Backups, Kickstarter Ideas, and ReFS

Warning: Nothing in this blog post relates to photography.  I do this from time to time.

In this Issue:

• ReFS on Windows 10
• How Not to Back Things Up
• 4 Kickstarter Ideas that Solve Major Societal Problems:
• Uber for Seniors
• E-book Authoring Tools
• Encryption That Makes Everyone Happy
• Class-Action Suit against Credit Card Companies

ReFS on Windows 10

If there was ever a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 10, it would the the optional ReFS file system which was designed to combat the bitrot problem described in my previous blog posts.  After doing the research for those posts, I had committed to buying a NAS4Free server (running ZFS) and attach it to my home network to solve the problems.  It was cheap and it was available now.

Of course that didn't happen.  I didn't have the budget to acquire more hardware and I certainly didn't have the boatload of time required to learn and configure everything to my needs.  "I'll just do the easiest thing - wait for Microsoft's ReFS effort to mature and use it when it becomes available."  Based upon everything I read, Microsoft was rolling out ReFS slowly, at the same rate as the new wave of driverless cars, because pushing it out before it establishes a solid track record can be dangerous.  And so, even though ReFS is baked into Windows 10, it's not officially available to consumer users.

And even if it were, right now it can only be used in conjunction with an ambitious Storage Area Network software layer called "Storage Spaces".  With Storage Spaces, you can attach a collection of any old hard drives you have lying around, and it appears to you as one giant disk.  If you have mirroring configured, you can even swap out dead drives without any problem.  It's actually pretty cool and potentially very useful.

But I don't need any of that.  All I wanted to do was have my many multi-terabyte USB hard drives refresh and renew themselves so my growing archive would not disintegrate all the while "chkdsk" showed no problems.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that ReFS could indeed be enabled!  All you had to do is install a registry key, format the drive, then deinstall the registry key and reboot.  And bitlocker even works on it!

Want to learn the details of enabling ReFS on your copy of Windows 10?  http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/try-resilient-file-system-windows/  (Mac users: see previous posts about bitrot which talk about options for OSX.)

So I upgraded to Windows 10 and I tried it.  Then I went back to Windows 7.

What went wrong?  Under Windows 10, on my old hardware, USB transfer speeds slowed to a crawl; from 80-100 Mbps sustained to a measly 1-2 Mbps.  I guess some drivers never got updated.  Going back to Win7 fixed everything.

That was a waste of 2 days.

I'm not sure how I would have tested ReFS anyway.  It's like evaluating the effectiveness of vitamin supplements.  Still, I know the need is there and my data set seems to grow exponentially, so I see this in my future.

(Scholarly note: For power users there's a lot to like about Windows 10... the Storage Spaces disk virtualizer, it can handle high-density displays better, virtual desktops (something Unix has had since the '90's), God Mode control panel, Game DVR (helps me make instructional videos), better command prompt and power shell... too bad data transfer speed took a big hit otherwise I would have been be very happy with the upgrade.)

How Not to Back Things Up

Since we're in full-on geek mode, let's continue and talk about backups.  If you're presiding over terabytes of information, you'd think one of those high-falutin' fault-tolerant RAID arrays would be for you.  Believing that is like believing your pictures will improve if only you had a more expensive lens.

Those devices may offer a level of disaster protection, but they are not a replacement for backups.  Don't believe me?  Let's say some sort of ransomware gets into your system and locks up all your data.  (Which is what happened to these folks.)  If all you had was a RAID array, your duplicates would be held hostage as well.

RAID is great if you're in a production environment and you can't tolerate any downtime.  (You'll still need to back things up regularly, though.)  In my mind the extra reliability is nullified by the increased expense and the increased complexity that can become an additional failure mode.  And when solutions like Drobo which use proprietary file systems fail, it's much more difficult to recover from it - you have to invest in another one of their systems to read your disks.  Here are two stories from people who should have known better:

Scott kelby reference: http://scottkelby.com/2012/im-done-with-drobo/

David Kilpatrick had a similar problem with Drobo, which eventually got resolved (and the article's in print only so I can't point to it.).

(If only these folks would have asked me first...)

Yes, my websites have a high availability requirement, but that burden is on my web hosting company (globalhost.com).  So if my desktop or laptop computers fail for an hour or for a day, I'm not out of business.  And so I can save myself a tremendous amount of money and complexity by designing a backup system that meets my needs.  There's a very good chance that your needs are pretty close to mine, which is why I'm sharing these here.

Before you can design any kind of a system that is going to protect your data, it makes sense to identify the risks you're trying to protect your data from.  Here is my list of threats I'm concerned about:

• Fire or theft
• Hardware failure
• Malware that somehow gets onto my system and starts deleting data.  
• Ransomware (same thing as malware, really)
• Accidental deletion or mangalation of a file by me.

