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Permanent.org – Nonprofit, secure cloud storage

353 points by c1c2c3 6y ago

nickcw 6y ago
Anyone want to guess how long it takes for an issue to be made for rclone to support it ;-) Seriously though I couldn't see a public API - can anyone see it? (Rclone author)
pixxel 6y ago
What does the product look like, how does it work, features, etc.? I see from the live donation list that people are throwing money at it. Am I missing something, has someone trusted/influential tweeted this out?
jrochkind1 6y ago
So, there was an earlier attempt at a preservation storage system with a "pay up front to fund perpetual storage", called the "Digital Preservation Network". It came out of the library and archive sector, and focused on institutional customers -- libraries and archives with long-term archival/preservation needs. It was also non-profit. It of course seems attractive, if you really want to ensure long-term preservation, to set up a financial model that can somehow do this independent of the risk of the business continuity and budgets of the original depositors. And for cultural heritage institutions -- in the business of preserving incrementally more stuff every year -- it's a big advantage to budgeting if you can budget per GB you add to preservation storage up front, and never have to pay for it again -- so your yearly budget for preservation storage is just based on number of NEW TB's you are adding, instead of constantly going up with total number of TB's preserved, and thus this portion of your budget stays pretty constant instead of ever-increasing. However, the DPN folded in Dec 2018, after fewer than 5 years of operation. It did not attain financial sustainability. (So all those up-front fees did not end up paying for perpetual storage after all). You can read more about it's shutdown here: https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-to-cease-operations/ https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-t... https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-preservation-network-disband/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-prese... This new attempt is focusing on consumer/retail rather than institutional customers. A different scale of market (and by their suggested pricing tiers, aiming for much less storage per-customer). And there is at any rate no reason to think just because one effort failed another will have to. Not every try ends up at the same outcome. But I'd think the story of that effort should hopefully be informative for this new one. I think it's not a trivial thing to succeed with this sort of business model. I'd find it a bit more reassuring if they were like "Here are people who have tried this before, and why we think we will succeed." Although the answer to that might just be "an endowment model". I think the permanent.org website is engaging in a bit of marketing slight of hand when they say "We are leveraging the same funding models used by museums, libraries and universities for centuries." -- making it seem like this is a solved problem, we're just doing what's worked for centuries for libraries and museums! There's really nothing specific to libraries, museums, or universities about "endowments". Non-profits of all sorts would love an endowment. (and maybe some for-profits somehow?) I know of few libraries, museums or universities whose entire operating budget is paid out of an endowment. Most institutions even with endowments (and not all do) need to seek ongoing funding or revenue for operations in addition to the endowment. Only the wealthiest even approach it. Generally there is a correlation between how much of operating budget is endowed and how old the endowment is. "For centuries" indeed -- those institutions with the biggest endowments generally have centuries-old endowments, created by extremely wealthy people long ago. I think there are probably few, if any, examples of recently-created endowments funding all or most of the operating budget of non-tiny institutions. Let alone endowments created by aggregating fees from "customers" paying for service, instead of wealthy benefactors. And of course, there is the different business here too, the need to be able to predict ongoing operational costs not just of hardware, and things like electricity and space and networking, but of course the staff time that we all know is a non-trivial component of most IT projects. And the need to be doing it competently, with effects on both budget and success at not losing data! I think it's rather too hand-wavy to imply (and i think that is defintely meant to be the implication) "Oh, this is the model that libraries and museums have used for centuries to do similar stuff, so of course it's proven!" That said, the model is certainly attractive if it works! It is hard to imagine ensuring very-long-term preservation with a business model that requires the content-donors to keep paying perpetually. (also a non-profit model seems appropriate to me for very-long-term preservation). (I am a librarian/software engineer whose work includes archival materials and digital preservation).
- hosh 6y ago
  This is probably the most well-thought-out comment here. It isn't a knee-jerk "it isn't permanent", "the tech won't work", "the funding won't work". I'm not looking at this from the lens of an archivist, though I think that is important too. What do you think about the role of IPFS and FileCoin in digital preservation? Is there a role?
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    Thanks! I don't personally think very much of one, but i'm pretty down on blockchain in general. (Also not an expert at it, only have a surface-level IT guy understanding of it). I could see some role in using blockchain to keep track of _checksums_ of preserved files (nothing in the chain except the cryptographic digests of files stored elsewhere), as a way to have a hard-to-tamper-with multi-party-decentralized preserved historical record that a particular file was stored at a particular time, and has not changed since (whether from error or mal-intent). Just a record of what was stored when, not otherwise involved in the storage itself. If you want decentralized multi-party storage (which is cool, but I'm not sure it's necessary), there are protocols for that which don't require, or IMO have any reason to benefit from, blockchain technology. Again just my own not super well-informed opinion, and I'm hardly a blockchain expert (being pretty suspicious of it).
    - hosh 6y ago
      Awesome, thank you for engaging :-) Let me see if my quick run-down here might spark something interesting. IPFS itself is not a blockchain. It is a piece of distributed infrastructure that allows people to share and store content in a distributed way. There are parts of it that are similar to the old torrent protocol. The main thing with IPFS is that the people who care about keeping a particular piece of data alive can "pin" it locally on their servers. Everyone accessing it will query other people who have pieces of that content -- just like with bittorrent. IPFS has no monetization or blockchain. FileCoin is the blockchain. It was intended to be the blockchain run on top of IPFS, although it may work on other content storage/transfer schemes. The idea with that blockchain is built around "proof of storage". That is, I can request someone store some bit of data for me, and you can offer to store it in exchange for something of value. Among one of the immediate things I wanted to apply IPFS to is this archive of digital material that contains a knowledge base for our current technology base. I have since lost track of that knowledge base. It was designed as a CD you can burn, and get all sorts of information. The idea was to preserve this information in case of something catastrophic happening to our civilization. One thing about IPFS, and perhaps FileCoin, is that it allows for decentralized knowledge bases. Stuff that could be administrated at a local, community level, and yet federated with many communities. An example: gardening. With the pandemic, there had been a lot of people interested in gardening for the first time. However, how you plant, what you plant, how you manage those things are depended upon local conditions. I live in the low desert, and what I need to do for here is different from my friend who live in the high desert, or in the SE US.
longtermd 6y ago
"a free Gigabyte" doesn't catch anyone in the US since 1999. Try "10 Terabytes" :). Few people will use all of it at once, anyway.
webmaven 6y ago
This seems interesting to me... the one question I have (that others here haven't asked, anyway), is whether 'permanent' means 'imutable', or if I can replace files with newer versions? My use-case is a large shared ebook library where I sometimes replace files with improved conversions (updated cover art, smaller files, improved CSS or standards compliance, etc.).
CrowGrandFather 6y ago
I feel like everyone is ignoring the obvious elephant in the room. The insane price model. $10 for a gig? 1 GB? $1000 for 100GB? Are you insane? I can buy an 8TB for $120. I could have 70TB of storage for the price of your 100Gb. If I bought 2 HDDs up front, had a raid with duplication set up, and replaced 1 HDD every 3 years (imagining one failed every 3 years) I would still have almost 30 years of storage which is longer than you'll exist with this insane price model.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  Manpower costs money too.
- carapace 6y ago
  It's not that insane if they can really deliver (and I don't see a technical reason why not.) The real question is whether or not they compete with Archive.org, in the sense of sharing the same ecological niche. Archive.org does a great job but everything there is public, so maybe that's the differentiator?
poleguy 6y ago
I love the idea of a not-for-profit tech company... I don't _yet_ trust _this_ company: fancy, connected, rich people's faces on the website may inspire trust in some, but for me, I see that they only paid for the domain name for one year, and haven't registered the two common misspellings listed on wikipedia. I'll wait 50-100 years and then judge them. If they don't have confidence in their own plan beyond the one year of their DNS, why should I? Are they just fishing for $100K and then they'll possibly make some real plans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_misspellings/P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_miss... From: https://lookup.icann.org/lookup https://lookup.icann.org/lookup Name: permanent.org Registry Expiration: 2020-06-11 18:55:23 UTC (First post on news.ycombinator.com)
- rsanek 6y ago
  Who do you plan to trust for the intervening 50-100 years?
  - brianpan 6y ago
    Or, who from 50 years ago is still around to be trusted? The list to choose from is short. IBM, HP, GE, TI...
