[tahoe-dev] Tahoe WUI enhancement suggestion

[Greg Troxel]

I understand better where you are coming from now.

So as is pretty clear, tahoe has a unapologetic security-first
mentality.

On the continuum, there are multiple things:

  dropbox: provider can read, less than 100% clear policies

  owncloud on a VPS: VPS provider could read, probably clearly may not

  owncloud in your facility: reliability issues

  tahoe, with red nodes (with keys) only in your own control

  tahoe, with red nodes in VPS, or ?

So it really depends on your requirements and what you want.  tahoe's
strengths are

  surviving loss of servers

  hiding content from servers

  being able to use storage at nodes that are not "servers" in terms of
  cloud politics and service agreements

So if you want the replicated/distributed part of tahoe but do not
really need the security part, then accessing it from untrusted nodes
could make sense.  But then you'd need to ask yourself if that's really
the right tool, given the other things out there.  For your travel
example, why not use one of the centralized services, or just a web
server?  As soon as you need a particular gateway you have a single
point of failure again anyway.

owncloud with tahoe backend makes sense because you can have a small VPS
with access to vast storage, trading BW for capacity, which is usually
cheaper in modern vps/cloud offerings.

So I think it would be fine to have optional features to have redder
gatewys; my only strong opinion is that they be off by default.

When I talk about red and black, I mean by red that the node has the
private data or the keys, while black nodes only have ciphertext.