That's it.  The other "soft" criteria is that I should be able to recover from a hardware failure in about a day.

The solution I use is cheaper than any commercially available backup solution out there.  I purchased 3 sets of USB 3.0 external drives, and use them in the following ways:

1) The first set of external disks are permanently attached to my desktop, and act as my main working drives.

2) The second set is my backup set, and is always OFF unless I’m making my nightly backups (that way if there’s a computer virus it can’t infect a drive that’s powered off.)  If there’s a fire and I have to grab something quick, I grab these drives and my laptop and scram.  I'll lose no more than a day’s work this way.

3) The third set acts as my off-site backups.  One of the drives is kept by a friend, and once a week it is swapped out for set 2 above.  If the unthinkable happens (fire/theft/both), the most I’ve lost is a week’s worth of data.  (And even that's not a problem - see step 4).

4) For projects where even losing a day's worth of work is unacceptable, I've started using dropbox as my working drive, and include it in my nightly backup schemes.  No data loss ever!

I've had every type of hardware failure happen to me - one time happening in the middle of a backup! - and have never lost any data using the above scheme.  It has served me well and didn't represent a huge capital outlay.

(Scholarly note: Online backups to the cloud won't work for me, since my data set is so large it would take me months to recover all the data by downloading.)

4 Kickstarter Ideas

My entrepreneurial days are over (truth be told, it ended here); but my ability to see legitimate needs and business opportunities will never go away.  And so I'm giving away four ideas that the world really needs.  If someone wants to go ahead and run with any of them, be my guest.  I will have done my part in helping to make the world a better place.  (And if you want to kick back 0.5%, I wouldn't mind that either. :-) )

1) 'Uber' for Seniors

The smart clamshell phone; configured just for Uber and Lyft, plus one-button dialing for family members.  Simple enough, right?

My dad is 88 years old and, god bless him, still teaches Systems Engineering and Constraint Theory as a professor at the University of Southern California.  But his driving skills aren't what they were, and the family would feel more comfortable if he were no longer making the commute.  Uber seemed like an ideal option for him, and so I got him a hybrid clamshell phone / smartphone (to retain the user interface of the clamshell phone he's used to), and configured it to just have the icons he'll need.

I'll spare you the detail of all the things that went wrong in getting him to operate a smartphone; suffice to say the experiment didn't go very well.  As one ages, even an iPhone is too complex to use.

Adding to the problem is that the Uber user interface is pathetic.  It requires several button presses, and if your finger wanders a little bit the car will pick you up across town instead of where you are.  Plus there's that "surge pricing" which I prefer not to patronize.  Lyft, which in theory requires only two button presses, presented other problems as the GPS feature thought we were across town.  Later, when the car arrived but couldn't find us, we were unable to respond back to the automatic "I'm here!" text.  (How useless is that?)

Watching this whole thing unfold was frustrating.  I knew how simple the process SHOULD be, and this is far from it.  This must have been how Steve Jobs felt when he had in his mind the iPhone but he had to pitch the Rokkr instead.

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS is an "Uber for Seniors" - a one-button phone with a Come-get-me icon.  You press the physical button and a car appears.  That's it.  (Oh, there might be a status screen saying "your white ford escape will be there in 2 minutes" but no fine motor skills or concepts of modes should be required.)  I can see this being a secondary button to the Life Alert pendant - one button for transportation, one button for "I've fallen and I can't get up".

I believe the market for this is huge.  All it takes is someone to implement it properly.

2) .epub and .mobi authoring tools

I've written about this before.  The problem still isn't solved.  E-readers such as the Kindle were primarily designed for text-only books, and if you want to offer a complex-layout title with figures and tables you have to be a programmer.  Yes, there are tools such as Sigil and Calibre but they only takes you 90% of the way there.  The last 10% on a 600-page book is an exercise in tedium and an utter waste of consciousness.  Currently, publishing houses outsource this to India to have it polished by hand at considerable expense and time.

So if some giant, resource-rich organization were to tackle this difficult-to-solve problem, the world would be a better place for content creators.  Microsoft is actually well-positioned to do this, as starting with Word 2007 the entire internal document structure is represented via XML, which is like a higher-order HTML. In other words, they're almost there.

(Want proof about the internal structure?  Rename a .docx file to .zip and then open it - you'll be able to see and browse the interior document structure.)

3) Encryption That Makes Everyone Happy

As often happens with politicized topics, there is much ignorance and lies being spewed by all parties when it comes to the encryption vs. privacy vs. government access vs. security debate.  I'm not advocating mass eavesdropping; rather I'm talking about legitimate law enforcement needs to solve murders and kidnappings in cases where a warrant has been issued.  (Traditionally, warrants have been the mechanism to keep power-hungry government officials in check.)

