Seagate and LaCie just announced an exclusive agreement with the intent for Seagate to acquire a controlling interest in LaCie, the parent company of Wuala. The publicly announced details are here.
This potential deal does not change the fact that Wuala is a Swiss Company with servers exclusively based in Europe. We know that it is important for you to keep your data 100% secure and we respect this. We will always keep that top priority in mind.
Now, we can use the power of Seagate to store more for less. Wuala will stay local and secure.
You can be assured that we will keep you informed as this exciting partnership moves to close.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us here.
We proudly announce our latest update: Wollishofen. There are some great new features and a lot of overall improvement:
You can now set customizable filters for you backup and sync folders. The ability to decide which individual files should be excluded from your backup or sync makes Wuala even more versatile.
Creating multiple business groups with different users within one business account. These business groups all share the same storage quota, but can be managed independently. This greatly improves Wuala for business use-cases in which not everyone should have access to everything, e.g. a scenario with multiple projects or departments.
Wuala updates itself automatically when started. You can check which version you are running under Help > About. If you are still running Weinegg, a restart of Wuala will help. Click here for the release notes.
But wait! There is more, we released a new iOS update simultaneously. This gives you the possibility to access folders that your contacts shared with you. The update is available directly here.
The Fraunhofer institute, famous for its invention of the mp3 standard, published a study on cloud storage security. They are frequently cited by German media and enjoy a formidable reputation.
The study investigates the security of CloudMe, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Mozy, TeamDrive, Ubuntu One and Wuala. Unsurprisingly, they conclude that Dropbox, CloudMe and UbuntuOne are not a suitable solution for anyone who cares about privacy, as these providers and its employees are able of to see whatever their users have stored. Furthermore, they note that Mozy does not encrypt file names, thereby not fully adhering to client-side encryption even when the user defines a custom private key. The three other services - CrashPlan, TeamDrive and Wuala - offer client-side encryption, which prevents the provider from accessing user data. However, the researchers of Fraunhofer still hesitate to recommend these services, as none of them is open-source. Opening up the source code of a software allows anyone who has enough time and is skilled in the art to verify the security of the software. With closed-source software, such as Wuala, you have to trust the provider (in our case LaCie) to do things right. So none of the tested services qualifies as verifiably secure according to the study. This might be one of the reasons why the research team recently announced their own cloud storage solution, OmniCloud.
While Wuala gets the fundamental criterion of client-side encryption right, the researches identify many points that Wuala could improve. They recommend Wuala to introduce email-verification. Wuala does not verify email-adresses, making it slightly easier to pretend to be someone else. Furthermore, they encourage using known standards more often instead of relying on our own solutions and to not use convergent encryption (which we plan to change). Also, they criticize that Wuala allows to choose passwords with only six letters. We will consider their recommendations for our summer update. (Except for the open-source part, which I already rule out now to not raise false hopes.) What is your opinion? Should we force you to choose a longer password? Would you prefer having to click an activation link on account creation and be sure that user emails are correct in return?
posted by Luzius Meisser at 09:47 AM -
33 Comments
My name is Γιώργος but as the most of the people can not say it, I'm just... George, I'm coming from Greece and I recently joined Wuala team as a Software Engineer. I'm a real fan of cloud technologies and so I'm really excited for having the opportunity to work for a company targeting this area. Especially when I have to do with a place full of smart and friendly people.
I'm looking forward to working with the team improving the platform providing a better service to the user!
You probably heard the news, another big name is taking a dive into the cloud storage market. Google's Drive is a sleek and minimalistic synchronization tool that integrates quite well with other Google services like docs, but apart from that, it does not stand out of the crowd of storage services. Also, in the case of Google, users are extra cautious when it comes to privacy, and rightly so.
Wuala offers many features that others lack. For example, while most other services just copy data to a folder on the local disk, Wuala comes with a real file system driver that allows the user to mount Wuala as a network drive that can provide access to many terabytes without occupying local space. This and many other of Wuala's features can be copied by others. However, there is one feature that will never be copied by Google: client-side encryption.
With client-side encryption, all data you insert is encrypted before it is uploaded. Your password never leaves your computer. No one, not even LaCie as operator of Wuala, can read your files without your authorization. Epipheo has created a lovely video for us to illustrate this concern:
posted by Luzius Meisser at 11:17 AM -
11 Comments
Three years ago Wuala and LaCie joined forces. To celebrate the anniversary of this notable event, Wuala increases included storage from 2 GB to 5 GB. If you are already using Wuala, your new storage quota will be available over the next few hours. All you have to do is to sign into your account again to see your updated storage.
With 5 GB of Wuala storage, you can securely store:
Wuala encrypts your files before they even leave your device. That means that no one - not even Wuala or LaCie as provider - are able to read your stored data.
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