Wuala - a distributed file system

[SyntheholVideo]

"Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free."

They just killed this feature. A bad, bad, decision.

[grahamperrin]

@SyntheholVideo agreed. I posted to Posterous:

LaCie: Wuala ceases to trade storage, loses essence

[hhan44]

More Torrents! Fucking DLLs sucks... -.-

[lx45803]

@hhan44 What to dlls and torrents have to do with Wuala?

[lalujai]

why invent a pen for space? just use a pencil!

Cloud Computing and worldwide CDN is going cheap, HD space / CPU power also go cheaper and cheaper, n Home broadband going 1G speed now

Any highschool kid can subscribe awazon S3 + worldwide CDN and provide a higher speed, more stable service in 3 hours? u charge $45 for 25G??

The only good point I can think of is to share priate stuffs, since it uses P2P and difficult to trace the source unless the company disclose such information.

[leovailati]

Java? Good luck =D

[grahamperrin]

36:08 comparison with Freenet

37:30 comparison with Mojo Nation

43:05 comparison with Deep Store

[MrPandaDork]

my favorite been there since the beginning! 

[Stasoline]

Interesting stuff!

[hamletshero]

I wished it didn't run on Java either. Java's pretty unstable and it crashes very easily on my Mac.

[kulturfenster]

interesting thoughts..

[Mysticsam86]

i just tested it on debian lenny amd64 ,, it just dont work. :(

[letdowner]

no matter what.

[1lb0]

what a neat concept... wonder if LaCie merger will be good for the end user? has anybody found a way to stream media files from their wuala account to a computer without the file-system installed, or the wuala independent application? sure would be cool, being able to access the files via mobile device, not just download, but stream....

[CirkusBolgen]

To those who don't understand why you'd only get 7GB with 10GB*70%:

Your "downtime" should equal your "uptime", right?

Your "uptime" is 10GB*70%

But your "downtime" is actually 100% (you can access your files at 100% of the time), to make downtime and uptime equal, but downtime 100%, you need to get 7GB.

You wouldn't want 10GB of storage and only be able to access it 70% of the time, right?

[Samzsite]

Hmmm, there are multiple online storage websites online, some you have to pay for i know. But Java? Why not C# or C++? Then again, for mac is more of objective C. Even still, not many people like Java.

[CompleteShift]

Java is natively cross-platform. Java has had its criticisms in the past due to poor performance but it has matured enough that there is no justifiable reason to criticise it anymore.

C# is an open standard but you are restricted to third-party cross-platform GUIs like GTK or QT. I am not sure of cross-platform concerns about C++ and ObjC.

[F00dTube]

There is nothing native about a virtual machine. It is cross platform. Yes the virtual machine has increased performance but honestly pc's just got fast enough to not notice the bloat. Java is actually fast for system tasks but desktopapplications are just a bad idea in java.

[shelajev]

say it to eclipse developers :)

[HJPhilippi]

I'm running the Wuala Client on Windows and on Mac OS X. Honestly, I've never been a Java fan, but this software is a nice piece of work. Fast enough and user friendly and thus proving that Java -as has been mentioned before- has matured.

[stalepie35]

I wish it didn't use Java.

[Chilloutman33]

@stalepie35 why?

[lnostdal]

@stalepie35 Java (or JVM languages) is great. The problem with stuff depending on the JVM is that the JVM is not already in memory when it starts -- as is the case when something C/C++ based starts.

[kchecker]

bullshit

7GB space for me .. when i give in 10gb and stay online for 70% of the time...

thats just crap

i dont see commercial viability

[cyborgtroy]

If you're putting up 10GB for 70% of the time, 7GB is exactly what you should get back.

[hyretech]

How does this improve on AFS/OpenAFS?

If it's not open source, how can you hope to verify that it's secure?

[ahanix1988]

In the end, it doesn't really make anything easier -- people just use it to say they use it. It's a status thing.

[MaxTeel]

What do you mean? For me it's very useful.

[007luke666]

48:32 (!)

[pav930t]

On the point you make at 6.37 about data movement - I have always wanted someone to develop a distributed file system that supports an unlimited file size but more importantly when i select a file from another machine to be copied to yet another machine i dont want it to do 2 copies, one to me and then another to the destination machine, just one copy from the source to the destination.

Does your file system support this? If so, do you have any downloads?

[cam8001]

Could you just do this using FXP?

[infinity0x]

this misses the point. there is no such concept of "a copy" in this network - at least not in a sense visible to the user. copies of the various packets are sent and purged based on demand.

[djfetmage]

Wow, a commercial freenet

[ermonnezza74]

I'm using this and I don't like the fact that it's commercial/closed source, but it's still free, and I think it's the best thing around for exchanging things with friends. And it works perfect on linux. Can you share specific things with specific people on freenet? Or just backup your stuff only for yourself? Please let me know..

[futureprogress]

it uses a bunch of OSS and they plan to open it in pieces...

[MaZe741]

This imo is the beginning of the end of copyright.... right? a huge scale professional p2p network and easy to use? bomb!

[DrDabbles]

No. Copyright and ease of sharing are two different issues. This simply lets you easily access files from anywhere, including the sharing of files with other users.