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      What's to say that the new CEO of one of these companies wouldn't pull a Google Reader and axe the service, for the sake of consolidating product lines? Or that the companies themselves wouldn't be merged?
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Or, who from 50 years ago is still around to be trusted? The list to choose from is short. IBM, HP, GE, TI... Pretty sure there's no shareholder value in paying to preserve data for someone who's not paying fees and is not going to sue because they're dead. Those companies (or any for-profit entity) absolutely cannot be trusted to provide a service like this; their profit motive means they'll cheat, sooner or later.
dorfsmay 6y ago
Wouldn't that money better spent on archive.com? This site will only cares to people who know about it and care enough to use it, while archive.org fossilize every site out there, from simplistic 10 line html file to wordpress sites to news websites.
miki123211 6y ago
Nothing is really permanent if there's an organization in control, particularly one subject to U.S. law. we can't predict whether in i.e. ten years, the U.S. won't get a law requiring companies to pass everything through automatic copyright filters. Those tend to be unreliable, so this is just one of the many ways our content may be lost. The only network that could provide a reasonable guarantee of permanence would be a decentralized one, something like sia, but where the owner can pay for i.e. 100 years and lock the data in, so that no one can actually delete them.
lokl 6y ago
What prevents a disgruntled employee from deleting or altering the data?
pgcj_poster 6y ago
> We're bringing permanence to everyone. Your precious digital content is always private until you're ready to make it public I store private data on my own hard drives, and when I want to make it public in the long-term, I upload it to Archive.org, which for now I have more confidence in than this service. The only time I see needing something like this is when I want something to be public after I die but no sooner, like a diary or secret confession or something.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Permanent until it's gone
zwaps 6y ago
This would be genuinely interesting to me, as I use cloud backup to store private, but not secret data. That is, I'm interested in not having my family photos and personal files mined. To make it useful, I'd also want the service to handle encryption in a way that doesn't require me to self-encrypt and upload huge files all the time or anything of that sort. As entitled as that may sound: If you want my money, you'd have to provide apps that integrate with the usual OS's, encrypting the data locally and seamlessly. Now, they say they will use amazon for storage. That's a tough sell until I see what's the actual program looks like. I MIGHT be willing to trust a non-profit which existence is linked to ethical behavior. I will certainly not trust amazon without doing my own encryption. And if I feel like I gotta do that, I am not paying for an intermediate.
earthboundkid 6y ago
The Shrine of Ise in Japan is rebuilt every twenty years. A construction company with a family history going back for centuries builds a copy on lot 2, then they tear down lot 1 and wait another twenty years. It’s been preserved like this for over a thousand years. This is the only way to do something “permanently”.
- tunk 6y ago
  Tell that to the Romans :)
robotbikes 6y ago
This looks interesting and seems to have some known people on the board of directors such as Stephen Wolfram but I couldn't find pricing or much details as to how it functions. Permanent data storage is a big promise and a non-profit model could work if the people involved are commited.
- c1c2c3 6y ago
  You pay $10 per Gb but this is a one off payment rather than annual. The money is supposed to go into an endowment that will pay for the storage costs long term.
  - karamanolev 6y ago
    Aren't one-off payments to cover running costs provably unsustainable? It relies on continuous growth to support old users. I personally would want to rely on a service that might close at any minute because it stopped growing.
    - Gaelan 6y ago
      The idea is that they'd form an endowment. So they put your $10 in some sort of relatively safe investment, and every year it grows by, say, 1%. So then they have 10¢/year/GB to spend on storage costs.
    - djmobley 6y ago
      Not if you are able to charge enough, and reinvest the funds such that low-risk investment returns will cover the cost. Combine that with underlying costs (storage, data transfer, computing power) which are trending downward and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.
    - thruflo 6y ago
      Money makes money. Say they raise enough to earn interest on their capital. Say they make 1% interest per year. Storing a GB costs $10. 1% of that is 10c. How much does it cost to store a GB for a year? Amazon charge ~1c/m for infrequent access and 0.4c/m for Glacier. So somewhere between 12c and 5c a year.
jstanley 6y ago
> Our promise to you. > We will never mine your data, claim your copyright or invade your privacy. That sounds great and all, but I don't want your word, I want cryptographic guarantees. Are there any? EDIT: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... doesn't mention anything, so I guess not.
- hosh 6y ago
  Based on who is on their governing board, I think one of the use-cases here is to preserve files you would want to pass on to your descendents. You wouldn't necessarily want to have it cryptographically secured with E2EE. I have old 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, full of software written by my father during the course of developing his dissertation. He died several years ago. My original plan was to take whole disk images of it and stash it in the commercial cloud, ... but I'm probably going to stash a copy on permanent.org instead. I have no idea if my descendents would care about it. However, it is a memorial that (if the foundation does what it promises to do), not something I would have to do upkeep after I die.
- tobylane 6y ago
  What’s a cryptographic guarantee?
  - jstanley 6y ago
    OK, "guarantee" is a bit strong. But for example, if the keys are generated client-side and they never see the key, like on tarsnap, then I wouldn't have to take them at their word that they totally promise not to look at my files.
    - Proven 6y ago
      Or you could encrypt your data if you're so concerned about it
      - maqp 6y ago
djmobley 6y ago
I gather they’re going for an endowment model, and the pricing is reassuringly expensive. That said, storage is one of those things that feels as though it should be charged on a subscription basis.
- eitland 6y ago
  I can really like this. A while ago one of my cards was stolen and I got a new one. It took a month before I realized my contact lens subscription had stopped. Luckily contact lenses are easy to get and I try to keep some extra around as well. A bigger problem however was 20 or so years ago was that when I was drafted and I suddenly couldn't check my email for a while and after 14 days I lost access to - my old address that everyone knew - all my mail - and most of my contacts mail addresses Fixing that is a lot harder and I would be happy to pay a premium to be sure that some things stay around even if my house burns down with my NAS inside while I'm in hospital and my CC is cancelled while I'm unable to notice it. BTW: feel free to post your suggestions. My best ideas are to ship encrypted disks to one of my brothers/sisters and parts of the passwords to two others In case I lose them or in case I die and someone needs wants access to my accounts.
  - notechback 6y ago
    Why the encryption? If I store data with my family there's two kinds: the kind I encrypt because I don't want anyone else to access it and the kind that I don't encrypt because of I want them to be able to access it. Adding a fallible model with several people holding access might end up leaving your data inaccessible...
    - eitland 6y ago
      Good point. - What if the disks are stolen? - Or hidden in a wall and forgotten only to be found by the next owner? Weirder things have happened. - Or uploaded to the public internet by accident. Warning: (hopefully)[0] wild hyperbole ahead. While I don't have much to hide (today) who knows about the future. I'd rather not want to see my photoalbum indexed to death by clearview and results sold to a future Nazi/Communist/Peta regime who'll use the face database to track down my grandchildren to punish them because their grandfather hated Nazis/wasn't exactly too fond of Communism either/ate meat and owned a rabbit. - also for anything in the second category I guess the correct solution is an online server + encrypted backups with passwords available for everyone. Or just use backblaze or something and hope I don't become unavailable until some of my kids or their kids are old enough to become sysadmins ;-) [0]: but who would have thought 100 years ago that lists of people's faith would be used 20 years later to systematically track down people not based on what crimes they had done but rather based on heritage only to round them up and kill them?
chinathrow 6y ago
The pricing scheme is neat but for me irrelevant. What I want to know if this uses any form of zero-knowledge cryptography features or not. I guess not - since it can pull data directly from FB.
- scolvin 6y ago
  If you want to encrypt your data before you upload it, surely you have that option? In fact that really the only way it could work, if they did the encryption and have your back the key, you'd have to trust them that they're not keeping it too. I can understand why they don't want to add a big barrier to entry by requiring that.
yuppiepuppie 6y ago
Im getting a connection not secure warning on firefox 75.0. Seems like an ssl issue on the site.
baal80spam 6y ago
> Termination > We may terminate or suspend access to our Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms. Is this normal? So I guess this is not a good place to store a copy of my encrypted password file? Or am I misunderstanding and it means that they can terminate my account only if/when I breach the Terms?
- guug 6y ago
  Good catch. If they can remove my files for any reason, how can I trust them not to delete my files? This clause does not make any sense for a service like this.
- sleepychu 6y ago
  > We may terminate or suspend access to our Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever Pretty clear cut, any reason whatsoever.
- red_admiral 6y ago
  I think that's pretty normal and is meant to stop rules-lawyering when you do ban someone.
  - gwd 6y ago
    > I think that's pretty normal and is meant to stop rules-lawyering when you do ban someone. Which is fine for a free service, but is going to be a pretty big drag on the number of people willing to "donate" $1000.
  - OrangeMango 6y ago
