[tahoe-dev] some questions about tahoe-lafs

[Greg Troxel]

Hideo Kuze <another.ghost.in.the.shell at gmail.com> writes:

> 1) which clouds are supported to act as nodes? (mega.co.nz? skydrive?
> gdrive? dropbox?)

none.  But a node (that runs the tahoe protocol) could store shares
(ciphertext) in a cloud storage service.

> 2) what was the motivation for requiring a gateway for accessing the files?
> Couldn't it be done only with a client?
> I ask this question because if you only required a client for accessing the
> data, you could access the data from your mobile (as in having only a
> single device). But it seems that as it is, you will always need a trusted
> computer running tahoe-lafs 24/7 --- which will be a problem if you're
> traveling.

There is no such requirement.

A client node speaks the tahoe protocol and can fetch shares and
reconstruct plaintext.

A gateway is a client node that additionally runs a web server.

In my opinion, the prevalance of gateways in tahoe culture is a serious
bug, and is due to several notions:

  failing to have first-class FUSE support so that tahoe would have the
  same interface as every other filesystem

  accomodating usage from computers that people don't want to install
  the client code on

  (this one I find extra perplexing) using tahoe to store web content,
  but making it available to people who don't use tahoe, and wanting to
  do so in a slightly decentralized way that doesn't really address any
  of the concerns of full decentralization
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