At 01:31 AM 8/2/2001 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 11:52 AM 07/31/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
It would be handy, from my point of view, to use usenet as an "offsite backup" solution -- posting encrypted source for work-in-progress on binary newsgroups so I could just go back and nab it out of the archives if I ever have a disk crash or in case the computer gets stolen.
"Your message may cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars." Usenet may be effective for Blacknet and samizdat and unreliable storage of critical secrets where the Fedz won't stomp them all out, but it doesn't scale well for normal backups. You can use one of those "100megsfree.com" sites, or buy storage, and use some anonymizer to stash your stuff there. The real advantage of using Usenet as opposed to a non-broadcast medium is that it's much harder for eavesdroppers to find the people reading it when they're targeting the writer, so you can use a Blacknet service anywhere; if that's not relevant, then don't bother.
Freenet and Mojo Nation are much better bets. Because of the inherent crypto used for transport and the manner in which the data is distributed and stored, plus the ability to innocuously add your crypto on top, they make good potential data havens. steve