    People who give money to museum and university endowments typically attach conditions that are very much meant to be litigated if they are ever violated. The recipient expects this. They don't make promises to donors, they sign contracts that force them to use the money the way the donor wants them to. These terms and conditions are ridiculous if they want to be compared to museums and universities.
janwillemb 6y ago
> Our goal is permanence Nothing is ever permanent. I've seen so many services come and go, that I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. My 25+ years of data is on a local NAS and on an offline copy at a trusted location.
- gwd 6y ago
  > I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. I'm quite skeptical about relying on VC-funded or publicly-traded cloud services. An actual non-profit could be a lot more reliable: as long as expenses are less than income, there's no pressure to grow, and it could go on forever. The big thing I'm skeptical about is growth in data needs. 5GiB free iCloud was more than enough 5 years ago; when I upgraded my iPhone, suddenly all my videos take 8x as much space. $10 for 1GiB forever storage sounds OK now, but what happens in 20 years when a single photo is 500MiB?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    If you need more storage, buy some more when you need it. The endowment price should be correspondingly lower. An interesting side effect is that people are calculating the endowment interest in this thread (a hard thing to do when rates are near-zero and there is a real risk of negative rates in the next 50 years), while the big factor is that storage prices drop dramatically over time. Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
    - curryst 6y ago
      > Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now. That's a good point, but I don't think in their favor. At the rate that they're charging, you could prepay for 36 years of storage on S3 (neglecting bandwidth charges, which I know are substantial). Compounded with your point that data storage costs are tanking, I would actually expect $10 to go even further. Which is also not to mention that they're planning on paying for their costs on interest from their endowment. Turns out I can also put my money in something that generates a profit. I just don't see the point. They seem like they're trying to build S3 but without any profits, which at best makes them a marginally cheaper option, and at worst, a more expensive and less well featured S3.
gazzini 6y ago
They chose a 1-time payment model (which funds an interest-generating endowment), which seems a lot weirder than a subscription. This actually makes sense -- if the goal is long-term set-it-and-forget-it, it solves the problem of getting a new credit card every few years & forgetting to change this service. It also eliminates any recurring payment-processing fees. The back-of-the-napkin math checks out: accounting for storage, data-transfer, and business overhead, if they pay around $0.20 / GB / year, and they charge $10, then with 0 interest they would still have your files for 50 years, which is probably longer than your children will have your password to this service. I still wouldn't trust it -- I have a pavlovian response to the combination of "permanence" and "give all your data to this new internet service". Maybe it's irrational here, but still, this product is at the wrong layer of abstraction for me personally :)
- hosh 6y ago
  Flip the script in a different way: How many people have their Geocities site pulled from them? I think this foundation's mission is great. I'm not expecting things to be "permanent". I already know that there is no such thing as anything that is permanent, including our lives and our health. If there is no such thing as absolute permanence in anything, then I can throw that idea out and look at the rest of what they are offering. To me, it is irrational to think that just because someone _doesn't_ say their stuff is "permanent" doesn't mean you can trust them as well. What I see in this foundation is something that supports the internet that is not controlled by Big Tech. I think about my children and where we are going in our society, and I think that is something that I value. I valued it enough to have already pledged a donation for the price of two latte.
  - derision 6y ago
    Geocities never claimed to be permanent
    - ta1771 6y ago
      Good thing.
- 6y ago
FBISurveillance 6y ago
They don't seem to mention anything about egress/bandwidth costs. Is that unlimited or is there some sort of vague "fair use" policy?
- rechristened 6y ago
  From their Manifesto[1]: > While the endowment model of the Permanent Legacy Foundation is designed to keep yourmaterials into perpetuity, it is not designed to be a high-traffic heavy-bandwidth hosting site.With the exception of approved nonprofit partners, we do not allow references of embedded15Permanent Legacy Foundation Manifesto materials on external sites for, and we must reserve the right to throttle or block abusive traffic [1] https://www.permanent.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Permanent-Legacy-Foundation-Manifesto-v2018-10-05.pdf https://www.permanent.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Permane...
sslnx 6y ago
Similar service recently emerged in Russia. An eternal server for $150. https://vdsina.ru/pricing/eternal-server https://vdsina.ru/pricing/eternal-server
- Aeolun 6y ago
  That sounds like an eternal server up to 30 months. I don’t think that pricing works out there.
pjc50 6y ago
"Permanent" and "free tier" sounds like a particularly terrible combination. The market failure here is the classic "market for lemons" problem. Too many people have been burned by "forever" pricing that turned out to mean "a few years", or the bankruptcy or acquishutdown of a company. So any new entrant will face intense skepticism, no matter how sincerely they are trying. So far the only permanent pricing that's worked for me is my grandfathered permanent Pinboard account, and that has a bus factor of one and a bit.
- zzzcpan 6y ago
  Storage is suited for it though. Most data, and especially photos, stops being accessed after some time and could stop consume bandwidth and electricity given properly designed infrastructure. Not that there is even a need to keep it forever, removing data not accessed in say five years or a decade is likely to still meet realistic durability guarantees any organization could provide, if it ever comes to that, which might be the case once they run out of physical space. Because of that such service can be offered as a "forever" service as long as the rate of new payments is enough for running it. But this is also where it gets tricky, the price they are shooting for right now is crazy unrealistic, it's at least an order of magnitude higher than competitive range, so they won't have many customers who can multiply and won't be able to attract enough customers to sustain it.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > removing data not accessed in say five years or a decade is likely to still meet realistic durability guarantees any organization could provide This is exactly the sort of policy that a "permanent" storage facility must promise never to enact. The whole point of something like this is for stuff you don't need regularly but want to keep forever. Every year or so I log into the dropbox account that has a copy of my wedding photos in. I don't need to look at them, but I want to keep them.
x4j91 6y ago
The non-profit take on this is new, however, there are for profit cloud services that offer similar one-time payment "lifetime" plans. Pcloud for example charges a one-time lifetime 0.35 cents per GB, and their marketing language states: "We have defined a Lifetime account as 99 years or the lifetime of the account holder, whichever is shorter." Some thoughts on this: It probably works better at scale if you control the storage infrastructure (to control the costs). If you are reselling Amazon, and 10 years from now they either raise the price significantly, or discontinue the storage you are using, how would you maintain the service without new (renewal) cash flow. To solve this later in life you would want to / need to migrate the data to newer better more cost efficient storage. There are large scale costs associated with doing this. Dropbox eventually moved away from Amazon for these reasons, which provided balance sheet savings but it gets fuzzy when factoring the real world costs of owning and maintaining large scale storage infrastructure. Offering 1 GB free and file sharing between accounts is an invitation for nefarious activities, and it seems like the only way they could manage that would involve breaking one of Permanent.org's core tenets ... Someone will have to look at the files to police it. Or the free 1 GB becomes a liability, not a loss leader. How will they do this? Once they have your money and a few years have passed there might be an incentive for the organization to gradually degrade the service. Make it more and more difficult to use, in an effort to keep costs down. And 10 years later when they lose interest in the project, what would stop them from selling the whole thing (cashing out) to a for profit firm ..... Looking at you .ORG / ICANN?
- dexterdog 6y ago
  FYI PCloud is also half that price ($350) at a 2TB commitment.
oefrha 6y ago
At $10/GB I’d rather get redundant 4-10TB hard drives every five years than trust permenant.org to be around in 50 years.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  At $10/Gb I’d use some CD-R media
  - SamuelAdams 6y ago
    Nah CD-R's only last 10 years at most. Get some LTO tape.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  And that price would be a fraction of the price the previous 5 years each time you did it.
chx 6y ago
So Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB per month for storage. Let's see what are my options here, I could prepay 166 years at an unknown company with an unclear record of operations (I see the governing board is full of rather famous people but still -- that's not ops) and financials. Or I could just keep going with a company which has proven over 13 years it is solid both ops and financials wise.
- 418tpot 6y ago
  Backblaze B2 also requires a verified mobile phone number in order to use it - even if you've already given them a credit card. I would love there to be an option available at Backblaze B2 pricing, without a massive invasion of privacy. Right now I'm using Linode's Object storage, which is priced at $0.02/GB per month which is still reasonably priced for my needs.
  - chx 6y ago
    pvacodes.com
- dexterdog 6y ago
