[tahoe-dev] announcing allmydata.org "Tahoe" v0.8

[zooko]

ANNOUNCING: Allmydata.org "Tahoe" version 0.8

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.8 of allmydata.org
"Tahoe".

Allmydata.org "Tahoe" is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant
filesystem.  All of the source code is available under a Free
Software, Open Source licence (or two).

This filesystem is encrypted and distributed over multiple peers in
such a way that it continues to work correctlly even when some of the
peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious.

This is the successor to Allmydata-Tahoe v0.7, which was released
January 8, 2008 [1].

This release improves performance, diagnostics, and packaging.  This
release of allmydata.org "Tahoe" will form the basis of the next
consumer backup product from Allmydata, Inc. -- http://allmydata.com .


Since v0.7 we've made the following changes:

  * Add a preliminary Microsoft Windows package (ticket #195).

  * Add a preliminary Macintosh package (ticket #182).

  * Display information about peers (ticket #32).

  * Display information about uploads and downloads (ticket #39).

  * Add unit tests and docs for contrib/fuse (ticket #255).

  * Add a preliminary FUSE interface for Macintosh.

  * Update docs, starting with docs/about.html --
    http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html .

  * Improve logging, diagnostic tools, statistics, timing measurements
    during upload, etc..

  * Add more measurements of performance:
    http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Performance .

  * Add an upload helper, with resumption of incomplete uploads and
    short-circuiting of uploads if the file is already present (tickets
    #116, #258, #218).

  * Make upload continue even if some servers disappear during the
    upload process.

  * Add mtime and ctime timestamps to files (ticket #183).

  * Make introduction more efficient by allowing nodes to act as
    clients-only and not publish themselves as servers (ticket #271).

  * Extend the web API to allow programmatic control of mutable files.

  * Fix potential problem that could cause corruption of downloaded
    mutable files if a long series of unlikely coincidences and hacked
    clients occurred (ticket #312).

  * Make file and directory names use unicode.

  * Use SHA-256d instead of SHA-256 for secure hashes.


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

With Tahoe, you can distribute your filesystem across a set of
computers, such that if some of the computers fail or turn out to be
malicious, the filesystem continues to work from the remaining
computers.  You can also share your files with other users, using a
strongly encrypted, capability-based access control scheme.

This release is targeted at hackers and smart users who are willing to
use a web user interface, a command-line user interface, or a FUSE
interface.  (Or a RESTful API.  Just telnet to localhost and type HTTP
requests to get started.)

Because this software is new, it is not yet recommended for storage of
highly confidential data nor for valuable data which is not otherwise
backed up. However, it works well in practice, it comes with extensive
unit tests [2], and there are no known security flaws which would
compromise confidentiality or data integrity.  (For a current
description of all known security issues and an overview of Tahoe's
security properties, please see the Security web page: [3].)

This release of Tahoe is suitable for the "friendnet" use case [4] --
it is easy to create a filesystem spread over the computers of you and
your friends so that you can share files and disk space with one
another.


LICENCE

You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version
2 or, at your option, any later version.  See the file "COPYING.GPL"
for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public
Licence, version 1.0.  The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence says
that you may distribute proprietary derived works of Tahoe without
releasing the source code of that derived work for up to twelve
months, after which time you are obligated to release the source code
of the derived work under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence.
See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.html" for the terms of the Transitive
Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.0.

(You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence,
at your option.)


INSTALLATION

Tahoe works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, and Solaris.  For
installation instructions please see "doc/install.html" [5].


HACKING AND COMMUNITY

Please join us on the mailing list [6] to discuss uses of Tahoe.
Patches that extend and improve Tahoe are gratefully accepted -- the
RoadMap page [7] shows the next improvements that we plan to make and
CREDITS [8] lists the names of people who've contributed to the
project.  The wiki Dev page [9] contains resources for hackers.


SPONSORSHIP

Tahoe is sponsored by Allmydata, Inc. [10], a provider of consumer
backup services.  Allmydata, Inc. contributes hardware, software,
ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing several
allmydata.org Tahoe hackers and allowing them to spend part of their
work time on the next-generation, free-software project).  We are
eternally grateful!


Zooko O'Whielacronx
on behalf of the allmydata.org team
February 15, 2008
Boulder, Colorado, USA


[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=1805
[2] http://allmydata.org/tahoe-figleaf/current/
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Security
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/UseCases
[5] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html
[6] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
[7] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap
[8] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=1804
[9] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[10] http://allmydata.com