Pirate Software, week 4: Wuala

Wuala is a remarkable piece of software. It somewhat resembles Dropbox, which is a hugely successful product that lets you store files in the cloud. Lets review what Dropbox does first:

• All files you put in the special Dropbox directory on your computer gets copied to the cloud.
• You can install Dropbox on several computers, and the files will be in synch as long as they are connected to the net.
• 2 GB is free, you can get more by referring friends and colleagues to Dropbox until you get about 10 GB. You'll have to pay if you need more than that.
• In case your computer gets stolen or destroyed, all your files are safe. Just install Dropbox on a new computer, login, and all files are downloaded from the cloud.
• Dropbox is very well designed, works well, and can be installed on Macs, Windows, Linux, iPhones, iPads, Android, etc.
• You can turn off Dropbox, and your files will still be there in your Dropbox folder.
• You can put files in a public folder where they are accessible to anyone. For example, here is my resume. Whenever I change it on my computer, the changes can be seen by everyone, which is very handy.
• You can create a group of friends and share files in this group.

Dropbox has a few problems:

• It is not open source
• It does not encrypt your files all the way from your machine and out.

Wuala works exactly the same as Dropbox described above, with a few differences:

• It isn't completely open source, but some parts are.
• If you turn off Wuala, then your files aren't available since they can't be accessed unless unencrypted by the Wuala program, using the encryption keys on your computer.
• Wuala encrypts your files on your machine, so they are never readable to anyone else, not even Wuala employees. This is a crucial difference to Dropbox, where your files are encrypted while in transit to Dropbox, but then available unencrypted to Dropbox.
• 2 GB is free, but, you can trade up to 100 GB of your local hard disk for 100 GB of cloud storage. Wuala will copy encrypted files from other users onto your hard drive, and your encrypted files onto other Wuala users hard drives, forming a redundant cloud network. And if you have several computers connected to the same account and share local disk from all of them, then you are rewarded with cloud disk for all of it. If you need more than this, then you have to pay.
• Wuala works well with Linux, Mac and Windows, but the cross platform support isn't as good as for Dropbox.
• Wuala isn't really as easy to use as Dropbox, but some of that is on purpose, since they are dead serious about the privacy of your files.

If you are committed to 100% open source then neither Dropbox or Wuala is for you. I'd recommend Tahoe-LAFS, which is a piece of software I plan to talk about some other week.

Wuala is a Swiss company, so probably not as likely to yield to governments knocking on the door asking for information. Regardless, I recommend downloading their software, register an account and check it out.