  Not to mention you could have a fund that pays the backblaze bill and as that monthly price dwindles over time the interest on your money would pay it in perpetuity. If something like permanent.org is setup intelligently they can even have a plan for a backblaze demise (god forbid) and use the fund to migrate to another provider(s) in that case.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > Not to mention you could have a fund that pays the backblaze bill and as that monthly price dwindles over time the interest on your money would pay it in perpetuity. Assuming we're talking about storage in perpetuity without the need for maintenance, the fund would need someone trusted to administer it. I personally wish there was an inexpensive, trusted place for me to deposit a large sum of money, and have it automatically paid to service providers to maintain my domain/hosting/online identity in perpetuity, or until my deposit/endowment runs out. This sounds like what I want, only just for data.
Springtime 6y ago
Interestingly there was another site with an identical concept posted a number of years ago, which had a very simple website (teal background and virtually unstyled text IIRC). I remember it causing comments to be skeptical partly for the barebones site alone. Looking at Permanent.org's archive.org results it doesn't appear to be the same site though which makes me wonder how many other sites have tried this.
Aeolun 6y ago
I guess it costs me nothing to try this. Lets see how permanent it is after 1-2 years.
corobo 6y ago
I'm not a huge fan of their "What We Do" page if I'm honest. Aside from the title the first thing you read is "The Democratization of Permanence" - from my probably dumb, mostly mainstream with a bit of tech self this just screams "You're gonna need your thinking cap on for this one" Can't you just say "we host files and it costs like 50 bucks a year" or whatever you actually do? Once you've done that you can whip out your thesaurus and put whatever you want on the page, just answer the question first.
aledthemathguy 6y ago
hackernews is the roastme version of digital beings.
aledthemathguy 6y ago
what about these guys: https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://siasky.net/ https://siasky.net/
brainlessdev 6y ago
Off-topic. There's a typo on some of the marketing copy: "A new paridigm".
cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron. And the fact that the people who run this operation don't realize this means this initiative is doomed. These people use museum endowment as an analogy, but especially judging from that analogy I don't think they have any idea how this thing works. Storing someone else's data forever is completely different from how museum is run. The analogy is so ridiculous that it's not even funny. Where this analogy may apply is sites like Waybackmachine, because they're at least doing it for the greater good. But I'm pretty sure these guys will throw away some random guy's private file archive the moment they run out of money. Normally I'm all for silly experiments that come from ignorance, and I'm fine with various consumer startups that come and go along with their user data, because sometimes this ignorance leads to success. But in this case these people are playing with someone else's data AND asking for money, and claiming to store these forever in my view is no different from a scam artist. Intentional or not, this to me is no different from a scam. I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical.
- cycomanic 6y ago
  What has a profit motive to do with permanent? Why (provided it doesn't work) would it it work it if it was for profit, but not if it wasn't? It seems you have some political beef with this being a non-profit.
- rsync 6y ago
  "I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical." Luckily, those are not your only two choices - there are cloud storage providers that are simultaneously privacy minded[1], technically sophisticated[2], and honest about their business practices[3]. [1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html [3] https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron. Nonprofit mainly means that they're not a company beholden to shareholders, and that they can't be sold or acquired.
olah_1 6y ago
I’m bullish on Sia. If there can just be a simple way to obtain the stupid crypto currency...
seemslegit 6y ago
Let's see. A non-profit, charging up-front and touting affiliation of famous people in unexplained capacity and showcasing use cases based on human interest stories of finely tuned social relevance. Grift sense intensifies.
tgtweak 6y ago
Math is roughly $500 for 50GB of storage in perpetuity. I think you could essentially replicate this by putting the $500 in a high interest savings account paying blackblaze from that and you'd have about ~100GB worth of storage on that setup today. Over time that ratio should get better.
- rswail 6y ago
  Where is this "high interest" savings account of which you speak?
  - osamagirl69 6y ago
    Take your pick https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/banking/high-yield-online-savings-accounts https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/banking/high-yield-online-sa... I assume that he was running the calculations for the blackblaze B2 service which is $.06/GB/year for storage, so at 1.6% APR on your $500 principal that works out to over 100GB
    - tgtweak 6y ago
      Yeah that's the number I used.
jetrink 6y ago
They compare themselves to museums, libraries and universities, but maybe the better analogy would be a graveyard: you pay once for a small amount of storage that is yours forever (or at least until the nearby airport needs to add a runway.)
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  Even that is far from adequate analogy if you think about the economics behind these things. Buying a graveyard is essentially buying a piece of land (and maybe some very little amount of ongoing maintenance cost) A web storage is not only for storing on a hard drive because unless you can reliably read from it, it means nothing. And THIS costs a lot of money, for maintenance and ongoing innovation to keep the costs down. If storing someone else's data for free at scale was such an easy problem, none of the web startups would be going down.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > Buying a graveyard is essentially buying a piece of land (and maybe some very little amount of ongoing maintenance cost) If one thinks further, they'll also want to plan for the possibility of state-enforced exhumation or eminent domain, among other things.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
I guess my biggest question is how do you upload data? Through the web browser? Desktop client? Can I use RClone or rsync or an SSH / SFTP connection? For people with more than 10 GB of data, using CLI tools will make integrating with your product much easier.
- rsync 6y ago
  "Can I use RClone or rsync or an SSH / SFTP connection?" I think there's a cloud storage provider that lets you use any tool you want over SSH ... including rclone and borg ... It's not coming to me ... on the tip of my tongue ...
  - SanchoPanda 6y ago
    Rsync.net?
kerkeslager 6y ago
Some feedback: it's really unclear what your mission is. Your "what we do" section does not illuminate what you do: > This is our mission – to preserve and provide perpetual access to the digital legacy of all people for the historical and educational benefit of future generations. Okay, if that's your mission, how does "secure cloud" come into that? How will future generations benefit from my data if it's secure? Do "future generations" include the present NSA and advertisers? What's your actual use case? There are a lot of ways this could be good or bad, and without some clarity people are going to (perhaps correctly) assume the worst (as is evident in this thread).
- eganist 6y ago
  You're defining "secure" as meaning "confidential," which is understandable though not entirely accurate. At its simplest and most abstract, information security also includes integrity and availability. I'm oversimplifying it, but hopefully you see where I'm getting at. integrity i.e. ensuring that data received, changed, and removed is exactly as expected and accurate per the requirements for the data over the lifecycle of the data. availability i.e. ensuring that the data is accessible/usable for the use cases intended. That said, confidentiality could also be relevant for a system of truth such as this one. There may well be certain data elements that one might want to restrict e.g. only to people who share genetic history with an ancestor. (as an example) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Key_concepts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Key_conce... if it helps. --- edit2: security (confidentiality) in permanent.org elaborated: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-...
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Confidentiality is most of what people are thinking about when they consider the security of cloud storage systems.
    - eganist 6y ago
      Admittedly they've done a poor job talking about it on their front page. But for what its worth, they talk about security of data in accessible (albeit lacking) lay terms here: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... Not known to me yet is whether these claims have been validated.
muxl 6y ago
Reading about this I was reminded of this blog post by Backblaze when they announced they were raising their prices. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pricing-change/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pri... Backblaze does do more than "just store data" but that is their core business and operational concern. Just glancing through this it's easy to see that just retaining data at scale is difficult and expensive. > By making this decision [to raise prices] now, we are ensuring we can continue to offer unlimited backup and keep improving our Computer Backup service. I'm doubtful that this organization could generate enough passive income through an endowment to sustain itself. They do have a chart on endowment growth relative to storage growth. I wonder if they've hit the point where the endowment return is greater than their total expenses yet. A one-time-payment like this would seem more possible if there were any restrictions on who's data to back up and how much. You can't just look at the interest of a one-time payment and say "yup that pays for storage on those bytes indefinitely" because for every byte of storage someone paid for there might be many more that are used for free.
driverdan 6y ago
Who runs and manages this service? The board looks good but it doesn't list the management team or any employees.
- kam 6y ago
  Their IRS form 990 names three directors, an exec director, a CTO, and an engineer as of 2018. https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/473017917_201812_990_2020012417063808.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/473017917_201812_990_... Only one of those people, Dean Drako, is also listed on permanent.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako The address on the permanent.org contact page and the Form 990 matches one of his other companies.
ineedasername 6y ago
Claiming that any digital service is "permanent" (even in a 10 to 20 year time frame) is quite a bold claim to make.

