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Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

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Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#121

Post by chatmasta »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #117
chatmasta wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out the ipop project [0], the technology behind socialvpn and groupvpn. They have an active and extensive github. [1] The problem with technology like Hamachi, and even IPOP, is that the nature of NAT traversal means that for any given p2p network, "supernodes" will always be required. IPOP uses STUN/TURN (the same technology as WebRTC) for NAT-traversal. According to Google usage stats (can't find t…

Interesting abstract, but what about just asking for donations? Freenode does that, and so does public radio, but they seem uniquely positioned to do that. If I were running a bunch of STUN/TURN servers I wonder where I would ask for donations. Makes me wonder how the Internet came to be. Something about DARPA funding?

The cost of a supernode is more than just monetary. There is a cost to the network when one single entity controls all the supernodes, because in almost all cases that means they have some disproportionate level of power over routing or quality of service. You wouldn't want one company running every Tor exit node, because then it's not decentralized.

A business model that relies on donations to one, or a few, entities controlling the supernodes perpetuates the centralization of infrastructure. Not to mention that donations are historically the most cost inefficient solution, especially compared to "market forces." If the efficiency of a decentralized system depends on the number and quality of supernodes, then some economic mechanism must exist to incentivize peers to become "super peers." The competition will ensure that the super peers who survive are the ones with the highest quality nodes at the lowest cost.

Then the question becomes, who pays the cost that gets distributed to the supernodes? In the case of TorCoin, we wanted to avoid the situation where people need to pay to join the Tor network. So our solution was a cryptocurrency with "proof of bandwidth" as its "proof of work." Just like a single Bitcoin represents some amount of CPU power that was expended to "mine" the BitCoin, a single TorCoin would represent some amount of bandwidth that was transferred to "mine" the TorCoin.

The idea was that a TorCoin would have value outside of Tor, and Tor was simply the mechanism used to mine it. So relay operators would mine TorCoins, then sell them on an exchange just like they would any other altcoin. This way they get value from providing bandwidth to Tor users, but the users do not need to pay for the service.

However this gets complicated very fast, because you're not talking about one person mining coins with one CPU, but pairs of people mining coins by transferring bandwidth between each other. So the priority of the paper was addressing the threat of collusion, where two malicious nodes (possibly controlled by the same actor) spoof terabytes of bandwidth between each other, flooding the market with TorCoins. Our key insight was "TorPath," a circuit selection mechanism that ensures every circuit participating in the TorCoin mining scheme is "privately-addressable but publicly verifiable." So each TorCoin (or part of a TorCoin) would represent a circuit that actually existed, and anyone could verify that via a public ledger, without revealing the identity of the circuit participants.

I think the idea of non-CPU "proof of work" schemes is very interesting in general, and bandwidth is one of the most profitable venues to apply it to. For example, imagine if the BGP system were operated along an incentive scheme like this, where instead of "circuits" we are talking about "peering." The path selection mechanism we devised would work in any routing system with multiple participants, not just Tor.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#122

Post by codemac »

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…

Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me.

For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a blob under the same file.

It makes oauth2 look decent.

Saying that you managed to push everything through a file interface is interesting, but it's no more or less connected than a world of http://

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#123

Post by frostymarvelous »

chatmasta wrote: post #89
aidenn0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I'm really interested in hearing more about this. I mean "Internet 2.0".

Anh pointers on where I can find material that speak about the ideas you've expressed? Obviously I'll hit Google but you might just have something better.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#124

Post by chatmasta »

frostymarvelous wrote: post #123
chatmasta wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I'm really interested in hearing more about this. I mean "Internet 2.0". Anh pointers on where I can find material that speak about the ideas you've expressed? Obviously I'll hit Google but you might just have something better.

No idea, this is all based on my own observations.

Read my replies to your sibling comments for more details.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#125

Post by f2f »

codemac wrote: post #122
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…

Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me. For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a bl…

you're being deliberately obtuse. the uniformity in plan9 didn't mean everything spoke the same protocol, but that every resource could be shared everywhere. you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine. indeed on any other network that gave you could login to. that is the part that's sorely missed.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#126

Post by criley2 »

koluft wrote: post #97
criley2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the parent comment meant that Infinite is a word, and also a sensible name for Dropbox to name their product. Dropboxe is a silly neologism that only makes sense in the context of Dropbox's recent press, and not a good name for a product outside of this context. * Infinit is not releasing a product, this is a satirical post which "rebrands" their base service under a faux name. * Dropbox is releasing a servi…

Such are the risks of naming your company after a common word that describes the product.

