TWN Celebrates One Orbit Around the Daystar

Today, we celebrate the one year anniversary of Tahoe-LAFS Weekly News. So many excited things happened in the Tahoe-LAFS universe this past year. We saw the release of Tahoe-LAFS 1.8.3, 1.9 and 1.9.1. There was not one, not two, but three Tahoe-LAFS Summits. Tahoe-LAFS received a new server. Numerous Tahoe-LAFS grids appeared in Virginia Tech, San Franscisco (Noisebridge) and location unknown (Cryto Coding Collective and JonDonym). Tahoe-LAFS' influence could be seen in projects like Nilestore, FreedomBox, Tamias and Cryptosphere. We even saw the founding of a company who donated their work back to Tahoe-LAFS, in Least Authority Enterprise (LAE) . We are really excited in where Tahoe-LAFS is going and that "provider-independent" security is catching on all over.

Thoughts from the Scribe

When Zooko suggested I write a weekly Tahoe-LAFS newsletter a year ago, I was a little unsure. I was not sure what I would write about or if I would be able to provide stories which would capture the attention of the incredible community surrounding Tahoe-LAFS. I must say now that I am ever so grateful for this opportunity. I can't express my thanks enough, but I will do my very best to below.

First, I would like to thank the readers. If it wasn't for you, this newsletter, wouldn't exist. Your exceptional feedback (see below) makes writing TWN a sheer joy. I look forward to doing this every week and that is in large part due to you.

I would like to thank the development and support team of Tahoe-LAFS. Thank you for the gift of Tahoe-LAFS. I hope I help more people realize what a special thing we have here. In particular, I would like to thank Zooko, Brian and David-Sarah . Your brilliant discussions on the mailing list and IRC stretched the limits of my brain, forcing me to look up numerous things. Thank you so much for expanding my knowledge. Thank you to Peter . Your interview helped convince me that I didn't need to be a developer to contribute to an OSS project in a meaningful way. That interview did more to encourage me to continue than you will ever know. Thanks to Kevan for being my first interview. Thanks to Marcus for forwarding me all the tab completion fails :). Lastly, thanks to the many whom, I didn't get to mention. You have made me a better person and not just technically. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Thank You to Atlas Networks

We would like to say thank you to Atlas Networks for their continued support and generous donation of four servers. As noted in TWN #14, "In addition to the generosity of their hardware donation, Atlas Networks provide the Tahoe-LAFS project with remote consoles and technical support, including complete OS reinstalls." As a way of showing my appreciation, I will be moving my last VPS over to Atlas Networks. Thank you for your support.

Redundant Array of Independent Clouds Makes a Big Splash

The article on RAIC in last week's TWN made a tremendous splash. Numerous tweets regarding it appeared on Twitter. The following,

"Redundant Array of Independent Clouds -- Dropbox, Googledrive, memopal, ... http://j.mp/MviO55" [0]

was retweeted 22 times and favorited by 41 users. Numerous other news channels picked it up and ran with the story. TWN experienced a large increase in the number of subscribers this past week. My feelings tell me it was largely a result of this story. So congratulations to Deigo "sickness" Righi , your idea resonates with a lot of people.

Free/Open Source Project of the Week

One of the first FOSS projects we wrote about was git-annex. Back then, Tahoe-LAFS was made a backend to git-annex. git-annex is a tool that uses all of git's machinery for identifying and tracking files, but stores the actual complete contents of the files in a separate location instead of in the git repo itself.Now the developer, Joey Hess, is in the middle of a very ($9,842 pledged) successful Kickstarter campaign. Congratulations Joey on achieving your funding and we look for to the new features which result.

Potential use of personal backup

As mentioned above, a new user, Saint Germain was unsure of Tahoe-LAFS' ability to be used for personal backups. Guido Witmond included some of the reasons to use Tahoe-LAFS for personal backup:

• it's easy to setup, although not yet "Parent-proof";
• it works out-of-the-box on many platforms;
• it is encrypted by default;
• only you have the key, so no one else can read your data, unlike the other cloud providers;
• that it shows the 'health' of your data; and allows to repair it. [6]

Zooko provided one of the better descriptions of Tahoe-LAFS, I have experienced the privileges to read. I may have to steal it and place it in the introductory documentation.

On a side note, Saint Germain is writing an article on new backup software for the French site, linuxfr.org and may add Tahoe-LAFS to the article. Regardless of whether the article includes Tahoe-LAFS, we would love to see it.