353 points by c1c2c3 6y ago

Anyone want to guess how long it takes for an issue to be made for rclone to support it ;-) Seriously though I couldn't see a public API - can anyone see it? (Rclone author)

pixxel 6y ago

What does the product look like, how does it work, features, etc.? I see from the live donation list that people are throwing money at it. Am I missing something, has someone trusted/influential tweeted this out?

jrochkind1 6y ago

So, there was an earlier attempt at a preservation storage system with a "pay up front to fund perpetual storage", called the "Digital Preservation Network". It came out of the library and archive sector, and focused on institutional customers -- libraries and archives with long-term archival/preservation needs. It was also non-profit. It of course seems attractive, if you really want to ensure long-term preservation, to set up a financial model that can somehow do this independent of the risk of the business continuity and budgets of the original depositors. And for cultural heritage institutions -- in the business of preserving incrementally more stuff every year -- it's a big advantage to budgeting if you can budget per GB you add to preservation storage up front, and never have to pay for it again -- so your yearly budget for preservation storage is just based on number of NEW TB's you are adding, instead of constantly going up with total number of TB's preserved, and thus this portion of your budget stays pretty constant instead of ever-increasing. However, the DPN folded in Dec 2018, after fewer than 5 years of operation. It did not attain financial sustainability. (So all those up-front fees did not end up paying for perpetual storage after all). You can read more about it's shutdown here: https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-to-cease-operations/ https://duraspace.org/the-digital-preservation-network-dpn-t... https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-preservation-network-disband/ https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/13/digital-prese... This new attempt is focusing on consumer/retail rather than institutional customers. A different scale of market (and by their suggested pricing tiers, aiming for much less storage per-customer). And there is at any rate no reason to think just because one effort failed another will have to. Not every try ends up at the same outcome. But I'd think the story of that effort should hopefully be informative for this new one. I think it's not a trivial thing to succeed with this sort of business model. I'd find it a bit more reassuring if they were like "Here are people who have tried this before, and why we think we will succeed." Although the answer to that might just be "an endowment model". I think the permanent.org website is engaging in a bit of marketing slight of hand when they say "We are leveraging the same funding models used by museums, libraries and universities for centuries." -- making it seem like this is a solved problem, we're just doing what's worked for centuries for libraries and museums! There's really nothing specific to libraries, museums, or universities about "endowments". Non-profits of all sorts would love an endowment. (and maybe some for-profits somehow?) I know of few libraries, museums or universities whose entire operating budget is paid out of an endowment. Most institutions even with endowments (and not all do) need to seek ongoing funding or revenue for operations in addition to the endowment. Only the wealthiest even approach it. Generally there is a correlation between how much of operating budget is endowed and how old the endowment is. "For centuries" indeed -- those institutions with the biggest endowments generally have centuries-old endowments, created by extremely wealthy people long ago. I think there are probably few, if any, examples of recently-created endowments funding all or most of the operating budget of non-tiny institutions. Let alone endowments created by aggregating fees from "customers" paying for service, instead of wealthy benefactors. And of course, there is the different business here too, the need to be able to predict ongoing operational costs not just of hardware, and things like electricity and space and networking, but of course the staff time that we all know is a non-trivial component of most IT projects. And the need to be doing it competently, with effects on both budget and success at not losing data! I think it's rather too hand-wavy to imply (and i think that is defintely meant to be the implication) "Oh, this is the model that libraries and museums have used for centuries to do similar stuff, so of course it's proven!" That said, the model is certainly attractive if it works! It is hard to imagine ensuring very-long-term preservation with a business model that requires the content-donors to keep paying perpetually. (also a non-profit model seems appropriate to me for very-long-term preservation). (I am a librarian/software engineer whose work includes archival materials and digital preservation).

hosh 6y ago
This is probably the most well-thought-out comment here. It isn't a knee-jerk "it isn't permanent", "the tech won't work", "the funding won't work". I'm not looking at this from the lens of an archivist, though I think that is important too. What do you think about the role of IPFS and FileCoin in digital preservation? Is there a role?
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Thanks! I don't personally think very much of one, but i'm pretty down on blockchain in general. (Also not an expert at it, only have a surface-level IT guy understanding of it). I could see some role in using blockchain to keep track of _checksums_ of preserved files (nothing in the chain except the cryptographic digests of files stored elsewhere), as a way to have a hard-to-tamper-with multi-party-decentralized preserved historical record that a particular file was stored at a particular time, and has not changed since (whether from error or mal-intent). Just a record of what was stored when, not otherwise involved in the storage itself. If you want decentralized multi-party storage (which is cool, but I'm not sure it's necessary), there are protocols for that which don't require, or IMO have any reason to benefit from, blockchain technology. Again just my own not super well-informed opinion, and I'm hardly a blockchain expert (being pretty suspicious of it).
  - hosh 6y ago
    Awesome, thank you for engaging :-) Let me see if my quick run-down here might spark something interesting. IPFS itself is not a blockchain. It is a piece of distributed infrastructure that allows people to share and store content in a distributed way. There are parts of it that are similar to the old torrent protocol. The main thing with IPFS is that the people who care about keeping a particular piece of data alive can "pin" it locally on their servers. Everyone accessing it will query other people who have pieces of that content -- just like with bittorrent. IPFS has no monetization or blockchain. FileCoin is the blockchain. It was intended to be the blockchain run on top of IPFS, although it may work on other content storage/transfer schemes. The idea with that blockchain is built around "proof of storage". That is, I can request someone store some bit of data for me, and you can offer to store it in exchange for something of value. Among one of the immediate things I wanted to apply IPFS to is this archive of digital material that contains a knowledge base for our current technology base. I have since lost track of that knowledge base. It was designed as a CD you can burn, and get all sorts of information. The idea was to preserve this information in case of something catastrophic happening to our civilization. One thing about IPFS, and perhaps FileCoin, is that it allows for decentralized knowledge bases. Stuff that could be administrated at a local, community level, and yet federated with many communities. An example: gardening. With the pandemic, there had been a lot of people interested in gardening for the first time. However, how you plant, what you plant, how you manage those things are depended upon local conditions. I live in the low desert, and what I need to do for here is different from my friend who live in the high desert, or in the SE US.

longtermd 6y ago

"a free Gigabyte" doesn't catch anyone in the US since 1999. Try "10 Terabytes" :). Few people will use all of it at once, anyway.

webmaven 6y ago

This seems interesting to me... the one question I have (that others here haven't asked, anyway), is whether 'permanent' means 'imutable', or if I can replace files with newer versions? My use-case is a large shared ebook library where I sometimes replace files with improved conversions (updated cover art, smaller files, improved CSS or standards compliance, etc.).

CrowGrandFather 6y ago

I feel like everyone is ignoring the obvious elephant in the room. The insane price model. $10 for a gig? 1 GB? $1000 for 100GB? Are you insane? I can buy an 8TB for $120. I could have 70TB of storage for the price of your 100Gb. If I bought 2 HDDs up front, had a raid with duplication set up, and replaced 1 HDD every 3 years (imagining one failed every 3 years) I would still have almost 30 years of storage which is longer than you'll exist with this insane price model.

ValentineC 6y ago
Manpower costs money too.
carapace 6y ago
It's not that insane if they can really deliver (and I don't see a technical reason why not.) The real question is whether or not they compete with Archive.org, in the sense of sharing the same ecological niche. Archive.org does a great job but everything there is public, so maybe that's the differentiator?

poleguy 6y ago

I love the idea of a not-for-profit tech company... I don't _yet_ trust _this_ company: fancy, connected, rich people's faces on the website may inspire trust in some, but for me, I see that they only paid for the domain name for one year, and haven't registered the two common misspellings listed on wikipedia. I'll wait 50-100 years and then judge them. If they don't have confidence in their own plan beyond the one year of their DNS, why should I? Are they just fishing for $100K and then they'll possibly make some real plans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_misspellings/P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lists_of_common_miss... From: https://lookup.icann.org/lookup https://lookup.icann.org/lookup Name: permanent.org Registry Expiration: 2020-06-11 18:55:23 UTC (First post on news.ycombinator.com)

rsanek 6y ago
Who do you plan to trust for the intervening 50-100 years?
- brianpan 6y ago
  Or, who from 50 years ago is still around to be trusted? The list to choose from is short. IBM, HP, GE, TI...
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    What's to say that the new CEO of one of these companies wouldn't pull a Google Reader and axe the service, for the sake of consolidating product lines? Or that the companies themselves wouldn't be merged?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Or, who from 50 years ago is still around to be trusted? The list to choose from is short. IBM, HP, GE, TI... Pretty sure there's no shareholder value in paying to preserve data for someone who's not paying fees and is not going to sue because they're dead. Those companies (or any for-profit entity) absolutely cannot be trusted to provide a service like this; their profit motive means they'll cheat, sooner or later.

