> Why the collision with academic cryptography doesn't matter[...]
Good description and I agree that the collision is not confusing to someone who already knows what a zero-knowledge proof is. But I still appreciate the change because people who first hear the term from the website could be pretty confused if they hear about the academic term later.
PS. I see your point about leaking of some metadata but it seems very difficult to expect any cloud service to avoid this. The only solution I see is to continually re-upload a re-encrypted version of all data whether it's been updated or not, and maybe pad the uploads so that they are all some maximum size regardless of how much data there actually is.
Oh, there is no good solution. You need to do something using ORAM. There some clever tricks you can use that might be efficient (e.g this paper does some very interesting things: https://www.internetsociety.org/doc/oblivisync-practical-obl...), but I wouldn't realistically expect Spider Oak to cover it. What I would expect them to do is clearly state what they don't cover. Metadata is a thing people understand.
Good description and I agree that the collision is not confusing to someone who already knows what a zero-knowledge proof is. But I still appreciate the change because people who first hear the term from the website could be pretty confused if they hear about the academic term later.
PS. I see your point about leaking of some metadata but it seems very difficult to expect any cloud service to avoid this. The only solution I see is to continually re-upload a re-encrypted version of all data whether it's been updated or not, and maybe pad the uploads so that they are all some maximum size regardless of how much data there actually is.