If you've been following this subject at all in the media, you'll be hearing two major arguments:

1) "Strong encryption prevents the government from preventing terrorism, therefore manufacturers must install 'back doors' to the encryption that the government can use to eavesdrop".  (This has been proven to be propaganda, as there are no demonstrated cases where not having access to an encrypted channel would have prevented anything.)

2) "We want to help law enforcement, however if such back doors were to be installed, hackers would be able to access it too, allowing no shortage of evil to take place.  Plus, the NSA and other officials have demonstrated that they're not as concerned about due process when it comes to overstepping eavesdropping authority.  It would be a public policy disaster and U.S. tech companies would lose international business as confidence in their security drops."

The above set of arguments is what's called a false dichotomy; it implies that these are the only two options available.  Throughout this argument, nobody - not even encryption experts - has talked about existing encryption algorithms which can meet everyone's legitimate needs without necessitating a back door.  It's called (m,n)-threshold encryption, and it works like this: Instead of having one key (that can both encrypt and decrypt), or two keys (one to encrypt and another to decrypt), you can encrypt anything using m of n keys, meaning you can have multiple keys floating around, and any 2 or 3 (or whatever combination you choose) of those keys can decrypt the contents.  You can also configure it to have just one of the keys lock but two of any of the other keys will be required to unlock.  It can be custom-tailored to meet specific use cases.

How would this work in the case of a smartphone?

In this instance I would propose issuing three keys, one of which works as it does now, and two others being distributed to the mobile phone manufacturer (let's say Apple for the sake of example), and the FBI.  By themselves, neither Apple nor the FBI would be able to decrypt the phone.  However, when a warrant is issued the FBI approaches the mobile phone manufacturer with the warrant and their key, and upon verification of the warrant the manufacturer can combine the FBI's key with their own key to decrypt the information.  And since each person / phone / communication channel would get their own unique set of 3 keys, if one decrypting key combination were to be stolen or leaked, all the other phones would still be secure.

Of course I'm not familiar enough with the ways key management is used in modern mobile phones.  So I emailed a foremost expert on the subject, Bruce Schneier, whose book "Applied Cryptography" has been referenced by me for longer than I care to admit.

Bruce wrote back the next day:  "Many people have proposed secret sharing schemes for government access. What you're missing is that the problems are legal, and not mathematical."  (Gotta love a busy guy who answers his own email!)  Unfortunately he didn't go into more detail, but at least my premise has been validated: This problem has a technical solution which can be a win for all parties involved.

So, this is an opportunity to save the world from an epic political logjam, protect people's information from overzealous snoops and hackers alike, yet still give law enforcement a valuable tool to help track down that kidnap victim when there is a warrant.

(I haven't asked Edward Snowden his opinion yet.  I think he has bigger problems to deal with right now.)

4) Class Action Lawsuit Against Credit Card Companies

You know how your credit card companies make you feel warm and fuzzy, saying "Don't worry if you see some unauthorized activity on your bill - just let us know and we'll remove it"?  Do you ever wonder who absorbs that loss?  I'll give you a hint, it's not the credit card companies.  It's the merchants.  Merchants like me.

This can be a huge burden if you have an online shop that mails out physical goods, like I do with my other business: Maui Xaphoon Musical Instruments (www.Xaphoon.com).  A typical order goes for between $90 and $250 and we ship out physical goods right away.  I can't tell you how many times the credit card got approved at the time of sale, only to be reversed weeks later because the purchase was made by stolen c/c info.

Why am I the one who must pay for the weak security of the credit card infrastructure?  Why isn't the issuing bank absorbing this loss?  Why go to the trouble of getting an authorization for each transaction when the "Approved" response means nothing?  Perhaps if the parties involved were to be held liable for all the fraud their weak systems allow, they might be further incentivized to replace it with something that requires more than a 3-digit security code and a matching zip code.  (So far the only innovations they've implemented make data theft easier, not harder.)

So I propose all merchants get together and conduct a class action lawsuit against Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to make them absorb the fraudulent transactions that they are approving.  I have no idea if you can fund a class-action lawsuit with kickstarter, but it seems to me this would be an ideal way to find out.

(Oh, if only I could just accept bitcoin for payments instead of credit cards, this whole problem could go away.  Right now the weakest aspect of bitcoin is their digital wallets, but that won't affect me if I convert them to dollars daily. :-) )  (Too bad most customers don't know how to pay with bitcoin...)

Until next time,
Yours Truly, Gary Friedman