[tehhu1k]

I have a question about privacy. As you said you have (or want to have) flags for copyrighted/inappropriate material. However, as the files in question are encrypted how do you 'legally' gain access to them and review their content? Saving encryption keys on your servers sounds dangerous from a privacy,if not a legal, stand point (unless you explicitly mention such a situation in the EULA).

Either way, I'm excited about such technology and really liked the video. Nice one! :]

[dominikgrolimund]

we only see files that have been made public. all private / shared files we don't see and we can't encrypt, since your password never leaves your computer.

[haver741]

Hi Dominik,

This was an interesting talk. I have however some questions. You said that if someone offers 10 Gb of its own disk space to the system, and is online 70% of the time, will get 7Gb of public disk space. This does not seem to be a good trade, as I give more than I receive. And does this mean that I can store really 7Gb in the system, which actually eats up 35Gb if all data is replicated 5 times?

[azopteks]

It is true you don't get as much as you share but what you get is a different kind of storage. Universally accessible from any Wuala client and fault tolerant.

Also you are only deducted what you add into to Wuala once, not for every replication. So 7gb would only be 7gb not 35gb.

[den1s12]

Hi Dominik,

Nice work, I have a little concern though. How will you manage the balance between the stored and the uploaded data on the long run (when the google servers are out of the picture) if let's say every user wants to upload 7g, which represents 35g in the system, but on the other hand "only" 10g data is stored at every peer?

[mymischief1]

how fast would an folder-access-change propagate thru the network? (e.g. removing a 'friend' would still allow him to 'get' files for some time)

how secure are the routing tables? a malicious user could manipulate them to redirect traffic to his storage

[dominikgrolimund]

i think i didn't explain that point well enough. let's say you revoke access to a folder to marc. then marc doesn't have access to that folder anymore immediately.

lazy revocation is only on a technical level: only if marc had a hacked client which would keep the access key to that folder, he could decrypt the files he had access to before as long as there are no changes to the folder (add, edit, remove). see our cryptree paper or lazy revocation in general for details.

[PQTube]

Zitat: "For the other parts: We don't see the files so there is nothing we could do there."

Ist das wirklich dein Ernst?

Ihr seid euch hoffentlich klar darüber was das für rechtliche Konsequenzen für euch haben kann...

[samisupidupi]

Do you have no possibility to see or access the files shared with a group of friends? Let's say you get a hint of someone, saying "this user shares these illegal files with these people", what can you do about it?

[1pa2ch]

Ich kenne mich im Recht kaum aus, aber - wieso sollte das eigentlich rechtliche Konsequenzen haben? Ich meine, die Post wird ja auch nicht dafür verantwortlich gemacht, wenn gefälschte Banknoten, kopierte DVDs oder sonstwas damit verschickt wird. Oder? Wo ist da der Unterschied?

[vecter]

Just to clarify, doesn't d points uniquely specific a polynomial of degree d-1? For example, 1 point uniquely specifies a polynomial of degree 0 (constant), 2 points uniquely specifies a line, 3 points specify a parabola, etc.

[dominikgrolimund]

yes, you're right of course.

[dominikgrolimund]

This is Dominik. Thanks for your interest! I assume you have received your invite by now. If not, please let me know.

[gnomeuser]

Any hope you can link the papers you referenced? Also can you expand on the licensing the code will be under, I could see a lot of interesting integration work being done e.g. with Nautilus and the GNOME Online Desktop project to make Wuala an integrated part of the users desktop and computing life but this would only be possible if the license was compatible.

[dominikgrolimund]

bah, youtube doesn't allow me to post URLs? whenever i post a URL, it fails...

[dominikgrolimund]

ok, another try: you can find the paper at dcg dot ethz dot ch (search for cryptree and havelaar)

[elimisteve]

Wuala sounds promising! I can't wait for the Linux client :-)

[dominikgrolimund]

Wuala for Linux is here! :-) Since yesterday.

[gnomeuser]

And thank you for the invite, I'm currently working with one of your engineers to make it work on my Fedora box.. Can't wait to play with this cool technology

[shinynew]

I have to cut my first statment short: this was very interesting to me.

But I have a couple questions

Once a file is downloaded does the client keep the decrypted file, the encrypted pieces, both or none? So if one particular file became exceedingly popular would there still only be a few copies of it lying around?

Also it is pretty clear that you do not want any pirating, but if there is pirating going on in a private group how will that be handled?

[dominikgrolimund]

The encrypted files are kept in a cache. You can define how big that cache should be, e.g. 1 or 10 GB, very similar to a browser cache. If a file becomes very popular, a content distribution protocol similar to BitTorrent comes into play, making use of encrypted fragments in the cache.

As for the other question, we don't see what people store or share if the files are private since we respect the user's privacy.

[eMbry00s]

I'd love to be in the alpha, and since I watch these engedu films, I would assume that I'm the right type of person for it :)

[denito9474]

"All antendees will also get an invitation code to join the early alpha version"

Would you consider giving invitations to the first 100 or whatever who respond to this video?

think about it. I mean how many people are watching the techtalks as they come out? There's gotta be some kinda payoff for that.

[denito9474]

Oh, we have to wait 48 hours to see if that one worked?