dorfsmay 6y ago

Wouldn't that money better spent on archive.com? This site will only cares to people who know about it and care enough to use it, while archive.org fossilize every site out there, from simplistic 10 line html file to wordpress sites to news websites.

miki123211 6y ago

Nothing is really permanent if there's an organization in control, particularly one subject to U.S. law. we can't predict whether in i.e. ten years, the U.S. won't get a law requiring companies to pass everything through automatic copyright filters. Those tend to be unreliable, so this is just one of the many ways our content may be lost. The only network that could provide a reasonable guarantee of permanence would be a decentralized one, something like sia, but where the owner can pay for i.e. 100 years and lock the data in, so that no one can actually delete them.

lokl 6y ago

What prevents a disgruntled employee from deleting or altering the data?

pgcj_poster 6y ago

> We're bringing permanence to everyone. Your precious digital content is always private until you're ready to make it public I store private data on my own hard drives, and when I want to make it public in the long-term, I upload it to Archive.org, which for now I have more confidence in than this service. The only time I see needing something like this is when I want something to be public after I die but no sooner, like a diary or secret confession or something.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Permanent until it's gone

zwaps 6y ago

This would be genuinely interesting to me, as I use cloud backup to store private, but not secret data. That is, I'm interested in not having my family photos and personal files mined. To make it useful, I'd also want the service to handle encryption in a way that doesn't require me to self-encrypt and upload huge files all the time or anything of that sort. As entitled as that may sound: If you want my money, you'd have to provide apps that integrate with the usual OS's, encrypting the data locally and seamlessly. Now, they say they will use amazon for storage. That's a tough sell until I see what's the actual program looks like. I MIGHT be willing to trust a non-profit which existence is linked to ethical behavior. I will certainly not trust amazon without doing my own encryption. And if I feel like I gotta do that, I am not paying for an intermediate.

earthboundkid 6y ago

The Shrine of Ise in Japan is rebuilt every twenty years. A construction company with a family history going back for centuries builds a copy on lot 2, then they tear down lot 1 and wait another twenty years. It’s been preserved like this for over a thousand years. This is the only way to do something “permanently”.

tunk 6y ago
Tell that to the Romans :)

robotbikes 6y ago

This looks interesting and seems to have some known people on the board of directors such as Stephen Wolfram but I couldn't find pricing or much details as to how it functions. Permanent data storage is a big promise and a non-profit model could work if the people involved are commited.

c1c2c3 6y ago
You pay $10 per Gb but this is a one off payment rather than annual. The money is supposed to go into an endowment that will pay for the storage costs long term.
- karamanolev 6y ago
  Aren't one-off payments to cover running costs provably unsustainable? It relies on continuous growth to support old users. I personally would want to rely on a service that might close at any minute because it stopped growing.
  - Gaelan 6y ago
    The idea is that they'd form an endowment. So they put your $10 in some sort of relatively safe investment, and every year it grows by, say, 1%. So then they have 10¢/year/GB to spend on storage costs.
  - djmobley 6y ago
    Not if you are able to charge enough, and reinvest the funds such that low-risk investment returns will cover the cost. Combine that with underlying costs (storage, data transfer, computing power) which are trending downward and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.
  - thruflo 6y ago
    Money makes money. Say they raise enough to earn interest on their capital. Say they make 1% interest per year. Storing a GB costs $10. 1% of that is 10c. How much does it cost to store a GB for a year? Amazon charge ~1c/m for infrequent access and 0.4c/m for Glacier. So somewhere between 12c and 5c a year.

jstanley 6y ago

> Our promise to you. > We will never mine your data, claim your copyright or invade your privacy. That sounds great and all, but I don't want your word, I want cryptographic guarantees. Are there any? EDIT: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... doesn't mention anything, so I guess not.

hosh 6y ago
Based on who is on their governing board, I think one of the use-cases here is to preserve files you would want to pass on to your descendents. You wouldn't necessarily want to have it cryptographically secured with E2EE. I have old 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, full of software written by my father during the course of developing his dissertation. He died several years ago. My original plan was to take whole disk images of it and stash it in the commercial cloud, ... but I'm probably going to stash a copy on permanent.org instead. I have no idea if my descendents would care about it. However, it is a memorial that (if the foundation does what it promises to do), not something I would have to do upkeep after I die.
tobylane 6y ago
What’s a cryptographic guarantee?
- jstanley 6y ago
  OK, "guarantee" is a bit strong. But for example, if the keys are generated client-side and they never see the key, like on tarsnap, then I wouldn't have to take them at their word that they totally promise not to look at my files.
  - Proven 6y ago
    Or you could encrypt your data if you're so concerned about it
    - maqp 6y ago

djmobley 6y ago

I gather they’re going for an endowment model, and the pricing is reassuringly expensive. That said, storage is one of those things that feels as though it should be charged on a subscription basis.

eitland 6y ago
I can really like this. A while ago one of my cards was stolen and I got a new one. It took a month before I realized my contact lens subscription had stopped. Luckily contact lenses are easy to get and I try to keep some extra around as well. A bigger problem however was 20 or so years ago was that when I was drafted and I suddenly couldn't check my email for a while and after 14 days I lost access to - my old address that everyone knew - all my mail - and most of my contacts mail addresses Fixing that is a lot harder and I would be happy to pay a premium to be sure that some things stay around even if my house burns down with my NAS inside while I'm in hospital and my CC is cancelled while I'm unable to notice it. BTW: feel free to post your suggestions. My best ideas are to ship encrypted disks to one of my brothers/sisters and parts of the passwords to two others In case I lose them or in case I die and someone needs wants access to my accounts.
- notechback 6y ago
  Why the encryption? If I store data with my family there's two kinds: the kind I encrypt because I don't want anyone else to access it and the kind that I don't encrypt because of I want them to be able to access it. Adding a fallible model with several people holding access might end up leaving your data inaccessible...
  - eitland 6y ago
    Good point. - What if the disks are stolen? - Or hidden in a wall and forgotten only to be found by the next owner? Weirder things have happened. - Or uploaded to the public internet by accident. Warning: (hopefully)[0] wild hyperbole ahead. While I don't have much to hide (today) who knows about the future. I'd rather not want to see my photoalbum indexed to death by clearview and results sold to a future Nazi/Communist/Peta regime who'll use the face database to track down my grandchildren to punish them because their grandfather hated Nazis/wasn't exactly too fond of Communism either/ate meat and owned a rabbit. - also for anything in the second category I guess the correct solution is an online server + encrypted backups with passwords available for everyone. Or just use backblaze or something and hope I don't become unavailable until some of my kids or their kids are old enough to become sysadmins ;-) [0]: but who would have thought 100 years ago that lists of people's faith would be used 20 years later to systematically track down people not based on what crimes they had done but rather based on heritage only to round them up and kill them?

chinathrow 6y ago

The pricing scheme is neat but for me irrelevant. What I want to know if this uses any form of zero-knowledge cryptography features or not. I guess not - since it can pull data directly from FB.

scolvin 6y ago
If you want to encrypt your data before you upload it, surely you have that option? In fact that really the only way it could work, if they did the encryption and have your back the key, you'd have to trust them that they're not keeping it too. I can understand why they don't want to add a big barrier to entry by requiring that.

yuppiepuppie 6y ago

Im getting a connection not secure warning on firefox 75.0. Seems like an ssl issue on the site.

baal80spam 6y ago

> Termination > We may terminate or suspend access to our Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever, including without limitation if you breach the Terms. Is this normal? So I guess this is not a good place to store a copy of my encrypted password file? Or am I misunderstanding and it means that they can terminate my account only if/when I breach the Terms?

guug 6y ago
Good catch. If they can remove my files for any reason, how can I trust them not to delete my files? This clause does not make any sense for a service like this.
sleepychu 6y ago
> We may terminate or suspend access to our Service immediately, without prior notice or liability, for any reason whatsoever Pretty clear cut, any reason whatsoever.
red_admiral 6y ago
I think that's pretty normal and is meant to stop rules-lawyering when you do ban someone.
- gwd 6y ago
  > I think that's pretty normal and is meant to stop rules-lawyering when you do ban someone. Which is fine for a free service, but is going to be a pretty big drag on the number of people willing to "donate" $1000.
- OrangeMango 6y ago
  People who give money to museum and university endowments typically attach conditions that are very much meant to be litigated if they are ever violated. The recipient expects this. They don't make promises to donors, they sign contracts that force them to use the money the way the donor wants them to. These terms and conditions are ridiculous if they want to be compared to museums and universities.

