This would be very nice. It is indeed much faster, and will probably have a stronger effect the further you are from the Amazon datacentre. For me (in Australia) it cut the time to restore a particular backup from 40m to 6m.
I believe this would be a safe change: the s3 headers are digitally signed; the user data is either encrypted (or not) at the gpg level. The information exposure if there's a hostile connection somewhere between you and s3 is that they can see you're doing a duplicity backup and what the backup increments are. It seems to me this means the network is trusted as much as Amazon is trusted, which is a reasonable position.
This would be very nice. It is indeed much faster, and will probably have a stronger effect the further you are from the Amazon datacentre. For me (in Australia) it cut the time to restore a particular backup from 40m to 6m.
I believe this would be a safe change: the s3 headers are digitally signed; the user data is either encrypted (or not) at the gpg level. The information exposure if there's a hostile connection somewhere between you and s3 is that they can see you're doing a duplicity backup and what the backup increments are. It seems to me this means the network is trusted as much as Amazon is trusted, which is a reasonable position.