Heh. Yep, thats true. Wuala is already a reinvention. Look up Mojo Nation from the year 2000 and notice its descendants such as the current allmydata.com sponsored Tahoe at http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/. Both are open source.

Also, Bram Cohen worked on Mojo Nation before leaving when the money dried up to go create BitTorrent which solved an actual problem based on internet users needs.

-gps

Thanks for your critical review. I’d like to take the chance to comment on it. As with almost any technology, there is potential for misuse (see for instance Scott Berkun’s ethics chapter in “The Myth of Innovations”), and as the inventor or engineer you need to be aware of that. In our case, we’ve discussed a lot about potential misuse and we try to do whatever we can to fight against it. There are several reasons why we believe Wuala doesn’t leverage misuse in another dimension than existing technology. If friends want to exchange encrypted illegal or bad files, they can do so already today, and this is clearly not the problem for the music and film industry. If someone publishes a bad file, then everybody can see it, and if we detect it either by ourselves or if someone someone reports it to us, we will take it down immediately (users can report inappropriate files and you can also report abuse directly on our website http://wua.la/en/abuse.html). When it comes to private groups, we have the possibility to limit the number of people in any private group, so in effect taking away the potential leverage of sharing files encryptedly with “lots of strangers”. What is also important is that users in Wuala are not as anonymous as in other networks. A file is clearly associated with the person who uploaded it. So if a illegal/bad file is detected, we can take it down and also call the user to account if necessary.

I know that I probably didn’t cover all the issues you brought up. I just wanted to give you a quick response to the most important points I saw. Good use of Wuala clearly dominates over potential misuse and if you look closer at Wuala, you will realize that it doesn’t really leverage misuse, but even takes away lots of the possibilities that evildoers have on anonymous networks.

Having said that, I’d like to emphasize two points. First, we think privacy is a very important issue and believe that everyone should have a place where he or she can store files securely so that no one, not even the service provider, can see them. In today’s internet services, privacy is at stake with big corporations having access to all your data — it needs a technology such as Wuala where your files are encrypted on your computer and your password never leaves your computer. Second, with Wuala, we want to build and foster a platform for legal content. Because Wuala democratizes online storage and distribution, in the sense that it gives free storage to everyone and allows people to store their own files in any size and quality they like, this is for instance great for independent artists who don’t have the money to distribute their content elsewhere. Also, your wedding example was a good one: Never before was it easier for a group of people to share photos, videos, music, or even documents of an event. They simply drag their files into Wuala, post it to the wedding group, and then every member of that group can see and access the files. It’s that simple.

Best,
Dominik

@Dan Field: What you say about the password is correct (users are encouraged to choose a strong password).

Re: NSA could crack the encryption,

Surely the encryption is only as good as the users password? And as most people aren’t going to use an incredibly long and difficult to guess password it could be cracked using brute force methods?

I’m with you on this one too, Mike. I certainly wouldn’t want my storage being used to store anything dodgy.

It’s a very clever idea and I’m sure it will work really well but I can’t think of anything ‘legal’ that would require such a service, which then leads to the question – where’s the income and what’s the business model?

Happy to hear of any legit reasons to use such a service though!