Community Sharing Private Hard Disk Space

[Mattia DL]

Hi everybody,

 

i m looking for a small group of guy (20/30) that want to try to make a community of unknown that share part of their computer memory to keep data of other guys. A sort of peer-to-peer small cloud storage of unknown people. 

 

this is more a social experiment than a technological one.

let me know if interested or for every kind of question. 

 

Mattia 

[Maacus]

I have been thinking about that too. I'm interested to join you. I have about 4 devices with free space.

[Mattia DL]

wow, thats grate! do you know someone else interested?

any suggestion to reach other guys? 

[palmerit]

I'm in. Interested in the social aspect. My internet connection speed for upload is insanely slow though. Be warned!

[mboscovich]

I have been thinking about that too!! i would like to join you. I have been thinking on a big sync service, like dropbox, but using a decentralized infraestructure like Tribler, and totally free... i mean, a service where you can donate space on your computer to the comunity, and use space donate for other to sync the files, for example, to use 1 GB of cloud space, donate 4Gb of your disk (this can fix the offline problem on sincronization process, because the sync files will be replicated on a lot of machines). Obiously, the files must be encrypted on the others machines.

Regards,

 

                   Maximiliano.

 

 

PD: I know, my english is ugly  

Edited July 28, 2014 by mboscovich

[Mattia DL]

hi Maximiliano,

 

I m going to check Tribler tomorrow! 

I do know nothing about encryption, theme we need to talk about.

 

Do you have any skills about encryption?

 

My english is kind of ugly too,

and we are not in a english literature course,

so no problem! 

[segator]

I'm Interested, i have a Bored Server with 2TB of Disk with symetric 1gbps

 

 

P.D Sorry for my bad english

[Mattia DL]

Sounds grate! 

But I m not a dev but a designer. 

what do you mean about "Bored Server" 

maybe it means only bored... 

[mboscovich]

Nice!!  @Mattia DL and @Segator.
I know just a bit about encryption. Anyway, the bittorrent sync API has a method to do the file encryption, and comunication encryption, so it can save us a lot of work! .

I am not a expert developer (actually I'm a sysadmin ), but i have some experience coding on python (7 years), and there is a python module for this API, and also Trible is written on python ...so i'm investigating a little about it and i would like to start a project. Would be interesting if we can join efforts and desing and develop a file sync descentralized tool, based on bittorrent.

 

Regards

[Journeyman]

I might be interested.  However, you may want to establish some guidelines as well - how will you handle adult content, copyrighted material, etc.  Or is it just an "anything goes" kind of a thing?  In my experience with community shares, those two categories I mentioned are the first ones that I see filling things up.

[gmatth]

You can create encrypted node keys without the api.. So data can safely be stored / shared:

 

http://forum.bittorrent.com/topic/25823-generate-encrypted-read-only-secret-without-api-key/

 

Do the normal "Add a Sync Folder",

click "Generate", but change the first letter of the "Folder sercet" from "A" to "D" (see 1 and 2),

set the "Folder to sync", click "OK",

right click on that folder from the list,

click "Show Folder Preferences",

copy the "Read only secret" (see 3),

paste it into Notepad(or other text editor),

"Encrypted Read-Only Secret" is the first 33 char of that string with the first letter changed from a "E" to "F" (see 3 and 4)

real example this time.

 

1) AR7GC6JIVCTKG2XNPM7GGOSV3FI5BDDNH

2) DR7GC6JIVCTKG2XNPM7GGOSV3FI5BDDNH

3) EYF7Y3OOYZEZALVLFDQDAARXQTV2HO7IZCO2V2ZRZEAN32VY7RFH7HGOKRI

4) FYF7Y3OOYZEZALVLFDQDAARXQTV2HO7IZ

[Mattia DL]

@journeyman we can find porn everywhere online, 

so my proposal is to avoid any kind of adult stuff.

same answer for copyrighted material. 

 

sounds good? 

 

@gmatth thanks for sharing the encryption discussion.

seems that there are lots of interesting possibilities,

even open to guys like me that don't know how to manage API. 

