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Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

blog.infinit.one

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Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#81

Post by programLyrique »

amelius wrote: post #65

Online (cloud) storage seems to be a pretty silly business to operate or invest in, given the amount of solutions available and also the "threat" of open solutions that will inevitably become popular (such as IPFS). Also, essentially, storage is a commodity product. It is ready for a race to the bottom.

They compare Infinit with IPFS: http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs

"Note however that IPFS does not focus on providing high-level file system functionalities such as access control, POSIX compliance "

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#84

Post by amelius »

programLyrique wrote: post #81
amelius wrote: post #65

Online (cloud) storage seems to be a pretty silly business to operate or invest in, given the amount of solutions available and also the "threat" of open solutions that will inevitably become popular (such as IPFS). Also, essentially, storage is a commodity product. It is ready for a race to the bottom.

They compare Infinit with IPFS: http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs "Note however that IPFS does not focus on providing high-level file system functionalities such as access control, POSIX compliance "

Yes, IPFS was just an example.

Also IPFS is being developed as a basic layer. Since it is open, we may expect many independent developers to provide things like access control, and a POSIX API on top of it.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#85

Post by ccrone »

vikeri wrote: post #80

Exactly what I've been looking for! Does anyone know if I could run this on a couple of Rasberry Pi 3?

We don't do any ARM builds yet. It uses the same C++ backend we built for our file transfer application which runs on iOS and Android so it shouldn't be too hard for us to get it working on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#86

Post by olavgg »

This is seriously a big deal for the storage industry! Basically what you have created is something in high demand, yet lacking in the storage industry because of its complexity.

What I've read so far is that this is a storage solution that seamlessy integrates several storage technologies, including your own. This storage layer will have cross platform clients, using Fuse and Dokany with user sessions per client managed by your Infinit Storage Service. The end-users do not have to learn a new technology/user-interface and just get an external hard drive. Very similar to how Bitcasa works, with the exception that you give the power of the actual storage architecture to the system administrators. This mean we can freely choose our own storage cluster, for example Ceph or Infinit's own.

And as you plan to release this has open source, you allow a lot of new businesses to grow which together will manage to challenge Dropbox, Amazon, Azure and so on.

For the last few months I have been working on building a Dokany client that used Ceph Rados-GateWay with Erasure Coding. Where I live we have really fast fiber internet with extremely low latency. Dokany is really performant and can easily manage to read/write 30-80MS/s between two clients living in Norway and Denmark(same ISP). It's a lot of work though, and there are several corner cases that causes issues. However if I scrap mine and start using your technology, I can take advantage of your great work and I can contribute back mine to make it even better. My final point being, with this it should possible to offer high performance "remote drives" to end-users. In some cases maybe even faster than an external hard drive. A partnership with a local ISP could offer them a great incentive to use this technology to sell even faster internet access to their existing customers. The best part, this traffic is inside their own network which means less money has to be paid for internet bandwidth. I know my ISP is desperate for something like this, and I guess a lot of other ISP's around the world is highly interested in offering something similar too.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#87

Post by artursapek »

Sephr wrote: post #6
tux3 wrote: post #4

I have to admit the situation is a little funny, but Dropbox will probably have an easier time justifying their use of the word "Infinite" that Infinit justifying "Dropboxe".

Both infinite and dropbox are standard dictionary words. Dropboxes are also not limited to the physical world, as many online educational software platforms (that pre-date Dropbox the company) call their shared storage areas for assignment submissions a "dropbox".

Dropboxe isn't a standard dictionary word

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#88

Post by vikeri »

ccrone wrote: post #85
vikeri wrote: post #80

Exactly what I've been looking for! Does anyone know if I could run this on a couple of Rasberry Pi 3?

We don't do any ARM builds yet. It uses the same C++ backend we built for our file transfer application which runs on iOS and Android so it shouldn't be too hard for us to get it working on a Raspberry Pi.

Alright, good to hear that it is within reach. In our startup what we want that we can't get from Dropbox/Google is privacy. I've been looking at owncloud which would give us privacy but redundancy seems complicated and therefore my excitement about you guys. The possibility to start out super cheap with two RasPi3 and external drives and in the future migrate to more scalable solutions like S3 would make this product pretty awesome for everyone from home tinkerers to enterprises.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#89

Post by chatmasta »

aidenn0 wrote: post #72
lispython wrote: post #59

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel inte…

On P9 at Bell labs, everything could be connected and uniform. In the real world with corporate firewalls, HTTPS is very nearly the only reliable option for connecting to other computers. On top of that, the fact that most workstations in this world do not have public IP addresses, and p2p becomes really a non-starter.

This seemingly destructive segmentation of the Internet is precisely what will lead to its successor: a collection of "overlay networks" built on top of the existing IP stack. We're already seeing it in many ways, with Tor and VPNs as two commonly used examples. But overlay networks are not just advantageous for packet transport. They can represent any decentralized network. BitCoin is an overlay network, in that it's literally a payment network, is a payment network, built on top of existing IP infrastructure.

We are going to see more and more of these "overlays" as the Internet "re-decentralizes". Sure, what we know as "the Internet" is becoming increasingly centralized, and people are right to be concerned. But there is nothing to fear, so long as we can build more abstractions on top of the Internet as we know it. Let Amazon, Google, and the big "clouds" centralize as much of the Internet as they want. They are only digging their own grave, because the next revolution, the "Internet 2.0" will be as decentralized as its predecessor. Only instead of being built on the "dumb pipes" of copper and fiber, it will be built on the "dumb pipes" of the existing, increasingly centralized, Internet.

The more the Internet infrastructure consolidates itself, the more it provides an opportunity to re-decentralize on top of it.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#90

Post by TallGuyShort »

wavefunction wrote: post #17
sghi wrote: post #2

This is what they're (Infinit) are already doing, isn't it? I can see why they might be a little annoyed at the name Infinite, but it's not like infinite is an unreasonable name for Dropbox to pick for their project...

With trademark, the test for a new name depends on whether the name can cause confusion with an existing trademark. When it's the same industry then it's pretty cut-and-dried in favor of the existing mark owner. Reasonability of the name has nothing to do with whether or not Dropbox can use "Project Infinite". That's the point that Dropboxe makes. Dropbox can either fight that name (which really, they must or lose th…

I think they're being a little silly. If you use a relatively mainstream word from the language in which you do business (and which happens to be virtually identical in all languages anywhere near where you do do business), you don't (shouldn't) have a leg to stand on, IMO. You can't reasonably arrive at Dropboxe independently. But is everyone at Dropbox really supposed to tip-toe around being careful not to name a project after a common word if it's pronounced the same as a company that was accepted to a tech incubator just 2 years ago?
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