Disk's business edition. However, I like that nasuni offers access to the remote data after one stops using their service.

In my opinion, browsers aren't a good way to test a REST interface. Browsers are good at GET, and maybe POST, but they are very limited for other HTTP verbs and can't really do much in the way of header manipulation.

A much better solution is to use a tool like curl. With curl, you can set headers, HTTP verbs (even custom ones), and, importantly, test each transaction in isolation.

S3 uses a request signing mechanism. Each request is signed by the client and the signature is sent in the headers.

Rackspace Cloud Files uses a token based authorization. Authentication provides a token that is then sent in the header of each request. When the token expires, re-authenticate to get a new token.

The Cloud Files method is a little simpler for the user (IMO), but it also requires an SSL connection to protect the credentials.

Neither of these products allow non-public objects to be viewed in a browser (the browser doesn't send the correct headers).

Rackspace Cloud http://www.rackspacecareers.com/

Rackspace cloud is looking for python programmers. http://www.rackspacecareers.com/

surely they mean "Amazon goes down and takes the Internet with it"

This is the comment in these stories that has irked me the most.

Generally when I hear the term "deniable" used with something security related, I think of something like the hidden volumes in True Crypt: something that I can't be proved to have.

Does your product provide this level of deniability? I would venture a guess that the answer is no (after all, there is a box with a big "DV" on it). If not, what do you mean by the word deniable?

Full disclosure: I work for Rackspace.

I'm a fan of the web interface to the Rackspace-hosted emails. It's fast and seems pretty easy to use. IMO, it's better than Outlook's limited web client I have available to me on a Mac.

You can get a 2 week free trial for the Rackspace email: https://signup.apps.rackspace.com/.

San Antonio, Texas

in the "Other" category: ZFS and NFS

HFS+ and ext3 otherwise

Yes, the non-repeating nature of generators is a little unintuitive to start with, especially when you are familiar with the way lists work. But, they are no more unintuitive that floating point rounding errors (1.1 + 2.2 != 3.3). Simply learn the type and move on.

And if you need to repeat the generator, use itertools.cycle.

You are right, but Twitter (and, really, anything on the Internet) has the new feature of being persistent. Rumors in a crowd die out when more information comes to light. The unfailing memory of the Internet, combined with anonymity and its massive reach, creates an echo chamber that can reinforce false information long after the truth has been revealed.

Ozzie may be right, but only if one tries to implement Wave on top of the web. Sure the interface may be on the web (for some Wave clients), but the underlying protocol, from my understanding, works along side http. Similar to how smtp works along side http even if the user interface is on the web.

Google's demo was the possibility, and, yes, it was a shiny system, but I don't get the impression that Google is trying to sell that system. They are pushing the underlying architecture and protocols. Their demo was made up of several "independent and interoperable implementations of services from toolkits of foundational technologies." And the "foundational technologies" is the Wave protocol.

Technically, hasn't "voice communications via acoustic means" been around a lot longer than that?

I've build something similar for home/small-office use. My experiences are at http://johnandkaren.com/blog/file-server. Daz at http://sigtar.com/ has done similar things as well, and I've found his site to be invaluable as I have built my file server.

It sounds like what you are looking for is a Drobo (www.drobo.com). It has some shortcomings, but it is great for dead-simple backups that protect against hard drive failure.

I use git for a few small projects at work, and I enjoy it. This article, however, falls prey to my number one gripe about the git community: "You don't really want to do that. Do this instead." In some cases, it may be better to do something in a different way, but not always. This article says to not use git push but to email patches instead. It never addresses the original complaint of how to use git push. At the end, it concludes by saying that sometimes people really do need to push, and, if you need that, bazaar is easier/better.