 

seems we have growing topic, should we consider to move in other social network?

the first that came in my mind is a facebook group ora a G+. The second one give the possibilities to structure the discussion in sub groups and everyone with a @gmail.com can join us. 

But I m really open to other ways of being online

 

- - -

 

maybe some one of you already know, but Condoleezza joined Dropbox months ago

[mboscovich]

@ Journeyman the idea is to have a repository of personal files that may be distributed over a network of unknown peers, so that one could synchronize your files with each of its devices (tablet, phone, notebook, etc.), as bittorrent sync does, but without the need to have all your devices turned on for that synchronization becomes effective, instead of, the idea is using as intermediaries to other peers. For example, if I add a file on my desktop pc to my shared (private) folder, that file should be split and replicated on multiple peers, so that if you then turn off the PC desktop, and later turn on the notebook, that file can be synchronized with the same shared folder from the notebook, but by downloading from peers rather than the desktop pc. 

It would be a kind of Dropbox, but without a central server infrastructure, just using for this purpose a P2P network of unknown peers. 

- To use the P2P network of unknow peers, to hosted your personal files, necessarily you should donate your hard drive space to the community so that others can use it to store your personal files (for example, to use 1Gb of p2p network, you must donate 5Gb to the comunity). 

- Necessarily, when a file is hosted on the computer of another person (a stranger), this should be stored encrypted (using this encryptación asymmetric, as the use of public / private key). 

- That way maybe I could set a policy that no peer may have a full file from another user, only a percentage of it (ie, avoid seeds exist). 

- It would be good that the use of trackers is not required, but instead can use something similar to what makes Tribler (http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/whatIsTribler) for reporting this network of peers. 

- On what is pornography and files copyrights, being a personal folder, and to be encrypted, only the owner of that folder could decrypt those files, and therefore would be solely responsible for the content. 

 

@ Mattia DL I agree with you that could begin to use other tools to communicate. could be a gmail group or a G+ community. I created a community on G+, everybody can join to this on  https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/111676969507736751272  (is a public group, and is called P2PDropSync because i don't have any idea about the name ).

 

 

Regards

[Journeyman]

@journeyman we can find porn everywhere online, 

so my proposal is to avoid any kind of adult stuff.

same answer for copyrighted material.

 

Bravo.

 

 

@ Journeyman the idea is to have a repository of personal files that may be distributed over a network of unknown peers, so that one could synchronize your files with each of its devices (tablet, phone, notebook, etc.), as bittorrent sync does, but without the need to have all your devices turned on for that synchronization becomes effective, instead of, the idea is using as intermediaries to other peers.

Hmmm.  If that's all it is, I'm not too interested.  I already have an always-on device that serves that very purpose - without having to have my files available to the public.  I thought this was more of a social experiment where, if you have some open source/Creative Commons documents or programs that others might find interesting, you could post it for others to use (rather than a community-based cloud backup system).  Am I misunderstanding?

[mboscovich]

Ok well understood @Journeyman, we are thinking in differents things.

[Mattia DL]

@journeyman my initial idea was a community-based cloud backup system, maybe we can call it not cloud backup system, it is more like a fog backup system, sounds good?   but I m really interested in your open source /creative commons ideas, could you explain it a bit more? 

 

@mboscovich i think that adult and copyrighted stuff is not a good start. as i told you can find it everywhere and most of the time are big file. but i m really interested in the p2p distributed folder. @journeyman the point is not to have a always on backup system that everyone has to set up for themselves, but an easy to use service of always on distributed folder.  

 

but i think that we are discussing two different theme: one is how it works and the other one is what to put in it. 

maybe we can keep this two things separated.  

[mboscovich]

I Agree, those are two different things, and depends as think could be resolved with the same tool. 

When I speak of files that will be stored / backuped in this p2p network, I mean that those files will be encrypted to one or more people, so that these will be the only ones able to see that file, this can be done by asymetric encryption (more info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography). This would allow users to share files between certain users (as is done for example with google drive). You could even set up a public folder (where the files are not encrypted), so that there can store files that are available for anyone (somenthing like the public dropbox folder). 

