Wuala - a distributed file system

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Google Tech Talks
October, 30 2007

ABSTRACT

After three years of research and development on a distributed storage system, we are ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In the talk, I will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and I will also show a demo. All attendees will also get an invitation code to join the early alpha version.

Speaker: Dominik Grolimund
I am 26 years old and have studied computer science at ETH Zurich. In 1998, I founded my software company Caleido, and developed the Caleido Address-Book, a professional contact management software, of which over 35'000 licenses have been sold so far in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

In 2003, I did an exchange semester at the TU Delft, the Netherlands, as part of the Unitech exchange program, focusing on business and management. In 2004, a six-month internship followed with Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey in the US, where I worked in the 'Intelligent Vision & Reasoning' department, developing a prod...

Channel: People & Blogs
Uploaded: November 2, 2007 at 4:12 am
Author: googletechtalks

Length: 00:48:32
Rating: 4.69
Views: 22676

Tags: google techtalks techtalk engedu talk talks googletechtalks education

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Video Comments:
007luke666 (April 17, 2008 at 9:26 am)
48:32 (!)
pav930t (March 16, 2008 at 11:45 am)
On the point you make at 6.37 about data movement - I have always wanted someone to develop a distributed file system that supports an unlimited file size but more importantly when i select a file from another machine to be copied to yet another machine i dont want it to do 2 copies, one to me and then another to the destination machine, just one copy from the source to the destination.

Does your file system support this? If so, do you have any downloads?
cam8001 (May 8, 2008 at 11:32 am)
Could you just do this using FXP?
djfetmage (March 9, 2008 at 3:50 pm)
Wow, a commercial freenet
dominikgrolimund (January 18, 2008 at 12:31 pm)
i think i didn't explain that point well enough. let's say you revoke access to a folder to marc. then marc doesn't have access to that folder anymore immediately.

lazy revocation is only on a technical level: only if marc had a hacked client which would keep the access key to that folder, he could decrypt the files he had access to before as long as there are no changes to the folder (add, edit, remove). see our cryptree paper or lazy revocation in general for details.
MaZe741 (January 17, 2008 at 1:11 pm)
This imo is the beginning of the end of copyright.... right? a huge scale professional p2p network and easy to use? bomb!
DrDabbles (March 5, 2008 at 4:08 pm)
No. Copyright and ease of sharing are two different issues. This simply lets you easily access files from anywhere, including the sharing of files with other users.
den1s12 (January 15, 2008 at 7:01 am)
Hi Dominik,

Nice work, I have a little concern though. How will you manage the balance between the stored and the uploaded data on the long run (when the google servers are out of the picture) if let's say every user wants to upload 7g, which represents 35g in the system, but on the other hand "only" 10g data is stored at every peer?
tehhu1k (January 10, 2008 at 9:32 am)
I have a question about privacy. As you said you have (or want to have) flags for copyrighted/inappropriate material. However, as the files in question are encrypted how do you 'legally' gain access to them and review their content? Saving encryption keys on your servers sounds dangerous from a privacy,if not a legal, stand point (unless you explicitly mention such a situation in the EULA).

Either way, I'm excited about such technology and really liked the video. Nice one! :]
dominikgrolimund (January 18, 2008 at 12:34 pm)
we only see files that have been made public. all private / shared files we don't see and we can't encrypt, since your password never leaves your computer.