[tahoe-dev] a fundamental problem

zooko zooko at zooko.com
Fri Sep 14 00:10:07 UTC 2007


Folks:

My friend Niels Ferguson, cryptographer and Microsofty, had this to  
say about Allmydata.

Regards,

Zooko

Begin excerpted forwarded message:

> From: Niels Ferguson <niels at microsoft.com>
> Date: September 10, 2007 5:56:53 PM PDT
> To: zooko <zooko at zooko.com>
> Subject: RE: Remember DigiCash?
...
> It is great to hear that you are enjoying yourself, and from what  
> you say you are definitely in the right place at the moment. I  
> remember we discussed some technicalities of the ECC for a similar  
> distributed storage system. It is a cool technology. The only real  
> question mark I have is the legal situation w.r.t. law-enforcement  
> access and stuff. From my quick perusal of the website it isn't  
> clear whether Allmydata ever has access to the encryption key; if  
> they do they become a subpoena target which can be expensive and  
> threaten the company's reputation. If they don't have access to the  
> encryption key it is hard to ensure availability of the backup.  
> That is a hard choice to make.




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