Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.

Tarsnap is really designed as a backup service rather than a synchronization service: While it is very good at recognizing duplicate data and only uploading new blocks when you create an archive, it has no such mechanism for making archive extraction more efficient -- I wrote it with the presumption that people would only be extracting archives after losing data. That said, I think I can see a way to implement "tarsnap -x --sync" efficiently.

But for right now, as much as I'd love to get more customers, I don't think Tarsnap really matches the submitter's requirements.

in CTR mode you can easily flip bits of the cyphertext then make a new MAC.

No. MAC != hash. You cannot compute a new MAC unless you have the MAC key.

I mean what else is "2^119" hard to solve?

Finding a file which has an MD5 hash of either 000000000000000000000000000000XX or 000000000000000000000000000001XX for some pair of hexadecimal digits XX.

Computing the 2^100th bit of Pi (approximately -- the BBP algorithm has some factors of log thrown in, so I've dropped a factor of 2^19 to account for those).

Sorting a list of 31 elements using bogo-sort.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say "if I had a nickel", I'd have a lot of nickels.

The RELENG_7 branch moves directly from -PRERELEASE to -STABLE. The -RELEASE is cut from the RELENG_7_2 branch.

FreeBSD 7.2 is coming out on Monday, too. (The release source code has been tagged; now it's just a matter of waiting for ISOs to build and bits to propagate to the mirrors.)

Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?

The phrase "set of backups" is rather ambiguous here -- but if you're using an intelligent backup system (like tarsnap) you'll have multiple snapshots stored.

This is why backups should be encrypted.

Don't forgot user passwords stored in cleartext by Subversion and unencrypted SSH passwords.

Err... as I was saying, the fact that people have sensitive information on their systems is why backups should be encrypted...

If private keys are used, how are they backed up?

This is less of a problem than it sounds. Your private keys don't change very often (in many cases, never); you don't need to access your backup-reading keys very often (ideally, never); and your private keys are small. It's a PITA to store your daily backups by printing them out and storing the paper in a safe deposit box; but that's an entirely reasonable thing to do with your private keys.

Unfortunately, backups normally inherently contain sensitive files like /etc/shadow which could be used by an attacker to gain access to the live server (Brute force attack)

This is why backups should be encrypted.

And if you can't figure out how to do the above, use tarsnap, which is designed around the principle of an untrusted (and potentially conspiring with the NSA) backup system.

We must have different ideas of what "easy" means. To me, "set up a cron job which stores a backup online every hour" is easy, while "buy two hard drives and drive them between buildings each week" sounds like a lot of work.

There was a time when music was sold as sheet music. Somehow Joplin was making a $100,000 a week in the 1920's, even though it's fairly trivial to simply hand-copy someone-else's work.

Sheet music is cheaper than the cost of copying by hand. This doesn't mean that copyright laws were useless though -- without them, someone else could have set up their own printing press and started (cheaply) printing their own copies of Joplin's work.

Until recently, the only marginally profitable (in the economic sense) form of copyright violation was mass reproduction, requiring extensive capital costs. This made it easy to enforce copyright laws: You can't sell many thousands of copies of anything without attracting attention.

Everything changed when it became possible to make a profit by making a single illegal copy of something.