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A comment on the idea "Add Built-In Bittorrent Client; Feature request" in Wuala:

I guess I should have made my point a little clearer.

I know that Bittorrent is used legally with great success (using it myself), but with your proposal it would have taken just a single black sheep to get other people into trouble.

The act of connecting to the swarm alone submits your IP address to the tracker, which will happily hand it out to other people in the swarm -- including MediaSentry, et al. Protocol Encryption doesn't change that. It was introduced to prevent ISPs from shaping the traffic, not to hide the transfered data.

Yes, Wuala may have saved illegal stuff on my hard disk right now, but I won't get in trouble for that, because I have no way to tell what is saved there. Connecting to a Bittorrent-tracker might get me in trouble.

Apart from the points Bugreport makes below (which should render the issue moot), think of what this would do to the Bittorrent swarm in question: dozens of clients chiming in to leech a few pieces. That's not very nice... – DataWraith, on August 27, 2008 19:29

DataWraith marked one of Bugreport's replies in Wuala as useful. Bugreport replied to the idea "Add Built-In Bittorrent Client; Feature request".

DataWraith replied on August 27, 2008 13:16 to the idea "Add Built-In Bittorrent Client; Feature request" in Wuala:

No. Just no.

What if someone downloads something illegal? Then everyone who helped bring these files into the Wuala network will have his or her virtual fingerprints all over the "crime scene"...

DataWraith replied on August 25, 2008 17:28 to the question "Wuala RAID integration" in Wuala:

So you are asking for Wuala to basically simulate a RAID-drive for keeping its local data safe?

To be honest, I don't see what good that could do. Files are spread throughout the network, so when one drive fails, enough chunks will still be available in the network to successfully reconstruct the files.

Wuala generally tries not to put too many chunks of the same file onto the same machine, so if one drive goes up in smoke it won't irreparably damage the corresponding files. The data on that failed hard drive can be replaced by simply generating new chunks from the original file.

Moreover, you'd need at least twice the amount of disk space locally -- it would probably be more efficient to just contribute that much more space to the network, and let the existing error-correction mechanism do its work -- after all, disk failures happen relatively seldom.

DataWraith replied on August 25, 2008 13:20 to the question "Wuala RAID integration" in Wuala:

Wuala uses Forward error correction (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_...). This reduces the necessary redundancy from about 24 times to about 5 times, IIRC.

RAID does something similar, but is simpler. I can't imagine how one would go about integrating it with Wuala. Could you elaborate your idea?

DataWraith started following the question "Traded space management" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the question "Muss Wartung oft laufen?" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "Visual Notification about write access" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "More Statistics - Please" in Wuala.

DataWraith replied on July 29, 2008 15:42 to the question "hash collisions handling" in Wuala:

Well, hashes are designed so as to make collisions unlikely, either by accident or malicious intent. Judging from the Wikipedia article on SHA, an attacker would have to compute approx. 2^69 operations in order to find a collision for SHA1, which even on a supercomputer would take decades or centuries.

And if I recall correctly, Wuala is using the stronger SHA-256. Or maybe that was just for passwords, I'm not sure.

Anyway, for the foreseeable future -- barring major breakthroughs -- it is extremely unlikely for a collision to occur, and I wouldn't worry about it.

DataWraith started following the problem "Wua.la downloads some hash value. Can't stop it. Doesn't appear in the download view." in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the question "Downloadspeed schwankt stark!" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "SVN repository in a wuala group directory" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "prefer clients on the same network" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the problem "1 cache for all should be 2 caches for own/foreign stuff" in Wuala.

DataWraith replied on June 22, 2008 20:28 to the question "Die Sache mit dem Speicherplatz" in Wuala:

Ja, es wird alles online gehostet, und zwar auf dem Speicherplatz den Andere freigegeben haben. Und damit die Anderen einen Anreiz haben Speicher freizugeben, bekommen sie im Gegenzug selber neuen Speicher dazu, allerdings höchstens genausoviel wie sie auch teilen, meistens aber weniger.

Im Prinzip bewahren die Nutzer gegenseitig ihre Daten füreinander auf, indem sie den Speicherplatz teilen. Die Verfügbarkeit wird erreicht indem jede Datei in kleine Stücke aufgeteilt, und jedes Stück ungefähr 5 mal hochgeladen und gespeichert wird. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit alle Stücke der Datei wieder zu finden liegt dank dieser Redundanz und cleverer Codierung der Stücke bei über 99%.

Jetzt könnte man meinen, dass man 5x soviel Speicherplatz braucht wie zur Verfügung steht. Aber wie gesagt, man bekommt nicht soviel Speicherplatz zurück wie man freigibt; bei mir ist es z.B. nur rund ein Drittel. Außerdem kann Wuala Duplikate erkennen, so dass eine Datei die von zwei Benutzern gespeichert wird nur einmal vorhanden ist.

Wenn du zumindest einigermaßen Englisch kannst, dann findest du auf www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xKZ4KGkQY8 eine tiefergehende Erklärung von den Entwicklern selbst.

DataWraith replied on June 22, 2008 11:37 to the question "Die Sache mit dem Speicherplatz" in Wuala:

Nein, einen Platzgewinn ergibt das nicht.

Im Prinzip verlierst du sogar Platz, wenn du nicht daueronline bist.

Aber du kannst theoretisch von überall auf deine Daten zugreifen. Und du kannst Dateien Anderen freigeben -- das ist erheblich praktischer als z.B. das versenden per Email oder ICQ: Zum einen kann auch auf die Dateien zugegriffen werden während du selbst offline bist, und du zum anderen gibt es keine Beschränkung was die Größe der Dateien angeht (im Gegensatz z.B. zu Email).

DataWraith started following the idea "Allow users to share space on multiple partitions/HDDs" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "Bandwidth scheduler; feature request" in Wuala.

DataWraith started following the idea "Current Task Status" in Wuala.