>Such are the risks of naming your company after a common word that describes the product.

What? Not at all! Infinit has a trademark and will almost assuredly destroy Dropbox in court, including getting an injunction against even using the Dropbox Infinite name during the case.

The real risk is on Dropbox: Not doing their homework and attempting to name a product something that happens to be legally too close to a trademark from a competitor.

What you're saying is that it would be acceptable for me to make a Googol search engine, since googol is a real word and it's Google's fault for picking a name so similar to a real word.

EDIT: Also consider that Infinit is as close to the word Infinite as iPhone is to the word "phone". Do you think Apple assumed the same risks you bring up by naming their product 1 letter away from a common word?

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#127

Post by aidenn0 »

edraferi wrote: post #7
futuravenir wrote: post #3

Great marketing. I'd never heard of Infinit before. Now I have. Can anyone describe to me how it differs from MaidSafe? http://maidsafe.net/

They have an excellent comparison FAQ: http://infinit.sh/faq?q=&hPP=20&idx=infinit_sh_faq&p=0&is_v=... Maidsafe isn't on there, probably because it hasn't really launched yet, but Storj, IPFS, Wuala and others are. Should give you a good feel for what Infinit is doing.

Ceph is listed as "block" model when it's actually a distributed object store. Part of this is confusion because there has been both a block store and a filesystem built on top of Ceph (the latter named CephFS). But at its lowest level it's clearly an object store, not a block store.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#128

Post by jMyles »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #70
jMyles wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone else sick of people having to justify the words they use to describe their ideas? It's one of the most toxic effects of IP.

How else would you do it, though? If anyone could call their product whatever they wanted how would you know that your Apple iPad was actually an Apple iPad until you tried to use it? Look at the thriving counterfeit markets in China.

So, first of all, you are talking about straight-up fraud. I don't think anybody will actually mistake Dropboxe for Dropbox.

But yes, I think that in an information age society, we can surely make sense of the myriad of product names and their varying level of veracity without needing to wonder beforehand whether a particular name will warrant the hammer of government intervention.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#129

Post by Nadya »

jMyles wrote: post #128
Godel_unicode wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else would you do it, though? If anyone could call their product whatever they wanted how would you know that your Apple iPad was actually an Apple iPad until you tried to use it? Look at the thriving counterfeit markets in China.

So, first of all, you are talking about straight-up fraud. I don't think anybody will actually mistake Dropboxe for Dropbox. But yes, I think that in an information age society, we can surely make sense of the myriad of product names and their varying level of veracity without needing to wonder beforehand whether a particular name will warrant the hammer of government intervention.

>I don't think anybody will actually mistake Dropboxe for Dropbox.

Nearly all phishing attempts rely on users mistaking m with rn or not noticing an extra/similar/missing letter. eg Citibank vs Citlbank or Wellsfargo vs Wellsfarrgo. People make that mistake all the damn time - so I'm not sure how you can say with any certainty nobody will mistake Dropboxe with Dropbox.

Re: Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

#130

Post by codemac »

f2f wrote: post #125
codemac wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying things were uniform when your entire interface is "bytes to and from a file descriptor" is just editing the past to me. For most of these p9fs interactions, each one had a different format / API that you had to know in advance before reading or writing to the file. This meant many things just had custom ascii, others were binary. Some pushed elements into different file locations, some piled them all into a bl…

you're being deliberately obtuse. the uniformity in plan9 didn't mean everything spoke the same protocol, but that every resource could be shared everywhere. you wouldn't want your tv tuner card to talk ascii, but with 9p and a plan9 kernel you could access any tv tuner on the office network as if it was connected to your own machine. indeed on any other network that gave you could login to. that is the part that's s…

If I can get the damned TV onto the network at all, then I can use 9fs or any other protocol including http.

plan9 did not invent the network, or even the concept of shared resources. They focused on putting all resources into a filesystem API, entirely and exclusively. That's their innovation. I'm not being obtuse by pointing it out.

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