janwillemb 6y ago

> Our goal is permanence Nothing is ever permanent. I've seen so many services come and go, that I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. My 25+ years of data is on a local NAS and on an offline copy at a trusted location.

gwd 6y ago
> I'm quite sceptical about relying on cloud services for my data. I'm quite skeptical about relying on VC-funded or publicly-traded cloud services. An actual non-profit could be a lot more reliable: as long as expenses are less than income, there's no pressure to grow, and it could go on forever. The big thing I'm skeptical about is growth in data needs. 5GiB free iCloud was more than enough 5 years ago; when I upgraded my iPhone, suddenly all my videos take 8x as much space. $10 for 1GiB forever storage sounds OK now, but what happens in 20 years when a single photo is 500MiB?
- pjc50 6y ago
  If you need more storage, buy some more when you need it. The endowment price should be correspondingly lower. An interesting side effect is that people are calculating the endowment interest in this thread (a hard thing to do when rates are near-zero and there is a real risk of negative rates in the next 50 years), while the big factor is that storage prices drop dramatically over time. Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now.
  - curryst 6y ago
    > Imagine if this service had launched 20 years ago. $10 would have bought you .. maybe 20MB? Pretty cheap to store that "forever" now. That's a good point, but I don't think in their favor. At the rate that they're charging, you could prepay for 36 years of storage on S3 (neglecting bandwidth charges, which I know are substantial). Compounded with your point that data storage costs are tanking, I would actually expect $10 to go even further. Which is also not to mention that they're planning on paying for their costs on interest from their endowment. Turns out I can also put my money in something that generates a profit. I just don't see the point. They seem like they're trying to build S3 but without any profits, which at best makes them a marginally cheaper option, and at worst, a more expensive and less well featured S3.

gazzini 6y ago

They chose a 1-time payment model (which funds an interest-generating endowment), which seems a lot weirder than a subscription. This actually makes sense -- if the goal is long-term set-it-and-forget-it, it solves the problem of getting a new credit card every few years & forgetting to change this service. It also eliminates any recurring payment-processing fees. The back-of-the-napkin math checks out: accounting for storage, data-transfer, and business overhead, if they pay around $0.20 / GB / year, and they charge $10, then with 0 interest they would still have your files for 50 years, which is probably longer than your children will have your password to this service. I still wouldn't trust it -- I have a pavlovian response to the combination of "permanence" and "give all your data to this new internet service". Maybe it's irrational here, but still, this product is at the wrong layer of abstraction for me personally :)

hosh 6y ago
Flip the script in a different way: How many people have their Geocities site pulled from them? I think this foundation's mission is great. I'm not expecting things to be "permanent". I already know that there is no such thing as anything that is permanent, including our lives and our health. If there is no such thing as absolute permanence in anything, then I can throw that idea out and look at the rest of what they are offering. To me, it is irrational to think that just because someone _doesn't_ say their stuff is "permanent" doesn't mean you can trust them as well. What I see in this foundation is something that supports the internet that is not controlled by Big Tech. I think about my children and where we are going in our society, and I think that is something that I value. I valued it enough to have already pledged a donation for the price of two latte.
- derision 6y ago
  Geocities never claimed to be permanent
  - ta1771 6y ago
    Good thing.
6y ago

FBISurveillance 6y ago

They don't seem to mention anything about egress/bandwidth costs. Is that unlimited or is there some sort of vague "fair use" policy?

rechristened 6y ago
From their Manifesto[1]: > While the endowment model of the Permanent Legacy Foundation is designed to keep yourmaterials into perpetuity, it is not designed to be a high-traffic heavy-bandwidth hosting site.With the exception of approved nonprofit partners, we do not allow references of embedded15Permanent Legacy Foundation Manifesto materials on external sites for, and we must reserve the right to throttle or block abusive traffic [1] https://www.permanent.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Permanent-Legacy-Foundation-Manifesto-v2018-10-05.pdf https://www.permanent.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Permane...

sslnx 6y ago

Similar service recently emerged in Russia. An eternal server for $150. https://vdsina.ru/pricing/eternal-server https://vdsina.ru/pricing/eternal-server

Aeolun 6y ago
That sounds like an eternal server up to 30 months. I don’t think that pricing works out there.

pjc50 6y ago

"Permanent" and "free tier" sounds like a particularly terrible combination. The market failure here is the classic "market for lemons" problem. Too many people have been burned by "forever" pricing that turned out to mean "a few years", or the bankruptcy or acquishutdown of a company. So any new entrant will face intense skepticism, no matter how sincerely they are trying. So far the only permanent pricing that's worked for me is my grandfathered permanent Pinboard account, and that has a bus factor of one and a bit.

zzzcpan 6y ago
Storage is suited for it though. Most data, and especially photos, stops being accessed after some time and could stop consume bandwidth and electricity given properly designed infrastructure. Not that there is even a need to keep it forever, removing data not accessed in say five years or a decade is likely to still meet realistic durability guarantees any organization could provide, if it ever comes to that, which might be the case once they run out of physical space. Because of that such service can be offered as a "forever" service as long as the rate of new payments is enough for running it. But this is also where it gets tricky, the price they are shooting for right now is crazy unrealistic, it's at least an order of magnitude higher than competitive range, so they won't have many customers who can multiply and won't be able to attract enough customers to sustain it.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > removing data not accessed in say five years or a decade is likely to still meet realistic durability guarantees any organization could provide This is exactly the sort of policy that a "permanent" storage facility must promise never to enact. The whole point of something like this is for stuff you don't need regularly but want to keep forever. Every year or so I log into the dropbox account that has a copy of my wedding photos in. I don't need to look at them, but I want to keep them.

x4j91 6y ago

The non-profit take on this is new, however, there are for profit cloud services that offer similar one-time payment "lifetime" plans. Pcloud for example charges a one-time lifetime 0.35 cents per GB, and their marketing language states: "We have defined a Lifetime account as 99 years or the lifetime of the account holder, whichever is shorter." Some thoughts on this: It probably works better at scale if you control the storage infrastructure (to control the costs). If you are reselling Amazon, and 10 years from now they either raise the price significantly, or discontinue the storage you are using, how would you maintain the service without new (renewal) cash flow. To solve this later in life you would want to / need to migrate the data to newer better more cost efficient storage. There are large scale costs associated with doing this. Dropbox eventually moved away from Amazon for these reasons, which provided balance sheet savings but it gets fuzzy when factoring the real world costs of owning and maintaining large scale storage infrastructure. Offering 1 GB free and file sharing between accounts is an invitation for nefarious activities, and it seems like the only way they could manage that would involve breaking one of Permanent.org's core tenets ... Someone will have to look at the files to police it. Or the free 1 GB becomes a liability, not a loss leader. How will they do this? Once they have your money and a few years have passed there might be an incentive for the organization to gradually degrade the service. Make it more and more difficult to use, in an effort to keep costs down. And 10 years later when they lose interest in the project, what would stop them from selling the whole thing (cashing out) to a for profit firm ..... Looking at you .ORG / ICANN?

dexterdog 6y ago
FYI PCloud is also half that price ($350) at a 2TB commitment.

oefrha 6y ago

At $10/GB I’d rather get redundant 4-10TB hard drives every five years than trust permenant.org to be around in 50 years.

quickthrower2 6y ago
At $10/Gb I’d use some CD-R media
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Nah CD-R's only last 10 years at most. Get some LTO tape.
dexterdog 6y ago
And that price would be a fraction of the price the previous 5 years each time you did it.

chx 6y ago

So Backblaze B2 costs $0.005/GB per month for storage. Let's see what are my options here, I could prepay 166 years at an unknown company with an unclear record of operations (I see the governing board is full of rather famous people but still -- that's not ops) and financials. Or I could just keep going with a company which has proven over 13 years it is solid both ops and financials wise.

418tpot 6y ago
Backblaze B2 also requires a verified mobile phone number in order to use it - even if you've already given them a credit card. I would love there to be an option available at Backblaze B2 pricing, without a massive invasion of privacy. Right now I'm using Linode's Object storage, which is priced at $0.02/GB per month which is still reasonably priced for my needs.
- chx 6y ago
  pvacodes.com
dexterdog 6y ago
Not to mention you could have a fund that pays the backblaze bill and as that monthly price dwindles over time the interest on your money would pay it in perpetuity. If something like permanent.org is setup intelligently they can even have a plan for a backblaze demise (god forbid) and use the fund to migrate to another provider(s) in that case.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > Not to mention you could have a fund that pays the backblaze bill and as that monthly price dwindles over time the interest on your money would pay it in perpetuity. Assuming we're talking about storage in perpetuity without the need for maintenance, the fund would need someone trusted to administer it. I personally wish there was an inexpensive, trusted place for me to deposit a large sum of money, and have it automatically paid to service providers to maintain my domain/hosting/online identity in perpetuity, or until my deposit/endowment runs out. This sounds like what I want, only just for data.

