STE VE CASSIDY With Google placing stricter limits on its free online storage offering, it’s time to take back control. Steve explains why own Cloud may be the answer.
With Google placing stricter limits on its free online storage offering, it’s time to take back control. Steve explains why ownCloud may be the answer
I’ve always been a bit of a language nut. So much so that I don’t see the sharp distinctions drawn between human languages and computer languages: I’ve always thought that the similarities outweighed the differences, since it’s the same tool – the human brain – that goes to work on C++ or Ruby on Rails as works on Swiss German, Aleut or Geordie.
I realise that humans don’t compile their speeches into binary objects, but that’s not the kind of distinction I think is worth pausing over. Instead, we should pay attention to the way that a new language can redefine the limits of computing or of a problem. Thinking back to the 1980s, I recall that nasty un co mfortable feeling I had around anything to do with C or C++, which seemed to have a number of features designed to keep things “reassuringly difficult” and therefore sustain a rich and in-demand contract programming sector.
At that time, I was a Pascal and Modula-2 person. To give you some idea of the era, this was when the coolest business computer was an Apricot Qi, with a remote lock device called a Qi Card that looked like a car blipper. My development machine for working from home had a 286 processor, while projects rode to and from work in a grey plastic protective box full of 5.25in floppy disks.
Everything was small by modern standards – operating systems, working memory, processor speeds – but don’t be fooled into thinking that small machines meant the intellectual effort expended was smaller too. If anything, it was a more demanding environment because many of the activities and services we take for granted in 2021 were non-existent and had to be added to your coding burden, rather than just grabbed from the operating system and used off the shelf. We had lots of the tools and concepts still current in 2021 too: my humble 286 could be persuaded to compile programs written in Prolog, an artificial intelligence-specific language still popular today.
Fear not, I don’t want to dive into the incomprehensible world of modern AI. My interest in languages was rekindled by an otherwise unremarkable press release about one of those homebrew NAS operating systems: ownCloud Infinite Scale, which, you’ll doubtless be pleased to discover, is written in Google Go.
The whole selling point of NAS is that you can safely ignore it because it’s not supporting any extraneous functions that might lead to vulnerabilities or intrusions. Sadly, the state of communication about issues such as this, between product
“My interest in languages was rekindled by an otherwise unremarkable press release”
designers and users, has been pretty poor. We now have NAS platforms that include support for running virtual machines on the NAS box;
NAS that’s biased towards CCTV or media streaming; NAS for photo sharing; NAS as internet router. The list of functions is vast, and yet the development effort around adding those party tricks to a basic box isn’t subject to security or reliability testing. That’s up to you.
ownCloud is appropriately named. It wants to give you a NAS with an operating system that helps as much as possible with imitating the services of that strange and mythical beast: the perfectly public, perfectly secure, infinitely large and totally free cloud store. It’s just the kind of fantasy that’s designed to appeal to small businesses and hobbyist consumers who have been reading with horror that Google plans to put strict limits and paywalls on its own-brand cloud storage. Come June of this year, you can no longer upload photos with impunity and may well find that your Google Drive rapidly fills to the point where you’ll have to pay.
On own Cloud nine?
Listen to Google’s laments about ever-expanding storage and you might think the party is well and truly over, but I still can’t figure out how anyone could load enough up the line to represent an actual, noticeable burden on its immense resources.
But the decision has been taken and new solutions needed, with ownCloud in a great position to take advantage: the range of architectures possible with a private cloud storage platform such as this are sufficient to deal with even the least worthy of cloud storage user requirements.
The difficulty is making those who are most at risk understand which features are going to be so insecure as to warrant turning them off entirely (Microsoft’s SMB1 protocol for instance). Others may be perfectly secure, because the ground-up functional recoding exercise in 0wnCloud has closed the relatively simple loopholes presented by the older codes and languages.
There’s a big difference here between the “what” and the “how” of any function in a NAS device. What your exposed server does might look seriously risky if you just survey the incident report databases of the antivirus and machine-intrusion consultancies, when in fact the “how” of that function – for instance, an FTP server recoded to have no buffer overflows because Go keeps that sort of faux pas within the compiler – has rendered the risk assessment entirely superfluous.
I don’t think it’s going to be quite as easy to keep the hackers out as ownCloud claims because it’s already committed to including this project in the open-source movement. As such, both black and white-hat types can download the code and take a look themselves. To me, if the justification for a complete recode is to be accepted, hiding away important functions might be a good idea too.
This is where all the thinking comes together. Let’s say you have some files you don’t mind commercial partners being able to access openly that you’d like to keep in several diverse locations. They’re protected from harm mainly due to being held on several different OSes, but edits saved in one location are synchronised with another whilst still being protected from malicious changes caused by ransomware.
This is the main reason why storage and user authentication go hand in hand, and why they have to be handled at an entirely new level. Consider most of our problems around properly adaptable storage as being the outcome of thinking that “code” and “developer tricks” could and should be confined within the purview of HTML, simply because it has been successful – not because it was the best tool for the job.
ownCloud addresses almost all of these issues within its own, freshly