[cap-talk] ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Lofty-Atmospheric Filesystem, v1.5

Sat Aug 1 23:55:11 EDT 2009

List Moderator:  Please terminate this person's access to the list IMMEDIATELY, 
preferably BEFORE his runaway mailer fills EVERYBODY'S inbox with his "SURPRISE 
18 WHATEVER!" trash posts.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn" <zooko at zooko.com>
To: "General discussions concerning capability systems." 
<cap-talk at mail.eros-os.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2009 10:34 PM
Subject: [cap-talk] ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Lofty-Atmospheric Filesystem, v1.5

> Dear people of cap-talk:
>
> Please check out Tahoe-LAFS v1.5.  I'm hoping that the crypto-
> capability based access control scheme that is baked into Tahoe-LAFS
> will make it the natural answer to the current pressing concern of
> how to get the benefits of cloud storage without losing all control
> over the confidentiality and integrity of your files.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko
>
> The Tahoe-LAFS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of
> version 1.5 of Tahoe, the Lofty Atmospheric File System.
>
> Tahoe-LAFS is the first cloud storage technology which offers security
> and privacy in the sense that the cloud storage service provider itself
> can't read or alter your data. Here is the one-page explanation of
> its unique security and fault-tolerance properties:
>
> http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html
>
> This release is the successor to v1.4.1, which was released April 13,
> 2009 [1]. This is a major new release, improving the user interface and
> performance and fixing a few bugs, and adding ports to OpenBSD, NetBSD,
> ArchLinux, NixOS, and embedded systems built on ARM CPUs. See the NEWS
> file [2] for more information.
>
> In addition to the functionality of Tahoe-LAFS itself, a crop of related
> projects have sprung up to extend it and to integrate it into operating
> systems and applications.  These include frontends for Windows,
> Macintosh, JavaScript, and iPhone, and plugins for duplicity, bzr,
> Hadoop, and TiddlyWiki, and more. See the Related Projects page on the
> wiki [3].
>
>
> COMPATIBILITY
>
> Version 1.5 is fully compatible with the version 1 series of
> Tahoe-LAFS. Files written by v1.5 clients can be read by clients of all
> versions back to v1.0. v1.5 clients can read files produced by clients
> of all versions since v1.0.  v1.5 servers can serve clients of all
> versions back to v1.0 and v1.5 clients can use servers of all versions
> back to v1.0.
>
> This is the sixth release in the version 1 series. The version 1 series
> of Tahoe-LAFS will be actively supported and maintained for the
> forseeable future, and future versions of Tahoe-LAFS will retain the
> ability to read and write files compatible with Tahoe-LAFS v1.
>
> The version 1 series of Tahoe-LAFS is the basis of the consumer backup
> product from Allmydata, Inc. -- http://allmydata.com .
>
>
> WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
>
> With Tahoe-LAFS, you can distribute your filesystem across a set of
> servers, such that if some of them fail or even turn out to be
> malicious, the entire filesystem continues to be available. You can
> share your files with other users, using a simple and flexible access
> control scheme.
>
> We believe that the combination of erasure coding, strong encryption,
> Free/Open Source Software and careful engineering make Tahoe-LAFS safer
> than RAID, removable drive, tape, on-line backup or other Cloud storage
> systems.
>
> This software comes with extensive tests, and there are no known
> security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data integrity
> in typical use.  (For all currently known issues please see the
> known_issues.txt file [4].)
>
>
> LICENCE
>
> You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2
> or, at your option, any later version.  See the file "COPYING.GPL" [5]
> for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.
>
> You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public
> Licence, version 1 or, at your option, any later version.  (The
> Transitive Grace Period Public Licence has requirements similar to the
> GPL except that it allows you to wait for up to twelve months after you
> redistribute a derived work before releasing the source code of your
> derived work.) See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.html" [6] for the terms of
> the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.
>
> (You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence,
> at your option.)
>
>
> INSTALLATION
>
> Tahoe-LAFS works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, Solaris, *BSD, and
> probably most other systems.  Start with "docs/install.html" [7].
>
>
> HACKING AND COMMUNITY
>
> Please join us on the mailing list [8].  Patches are gratefully accepted
> -- the RoadMap page [9] shows the next improvements that we plan to make
> and CREDITS [10] lists the names of people who've contributed to the
> project.  The Dev page [11] contains resources for hackers.
>
>
> SPONSORSHIP
>
> Tahoe-LAFS was originally developed thanks to the sponsorship of
> Allmydata, Inc. [12], a provider of commercial backup services.
> Allmydata, Inc. created the Tahoe-LAFS project and contributed hardware,
> software, ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing
> several Tahoe-LAFS hackers and instructing them to spend part of their
> work time on this Free Software project).  Also they awarded customized
> t-shirts to hackers who found security flaws in Tahoe-LAFS (see
> http://hacktahoe.org ). After discontinuing funding of Tahoe-LAFS R&D in
> early 2009, Allmydata, Inc. has continued to provide servers, co-lo
> space and bandwidth to the open source project. Thank you to Allmydata,
> Inc. for their generous and public-spirited support.
>
> This is the second release of Tahoe-LAFS which was created solely as a
> labor of love by volunteers; developer time is no longer funded by
> allmydata.com (see [13] for details).
>
> Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
> on behalf of the Tahoe-LAFS team
>
> Special acknowledgment goes to Brian Warner, whose superb engineering
> skills and dedication are primarily responsible for the Tahoe
> implementation, and significantly responsible for the Tahoe design as
> well, not to mention most of the docs and tests. Tahoe-LAFS wouldn't
> exist without him.
>
> August 1, 2009
> Boulder, Colorado, USA
>
> P.S.  Just kidding about that acronym.  "LAFS" actually stands for
> "Lightweight Authorization File System".  Or possibly for
> "Least-Authority File System".  There is no truth to the rumour that it
> actually stands for "Long-lived Axe-tolerant File System".
>
> [1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=3853
> [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/NEWS?rev=4033
> [3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/RelatedProjects
> [4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/docs/known_issues.txt
> [5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/COPYING.GPL
> [6] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.html
> [7] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html
> [8] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
> [9] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap
> [10] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=4035
> [11] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
> [12] http://allmydata.com
> [13] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-March/001461.html
>
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