What is Bitcasa?
Bitcasa is a start-up begun by former execs at Mastercard, VeriSign and Mozy and is the latest entrant to the cloud storage market.
What makes Bitcasa different is that the service offers you truly infinite storage, all for just $10 per month. In fact, when you add your first folder, you are told that you have over 500TB of remaining free space, and the start-up says that number is only there because Windows and Mac machines cannot display higher numbers.
How does Bitcasa offer unlimited storage?
The company’s CEO says it can offer unlimited storage, “because 60 percent of their data is identical.” Simply, when you “cloudify” a music track or movie, the chances are someone else has the same exact track or movie on their computer.
Bitcasa uses “patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques, and encryption” to identify duplicate files and therefore the company only keeps a couple, (or even one) of of the files in its servers. By doing so, the company can keep its costs significantly down and offer infinite storage to its users.
Is it safe?
Now that you understand how it works, the biggest question is whether the data is safe, and who (if anyone) can access it. Bitcasa says every upload is encrypted and protected on the server side, meaning no one but you can ever access it, including employees of the company or “snooping” media companies.
This is great for users who may be scared that anyone can search their personal files. Services like DropBox have admitted that employees are prohibited from accessing files, but are not blocked in any way. They may lose their jobs, but they could do so after they have taken all your pictures, for example.
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Result for: personal files
Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Darrell Issa, ranking member of the committee, and Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, sent a letter this week to government officials and to the head of Limewire, expressing their concerns about the potential risk to privacy and security caused by use of P2P networks.
Mark Gorton, chairman of The Lime Group, appeared before the committee almost two years ago. At the time he admitted he was shocked to learn about the sheer amount of confidential and private information that was accidentally (or intentionally) shared using the Limewire software, and vowed to make changes to the software to help prevent accidental sharing of information.
We’re not just talking about curriculum vitae word documents or other personal files common to most users, but some notable accidental P2P leaks are blueprints of Marine One, Social Security numbers, tax returns, and private medical records. “It appears that nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem,” they wrote to Gorton.
