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By David Rothman

With the Democrats running Congress, America will be just a little safer from the megalomaniacs in the White House—no small reason to give thanks.

But be smug not. Perhaps privacy- and security-minded librarians and publishers should take close look at Cleversafe technology, described further by O’Reilly‘s Andy Oram. Very likely, here in the States, legalities could still get in the way of privacy protection from Bush and crew. Even so, it’s nice to dream of technology that can outwit Big Bro.

Andy notes that “The Cleversafe approach is doubly interesting because it is distributed in two senses:

  • The data is stored on many systems, geographically scattered around the world to facilitate disaster recovery.
  • Responsibility for the system is distributed. Cleversafe provides only the technology (open source) and the service. Actual storage will be purchased from a variety of companies, so that no one entity has control over users’ data.

He further notes:

  • Instead of being stored in a central location such as a Windows file server or NFS, data is split into slices stored at different nodes. A large file (like a video or a database backup), which is becoming more and more common these days, can therefore be stored and retrieved faster than a centralized system could, because it can benefit from multiple data paths through a network to multiple systems.
  • The data in each slice is compressed, encrypted, and digitally signed with a checksum, to ensure that it is transmitted securely and without corruption.
  • Only a subset of chunks is needed to restore the entire file. For instance, the file may be stored as nine chunks in 18 locations, and only five chunks are needed to restore the file. Even if a disaster causes 13 of the stored sites to be unavailable, the user can retrieve his data. The information dispersal algorithms that make this possible can be compared to RAID 5, where multiple disks store stripes of data along with parity information that can be used to compensate for a lost disk.

Andy concludes: “In an age where millions of Internet users store their photos on Flickr, their calendars on Google, and their web bookmarks on del.icio.us, I am looking forward to the day when centralized file servers give way to services like Cleversafe’s. The physical network is ready for the responsibility being placed on it, and the concept is well tested.”

Detail: I’m all in favor of pursuit of terrorists, and compliance with appropriate subpoenas. But the Bush administration is out to undermine and if possible ignore safeguards.

 
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