Besides complex passwords don't forget about usernames. I used to use just one username for all my online accounts but then I read some research paper outlining how much information an advertiser or attacker could gather from just comparing the same username across different websites. So now besides changing my passwords I also, where practical and possible, delete old accounts and create new ones with random usernames from a collection of username generators I've found.

If we're being pedantic, what part of "quasi-SAN" didn't you understand?

And a "shitload of hard drives accessed via iSCSI" IS a SAN. A SAN is nothing but a (special) network card in a PC hooked up via a cable to another (special) network card in another PC with "a shitload of disks" attached to it. If you use iSCSI, you can remove the "special" part...

The fact that the industry likes to make this complicated and expensive is just another example of how screwed up the industry is...

Just to comment on iSCSI a hair.

I have a client for which I set up an openFIler iSCSI box. The box connects to an unmanaged dumb GigE switch. Four iMacs connect to the same switch. Client uses FinalCut to access video assets on two MicroNet 4TB external storage enclosures. Each of the four iMacs accesses two drives in the enclosures configured as a 1.8TB volume.

Been running fine for, I dunno, two years? Box blew a power supply this past month, I grabbed a second box of similar make and model, reinstalled openFiler, attached the enclosures, ran a script someone on the Net created to reload the volumes, and reconfigured the iSCSI. Back in business in a couple hours..

openFiler is great, utterly reliable, In this case, running over the client's regular network has been no problem, since the path is box->switch->clients all on the same switch and his network doesn't really move that much stuff around in normal use since the twenty machines are mostly production machines.

I'm thinking of setting up an openFiler based backup server for the video department - in that case, I'll use a separate GigE network based on separate NICs and a separate GigE switch - although I'm not sure what I'll do about the iMacs (GigE USB, I guess, if there are drivers - someone on the Net has done it). The rest of the department is tower Windows PCs.

You need to talk to Bruce Parens. He's easy to find.

For my entire adult life I worked in the medical diagnostic device industry and somewhere in the late late 80's and electronic documentation & email really started to take over. Then following a series of lawsuits the corporate SOP began to change. We went from loose organization in directories to using versioning tools for documents. And we went from what was essentially unlimited email storage to smaller and smaller... eventually ending up in 2005 with mandated culling policies. (mostly as a proactive defensive legal strategy).

By my nature, I am digital packrat. I still have all the email I have ever received or sent, in curated archives. I still have all the documents I have created. I still have all the code I have ever written. I still have all the design docs I have ever created. And I still have the knowledge management system I created to curate all of that data.

So, my nature and corporate policy really began to conflict more and more strongly. For about 12 years I used my own hardware for backups with my management looking the other way. Eventually I was told the backup strategy had to go and to take all my stuff home. That was replaced by corporate supplied laptop which I routinely took home to backup.

I took early retirement in 2009 and in late 2010 was asked back to resolve a thorny problem with some of the in-house equipment I had a hand designing. The current site manager, who I have a lot of disagreements with but is a nice guy, assessed the parts of my personal archive that I brought in with me as "The largest and most frightening example of industrial espionage he had ever seen"... and wanted to buy it from me so he could destroy it.

Just because you mentioned ARM, perhaps you should look into Calxeda. I have no idea if their solution is well suited for your problem, it is a whole bunch of 32bit cores in one box. Someone else already has a similar arrangement using Intel Atom.

I'm still disappointed Technocrat is no longer. It wasn't perfect and I completely understand your reasons for shutting it down. Still, it's disappointing.

I'm glad you've started to do something more public, I'm looking forward to see more of this. Open Source Software has really proven the importance of the existence of things with an alternative to the most restrictive copyrights. In fact that success has enabled me to successfully argue that the firm I worked for should abandon those restrictive copyrights for certain projects where we released source code to our customers for free. Open Source Hardware is the obvious next step, yet despite these obvious advantages I don't have the impression that the idea has really generated the kind of critical mass that we need for the wider adoption needed to be self sustaining. Hopefully this journal can be the positive influence we all need.

Also, I think the idea of publishing a journal instead of blogging, tweeting, or just using your facebook page is very smart and sets the whole enterprise up on a great direction.

I have to wonder how much of this is due to the stagnating economy in much of the developed nations. My recollection is that the last time the economy went south, all sorts of projects were either postponed, put on hold, or simply ended.

Not the New York Times, the New York Post. It's a Rupert Murdoch, Enquireresque, Gotham City mashup.

This is an incomplete solution because it makes it very difficult to share files to unskilled users.

Asking what is an alternative to dropbox is only part of the question.

The whole question is what is an personal & private alternative to "the cloud".

Eben Moglen's FreedomBox effort is part of the answer but I am not aware of a more complete solution.