The company Protonet is sitting in the right place at the right time. With the Snowden docs continuing to cause churn and the edition of Condoleezza Rice, former US Secretary of State, to the board at Dropbox, more people are looking for secure alternatives. Protonet was launched a year ago and on the heels of the Reset the Net movement decided to launch a courdsourcing initiative.
From The Inquirer:
The Protonet website explained, “Protonet’s mini server combines basic capabilities with the advantages of local hardware: Scalability, high storage capacity and control.”
“We offer location-independent data access, a thought-through social collaboration platform and all this with no necessary maintenance and installation.”
The bespoke Linux OS based server includes private clients for popular services like Dropbox that have been built from the ground up.
Wait…Dropbox? Not the client that’s really the issue there.
They had asked for $136,000 (100k Euro) but, in less than two hours they had raised over $1 million and by the time everything was said and done it was $2 million.
Whelp, it is safe to say that there are enough people interested in making this thing a reality but, what is the feasibility of that? Sure, they can lock down the servers in such a way that no one could hack into the system in thousands of years. But, if I have a brick…you’ll give me your password.
(Image used under CC from Kreg Steppe)