Regarding the content copyright and adults, when it comes to the legal side, being encrypted files with private keys of users owners, these would be the only ones who can decrypt, and therefore the only ones with access to the same (in fact, there are privates files), so this problem should not matter much, since it would be the responsibility of each user to take care of your files. 

When it comes to the occupied space, remember to use 1GB of space on the P2P network, necessarily should make available to the community (the other users of the p2p network) at least 4 or 5Gb(this should be a necessary condition for joining to this p2p network) with what the community grow beyond the capacity of each user intends to store. 

This is a very basic diagram of what I think about this tool  http://www.gliffy.com/go/publish/6017743

 

@Mattia DL  "fog backup system", sounds really good!!! . A tentative name could be FoGBox

[FoxAlejandro]

Hello, My english is bad  ==> SPANIHS Hola Soy nuevo usando el bit torrent y me surgue un porblema  en el modo web me indica que la sincronizacion fue interrumpida  por una diferencia temporal entre los dispositivos su perior a 600 segundos, pero este porblema solo me sucede en unos cuantos equipos  como puedo solucionarlo? debo hacer algun ajuste ?

 Epero sus respuestas!

Gracias... thnks! :ph34r:

[Journeyman]

@Mattia DL

First, what exactly do you mean by keeping the two topics separated?

 

Second, about the Creative Commons/Open Source stuff...The first example I can think of is textbooks.  In college, I had a professor that gave us a link to an open source trigonometry book so that we wouldn't have to pay the going rate for yet another textbook.  I've started a collection of textbooks and would love to see them distributed.  As long as a link in provided to the Creative Commons License, redistributing them is perfectly acceptable with the author.  Now there are a lot of copyrighted textbooks out there that could make their way into the mix if people weren't careful - I could definitely see problems if it wasn't moderated somehow.

 

Another idea might be software.  Now software is probably best downloaded straight from the developer's site since who knows who has tampered with it.  But occasionally, a modified version -perfectly acceptable in the Open Source world- is quite useful.  Take linux for instance and its many different flavors.  Some others that I regularly use, although unmodified, are Blender, Audacity, and Gimp.

 

Perhaps hardware drivers/firmware are another example.  I've heard of firmware for routers that is open source, although I've never looked into it.

[Mattia DL]

@journeyman i mean that one don't exclude the other.

@aeaejei thank's for the link! Im reading it right know and seems that are lots of people working on our same idea. Ati a first glance, I dont like storj because is trying to sell me some of their money before i can use their service. It seems like a hidden crowdfunding campaign. after saying that project it seems that our discussion here are loosing value because other guys are already working hard on it! it seems...     am I right?

but at the same time the idea of @journeyman is something that may be interesting. at first because we are not a group of well known friends that can spend all night long toghather building the new whatever IT startup, but a community that think that sharing and FLOSS software is a key value for the near future, correct me if i am wrong. second, the idea is coming from a good desire of a guy, not with the idea of making money from it, offering a better service despite others. third, i have never heard about a open-distributed-database of FLOSS material.

@mboscovich FogBox it works! but as you can read above some one already thought about that, what to do?

 

[mboscovich]

@aeaejei thanks for links. I found Symform (http://www.symform.com) which is exactly what I've been looking for. 

Thank you.

[vagifzeynalov]

Hi guys!

Can I join too?

I can share up to 2Tb of space from my home server.

 

Thank you,

Vagif

Edited September 9, 2015 by vagifzeynalov

[jkozura]

There is a similar project called MetaArchive that people (primarily at universities) run to ensure that some files, etc., will be preserved for the future even in case of a disaster or something that would wipe out a whole campus or area. I used to maintain one of the servers at a job of mine in the past. It uses a protocol called LOCKSS to sync the content. In your case, that function would be filled by the bittorrent sync API.

You might want to look at their work for ideas, rather than reinvent the wheel again.

Here are links to their methodology and docs.

 

https://www.metaarchive.org/methodology

https://www.metaarchive.org/documentation

 

Good luck.