Wuala

Subsidiary of Seagate Technology

2.7.3 (Android) February 3, 2014

3.2.7 (iOS ) March 28, 2014

Wuala (pronounced like the French word Voilà ) is a cloud storage service from Switzerland and is based on a technology that was developed by Dominik Grolimund and Lucius Meisser at the ETH Zurich. With applications for the platforms Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and smartphone users can store files on the storage or recall.

Wuala was initially a product of the Swiss software manufacturer Caleido AG, which merged with the French-American computer peripheral manufacturer LaCie 2009. LaCie is itself since 2012 to more than 90 % owned by the American drive manufacturer Seagate Technology.

In April 2010, Wuala launched his bid for another five languages ​​(French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch). Thus, there is Wuala in eleven different languages.

The data are stored centrally on the European servers LaCie AG. By October 2011, the service had the data as file fragments locally on the computers of participants distributed ( peer-to -peer approach).

Operation

Wuala based to early October 2011 on a decentralized network constructed and used, unless the user agreed to, the idle resources of the individual contained in the grid network computer as extra storage. If you want to make a file for example by drag and drop on his Wuala hard disk, it will be encrypted or on your own computer ( using a 256 -bit AES algorithm). The file was then in several parts (fragments) and then divided so often propagated across the network that a permanent availability and integrity is assured of the file. While the October update retains the layout, the storage of the fragments is, however, only on the corporate network LaCie AG - no longer in the network of participants.

New registered users get the manufacturer 5 GB of online storage space made ​​available and can purchase additional memory. The price varies between € 19 for 10 gigabytes to 229 € up to 250 gigabytes per year. Higher quotas are traded on request.

For authentication of users on the network, the RSA algorithm is used with 2048 bit key length.

Since the Wuala version of 7 August 2008 (build 462 ( Windows) or Build 72 ( Windows version with new installer) ) and the corresponding Linux and Mac OS X version counterparts of the same date it is available to all users free to use the public world / world range from Wuala Wuala without their own account ( Browse, Read ). In later versions of Wuala is also a fully anonymous access to be possible, including the ability to upload files anonymously in Wuala.

Since August 14, 2008 Wuala is public as "open beta" Java applet via the Wuala site -executable directly from a Web browser.

Since 16 December 2008 all marked as public files as well as those private folders that are shared with password, accessible for anyone with corresponding URLs on the site. With this innovation, the site of www.wua.la has moved to www.wuala.com.

Wuala can be manually configured to be fixed to a particular IP address since the version dated 9 January 2009. This is useful for example when multiple IP addresses per system.

Since an update of 19 August 2010, it's possible to synchronize data across multiple computers and operating systems.

On October 3, 2011 Wuala has set the Replace function and this will increase the base memory to 2 GB. The memory was exchanged to users until October 2, 2012 free of charge.

The ongoing since the start of beta phase ended with the implementation of BLOB storage, a system update and the start Wuala Business on 10 September, 2012.

Security

Because the source code of the software will not be published ( closed source ), neither the specified operation, or the safety or correctness can be verified in an independent IT security audit. The manufacturer plans, however, to publish relevant for the encryption key parts to be checked by an independent body.

The publication was originally developed on the basis of Wuala, can be downloaded at the ETH Zurich and explains the technical details of the cryptographic idea.

According to the manufacturer, the program contains no spyware, but the software can be extended at any time using the Update function to add any functionality.

According to the FAQ servers are located in data centers in Switzerland, Germany and France. For example, www.wuala.com, api.wuala.com and bugs.wuala.com in the ' Hetzner Online AG "( Germany ), content.wuala.com at ' OVH SAS ' (France) and at email.wuala.com the ' AtrilA GmbH ' ( Switzerland ) operated.

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