ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Lofty-Atmospheric Filesystem, v1.6 The Tahoe-LAFS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.6 of Tahoe, the Lofty Atmospheric File System. Tahoe-LAFS is the first cloud storage technology which offers security and privacy in the sense that the cloud storage service provider itself can't read or alter your data. Here is the one-page explanation of its unique security and fault-tolerance properties: http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html This release is the successor to v1.4.1, which was released April 13, 2009 [1]. This is a major new release, improving the user interface and performance and fixing a few bugs, and adding ports to OpenBSD, NetBSD, ArchLinux, NixOS, and embedded systems built on ARM CPUs. See the NEWS file [2] for more information. In addition to the functionality of Tahoe-LAFS itself, a crop of related projects have sprung up to extend it and to integrate it into operating systems and applications. These include frontends for Windows, Macintosh, JavaScript, and iPhone, and plugins for duplicity, bzr, Hadoop, and TiddlyWiki, and more. See the Related Projects page on the wiki [3]. COMPATIBILITY Version 1.6 is fully compatible with the version 1 series of Tahoe-LAFS. Files written by v1.6 clients can be read by clients of all versions back to v1.0. v1.6 clients can read files produced by clients of all versions since v1.0. v1.6 servers can serve clients of all versions back to v1.0 and v1.6 clients can use servers of all versions back to v1.0. In addition, version 1.6 improves forward-compatibility with planned future cap formats, allowing updates to a directory containing both current and future caps, without loss of information. This is the seventh major release in the version 1 series. The version 1 series of Tahoe-LAFS will be actively supported and maintained for the forseeable future, and future versions of Tahoe-LAFS will retain the ability to read and write files compatible with Tahoe-LAFS v1. The version 1 series of Tahoe-LAFS is the basis of the consumer backup product from Allmydata, Inc. -- http://allmydata.com . WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? With Tahoe-LAFS, you can distribute your filesystem across a set of servers, such that if some of them fail or even turn out to be malicious, the entire filesystem continues to be available. You can share your files with other users, using a simple and flexible access control scheme. We believe that the combination of erasure coding, strong encryption, Free/Open Source Software and careful engineering make Tahoe-LAFS safer than RAID, removable drive, tape, on-line backup or other Cloud storage systems. This software comes with extensive tests, and there are no known security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data integrity in typical use. (For all currently known issues please see the known_issues.txt file [4].) LICENCE You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version. See the file "COPYING.GPL" [5] for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1 or, at your option, any later version. (The Transitive Grace Period Public Licence has requirements similar to the GPL except that it allows you to wait for up to twelve months after you redistribute a derived work before releasing the source code of your derived work.) See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.html" [6] for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1. (You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence, at your option.) INSTALLATION Tahoe-LAFS works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, Solaris, *BSD, and probably most other systems. Start with "docs/install.html" [7]. HACKING AND COMMUNITY Please join us on the mailing list [8]. Patches are gratefully accepted -- the RoadMap page [9] shows the next improvements that we plan to make and CREDITS [10] lists the names of people who've contributed to the project. The Dev page [11] contains resources for hackers. SPONSORSHIP Tahoe-LAFS was originally developed thanks to the sponsorship of Allmydata, Inc. [12], a provider of commercial backup services. Allmydata, Inc. created the Tahoe-LAFS project and contributed hardware, software, ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing several Tahoe-LAFS hackers and instructing them to spend part of their work time on this Free Software project). Also they awarded customized t-shirts to hackers who found security flaws in Tahoe-LAFS (see http://hacktahoe.org ). After discontinuing funding of Tahoe-LAFS R&D in early 2009, Allmydata, Inc. has continued to provide servers, co-lo space and bandwidth to the open source project. Thank you to Allmydata, Inc. for their generous and public-spirited support. This is the second release of Tahoe-LAFS which was created solely as a labor of love by volunteers; developer time is no longer funded by allmydata.com (see [13] for details). Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn on behalf of the Tahoe-LAFS team Special acknowledgment goes to Brian Warner, whose superb engineering skills and dedication are primarily responsible for the Tahoe implementation, and significantly responsible for the Tahoe design as well, not to mention most of the docs and tests. Tahoe-LAFS wouldn't exist without him. August 1, 2009 Boulder, Colorado, USA P.S. Just kidding about that acronym. "LAFS" actually stands for "Lightweight Authorization File System". Or possibly for "Least-Authority File System". There is no truth to the rumour that it actually stands for "Long-lived Axe-tolerant File System". [1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=3853 [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/NEWS?rev=4033 [3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/RelatedProjects [4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/docs/known_issues.txt [5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/COPYING.GPL [6] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.html [7] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html [8] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev [9] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap [10] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=4035 [11] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev [12] http://allmydata.com [13] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-March/001461.html