On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Saint Germain wrote:

tahoe-LAFS is not really a backup software but rather a storage solution.

How about: """ Tahoe-LAFS is not just a backup tool, but rather a distributed file system. It also comes with an integrated backup tool. """

The primary objective is to secure your data, either for privacy or for safety (against damage). To do so, it stores your encrypted data (encrypted at the source) on several machines organized in a network with a configurable policy (specifying K=2 and N=5 for instance, will spread your data on 5 machines, 2 of which need at least to be available to access your data).

Nicely written.

A few remarkable points: - I like its "paranoid" approach. The idea is to trust no one (and especially not your online storage provider)

This is fine and I don't think you need to change it, but for your information whenever I see the word "trust" a little warning flag goes up in my brain, and I go back and mentally rewrite the sentence without the word "trust". This is because that word combines two things: 1. Whether you think a person or tool is going to fail or betray you, and 2. Whether your system relies on that person or tool operating correctly and loyally. A lot of the architecture of Tahoe-LAFS is focused on question 2 and the interference of question 1 just confuses everyone. If you think about question 1 then you'll sometimes end up choosing the wrong answer for question 2. For example: think of Least Authority Enterprises. As a company, we don't want our users to think that we are weak or malicious -- that we are likely to fail or to betray our customers to someone else. But, we very much want our customers to be *invulnerable* to us, so that *if* we were to fail or to betray our customers to someone else, there would be very little damage that we would be able to do. If you use the word "trust", then it is hard to explain why you don't want to give LAE your encryption keys. Does that mean you think we are dishonest? Don't you trust us? If you force yourself not to use the word trust, then you can usually rewrite the sentences to be in terms of "reliance" or "vulnerability" instead of trust, and suddenly the confusion about question 1 vs. question 2 disappears. Why do you withhold your capabilities from LAE? Because you don't wish to be vulnerable to a failure or betrayal at LAE. Because you don't want the safety of your backups to *rely on* the continued security of LAE's servers and the continued loyalty of its employees. Doing that transformation on your sentence above would give something like: """ I like its "paranoid" approach. The idea is that no one (not even your online storage provider) should have read or write access to your backups. """

- Don't need any redundant PAR2 checksum, given that the data are

By the way, zfec is an alternative to PAR2. https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/zfec/browser/zfec/README.rst zfec is much more efficient than PAR2 for some settings. (See the benchmarks in the README.rst.) I don't know of anyone who is actively using zfec's command-line tool in the way that one uses PAR2's command-line tool, though. There are lots of people using zfec as a library inside other tools. Looking forward to reading your article! Maybe I'll painfully struggle through the first 10 words in French and then get my Francophone wife to read it to me. :-) Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE