So what began as a home improvement project culminated in a system
called Cleversafe, with potential applications far beyond Mr. Gladwin's
memorabilia. For companies and government agencies trying to secure
networked data, it offers a simple way to store digital documents and
other files in slices that can be reassembled only by the computers
that originally created the files. The idea of distributed data
storage is not new. But Cleversafe is significant because it is an
open-source project -- that is, the technology will be freely licensed,
enabling others to adopt the design to build commercial products. That
approach may contribute to Cleversafe's potential to lower the cost of
reliably storing data on the Internet. "If we distributed data
around the world this way, it would be a pretty resilient way to store
data," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a pioneer in designing distributed data storage techniques. Mr.
Gladwin contends that Cleversafe can store data at a lower cost and
make it more secure than current Internet services. The group is
counting on a continuing explosion of consumer digital data of all
types, including new generations of high-definition still and video
cameras that will create demand for secure and private backup
capabilities.
12:11:27 PM 
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