Springtime 6y ago

Interestingly there was another site with an identical concept posted a number of years ago, which had a very simple website (teal background and virtually unstyled text IIRC). I remember it causing comments to be skeptical partly for the barebones site alone. Looking at Permanent.org's archive.org results it doesn't appear to be the same site though which makes me wonder how many other sites have tried this.

Aeolun 6y ago

I guess it costs me nothing to try this. Lets see how permanent it is after 1-2 years.

corobo 6y ago

I'm not a huge fan of their "What We Do" page if I'm honest. Aside from the title the first thing you read is "The Democratization of Permanence" - from my probably dumb, mostly mainstream with a bit of tech self this just screams "You're gonna need your thinking cap on for this one" Can't you just say "we host files and it costs like 50 bucks a year" or whatever you actually do? Once you've done that you can whip out your thesaurus and put whatever you want on the page, just answer the question first.

aledthemathguy 6y ago

hackernews is the roastme version of digital beings.

aledthemathguy 6y ago

what about these guys: https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://siasky.net/ https://siasky.net/

brainlessdev 6y ago

Off-topic. There's a typo on some of the marketing copy: "A new paridigm".

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago

This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron. And the fact that the people who run this operation don't realize this means this initiative is doomed. These people use museum endowment as an analogy, but especially judging from that analogy I don't think they have any idea how this thing works. Storing someone else's data forever is completely different from how museum is run. The analogy is so ridiculous that it's not even funny. Where this analogy may apply is sites like Waybackmachine, because they're at least doing it for the greater good. But I'm pretty sure these guys will throw away some random guy's private file archive the moment they run out of money. Normally I'm all for silly experiments that come from ignorance, and I'm fine with various consumer startups that come and go along with their user data, because sometimes this ignorance leads to success. But in this case these people are playing with someone else's data AND asking for money, and claiming to store these forever in my view is no different from a scam artist. Intentional or not, this to me is no different from a scam. I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical.

cycomanic 6y ago
What has a profit motive to do with permanent? Why (provided it doesn't work) would it it work it if it was for profit, but not if it wasn't? It seems you have some political beef with this being a non-profit.
rsync 6y ago
"I would say the companies who are at least honest about exploiting our data such as Google and Facebook are more ethical." Luckily, those are not your only two choices - there are cloud storage providers that are simultaneously privacy minded[1], technically sophisticated[2], and honest about their business practices[3]. [1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/remote_commands.html [3] https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
ValentineC 6y ago
> This combination of "Nonprofit" and "Permanent" is an oxymoron. Nonprofit mainly means that they're not a company beholden to shareholders, and that they can't be sold or acquired.

olah_1 6y ago

I’m bullish on Sia. If there can just be a simple way to obtain the stupid crypto currency...

seemslegit 6y ago

Let's see. A non-profit, charging up-front and touting affiliation of famous people in unexplained capacity and showcasing use cases based on human interest stories of finely tuned social relevance. Grift sense intensifies.

tgtweak 6y ago

Math is roughly $500 for 50GB of storage in perpetuity. I think you could essentially replicate this by putting the $500 in a high interest savings account paying blackblaze from that and you'd have about ~100GB worth of storage on that setup today. Over time that ratio should get better.

rswail 6y ago
Where is this "high interest" savings account of which you speak?
- osamagirl69 6y ago
  Take your pick https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/banking/high-yield-online-savings-accounts https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/banking/high-yield-online-sa... I assume that he was running the calculations for the blackblaze B2 service which is $.06/GB/year for storage, so at 1.6% APR on your $500 principal that works out to over 100GB
  - tgtweak 6y ago
    Yeah that's the number I used.

jetrink 6y ago

They compare themselves to museums, libraries and universities, but maybe the better analogy would be a graveyard: you pay once for a small amount of storage that is yours forever (or at least until the nearby airport needs to add a runway.)

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
Even that is far from adequate analogy if you think about the economics behind these things. Buying a graveyard is essentially buying a piece of land (and maybe some very little amount of ongoing maintenance cost) A web storage is not only for storing on a hard drive because unless you can reliably read from it, it means nothing. And THIS costs a lot of money, for maintenance and ongoing innovation to keep the costs down. If storing someone else's data for free at scale was such an easy problem, none of the web startups would be going down.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > Buying a graveyard is essentially buying a piece of land (and maybe some very little amount of ongoing maintenance cost) If one thinks further, they'll also want to plan for the possibility of state-enforced exhumation or eminent domain, among other things.

SamuelAdams 6y ago

I guess my biggest question is how do you upload data? Through the web browser? Desktop client? Can I use RClone or rsync or an SSH / SFTP connection? For people with more than 10 GB of data, using CLI tools will make integrating with your product much easier.

rsync 6y ago
"Can I use RClone or rsync or an SSH / SFTP connection?" I think there's a cloud storage provider that lets you use any tool you want over SSH ... including rclone and borg ... It's not coming to me ... on the tip of my tongue ...
- SanchoPanda 6y ago
  Rsync.net?

kerkeslager 6y ago

Some feedback: it's really unclear what your mission is. Your "what we do" section does not illuminate what you do: > This is our mission – to preserve and provide perpetual access to the digital legacy of all people for the historical and educational benefit of future generations. Okay, if that's your mission, how does "secure cloud" come into that? How will future generations benefit from my data if it's secure? Do "future generations" include the present NSA and advertisers? What's your actual use case? There are a lot of ways this could be good or bad, and without some clarity people are going to (perhaps correctly) assume the worst (as is evident in this thread).

eganist 6y ago
You're defining "secure" as meaning "confidential," which is understandable though not entirely accurate. At its simplest and most abstract, information security also includes integrity and availability. I'm oversimplifying it, but hopefully you see where I'm getting at. integrity i.e. ensuring that data received, changed, and removed is exactly as expected and accurate per the requirements for the data over the lifecycle of the data. availability i.e. ensuring that the data is accessible/usable for the use cases intended. That said, confidentiality could also be relevant for a system of truth such as this one. There may well be certain data elements that one might want to restrict e.g. only to people who share genetic history with an ancestor. (as an example) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Key_concepts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security#Key_conce... if it helps. --- edit2: security (confidentiality) in permanent.org elaborated: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-...
- tptacek 6y ago
  Confidentiality is most of what people are thinking about when they consider the security of cloud storage systems.
  - eganist 6y ago
    Admittedly they've done a poor job talking about it on their front page. But for what its worth, they talk about security of data in accessible (albeit lacking) lay terms here: https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-and-security/ https://www.permanent.org/digital-archives/services/privacy-... Not known to me yet is whether these claims have been validated.

muxl 6y ago

Reading about this I was reminded of this blog post by Backblaze when they announced they were raising their prices. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pricing-change/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pri... Backblaze does do more than "just store data" but that is their core business and operational concern. Just glancing through this it's easy to see that just retaining data at scale is difficult and expensive. > By making this decision [to raise prices] now, we are ensuring we can continue to offer unlimited backup and keep improving our Computer Backup service. I'm doubtful that this organization could generate enough passive income through an endowment to sustain itself. They do have a chart on endowment growth relative to storage growth. I wonder if they've hit the point where the endowment return is greater than their total expenses yet. A one-time-payment like this would seem more possible if there were any restrictions on who's data to back up and how much. You can't just look at the interest of a one-time payment and say "yup that pays for storage on those bytes indefinitely" because for every byte of storage someone paid for there might be many more that are used for free.

driverdan 6y ago

Who runs and manages this service? The board looks good but it doesn't list the management team or any employees.

kam 6y ago
Their IRS form 990 names three directors, an exec director, a CTO, and an engineer as of 2018. https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/473017917_201812_990_2020012417063808.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/473017917_201812_990_... Only one of those people, Dean Drako, is also listed on permanent.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako The address on the permanent.org contact page and the Form 990 matches one of his other companies.

ineedasername 6y ago

Claiming that any digital service is "permanent" (even in a 10 to 20 year time frame) is quite a bold claim to make.