Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network • Hacker News Board

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#121

Post by nemo1618 » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #117

mtlynch wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encryption on Sia happens on the client-side, so the host has no guarantee that the file is actually encrypted.[1] For encrypted data, I think it will be similar to the situation with other storage providers. If law enforcement searches your computer and discovers that you've uploaded illegal content in encrypted form to S3/GCS/Mega (especially Mega because they make it so easy to upload client-side encrypted data),…

I think someone technically skilled enough to run a Sia host would also be skilled enough to know how to delete delete a specific file off their hard drive. Sia could even provide a UI to make that easy. Though if Law Enforcement has access to the client's encryption keys, I think chances are it'd be way easier for them to just issue a delete command to the Sia network directly.

We do in fact already make it trivial to remove content from your host. Law enforcement can provide a list of hashes, which you pass as parameters to a CLI command that deletes them.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#122

Post by camjohnson26 » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

yasp wrote: post #2

How do services like Sia handle illegal content?

How does http handle illegal content? Is there any reason that content should be blocked at a protocol level instead of punishing the person who created it through existing regulations? If Sia has a way to remove such content it loses its decentralized nature, which is the whole reason it exists in the first place.

Should it exist? Well sometimes important content is illegal, such as political content in China. It’s good to have a way to publish important illegal content, even if bad stuff slips through.

What if someone posts illegal violent or sexual content? That is unfortunate, but it means that a real person took the time to post such content on the network. Keeping them from speaking will not change their warped beliefs, it will just hide them from the world and keep people from remembering that evil people exist. The person who published the content should be punished through existing regulations and the content should stay on the network to remind us that some people are horrible. Hopefully no one accesses it.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#123

Post by nisten » Tue, Jul 16, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #88

nisten wrote: post #73

There is one missing piece to all this, I/O. Given they publish their apps on all platforms they could probably add this in the future as an ssd or PCIe storage tier by doing regular disk benchmarks. However it seems like a major limiting factor, given that random access speeds on spinning drives or even cheap ssds can drop drastically by an order or two of magnitude (i.e. from 130MB/s to 2MB/s). Given how they're do…

Most 4K video is closer to 50mbps. If your home connection is that fast, Sia should be more than capable of delivering smooth 4K streaming to your home. A single host with slow storage is not a blocking factor because Sia downloads in parallel from as many as 30 hosts at once when composing a stream of data. Even if each has an I/O bottleneck of 1 MB/s (8mbps), you'll be able to get your video out at 240mbps. In prac…

That's interesting, and very informative thanks.

No I have not tried it however, based on your information, this looks ideal for something like showing auto-playing video on a splash screen using your API to pull the file on the client side.

  /renter/stream/*siapath [GET]

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#124

Post by jchw » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

zherbert wrote: post #110

jchw wrote: post #74

> Today it is possible to purchase a refurbished 1 TB hard drive for about $20 — so buyers are essentially paying Amazon each month the entire cost of the hard drives used to store their data! What a refurbished hard disk does not give you: - Redundant storage - Redundant power/network/etc. - Geographic distribution - A network API - Any networking, or uplinks at all - Access control - A team ensuring the reliability…

Appreciate your response. My comparison to the cost of a hard drive today is not meant to be a direct comparison, but instead to demonstrate that traditional cloud storage is actually quite expensive. Sia is able to bring down storage costs by an order of magnitude and bandwidth costs by two orders of magnitude. While most HN readers understand the nuances of cloud storage costs, most non-technical readers are unfami…

The issue I take is that the comparison is truly not meaningful. Yes, storage is cheap, but you are comparing the cost of a refurbished disk to a managed service.

This may lead people to think cloud storage is a waste of money, which I personally think is untrue (though Sia certainly may be able to do it for cheaper than cloud storage, too. Both things can be true.) While the cost to us is certainly more than the cost to the provider, the cost for us to replicate what a cloud provider offers is certainly greater at small scales where we benefit less from amortization and volume pricing.

A good point may be that we don’t actually need to replicate what a cloud provider does to offer a compelling alternative for various use cases. This I would probably agree with. It is certainly cheaper for me to have my own NAS and offsite backups than it would be to pay for cloud storage, though it is still surprisingly expensive (at least to the uninitialized. Check out what a fully loaded Synology 8 bay would cost! Multiply by number of backup sites. A lot of storage, but definitely not cheap.)

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#125

Post by camjohnson26 » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:06 AM UTC

dymk wrote: post #77

galaxyLogic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the concept of "Illegal Content" conceptually questionable. Authorities do not care much, I assume, if you possess illegal content. What they care about is if you share illegal content. Say you have a pro-democracy pamphlet on your hard-drive in China. If they find it they would imprison you no doubt but they don't care so much to look for it, and it is hard to find if you never share it with anybody. SIA prov…

> Authorities do not care much, I assume, if you possess illegal content. What they care about is if you share illegal content. You'd be wrong - people get nabbed for having or creating child porn, not just distributing it.

Which is stupid. If I were a member of a foreign government I’d use sophisticated hackers to plant that kind of content on anyone I didn’t like. Automatic jail for life.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#126

Post by camjohnson26 » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:08 AM UTC

dymk wrote: post #78

antpls wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next step is to fight the idea of "illegal content". Bits are just bits, some just upset the elites, just like nipples.

And some of it is child porn. Does that only upset the elites?

Child porn is the emotional argument, the only possible case where most people might agree that some content can be illegal. A more representative scenario is illegal copies of music or a political pamphlet in China.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#127

Post by camjohnson26 » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #47

hanniabu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some of the reasons?

Otherwise encrypted illegal content is stored on everyone's computers, and technically makes them potential felons. And thanks to the magic of the blockchain, it's indelibly recorded forever.

What’s to stop a hacker from planting such content on your computer?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#128

Post by buildzr » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #70

buildzr wrote: post #63

I'm trying to understand the reliability story better. I'm currently looking at this page: http://siastats.info/contracts_status Does that mean for every individual hoster-renter contract, of ones that were established and used, some ~9% of them failed? That would essentially mean that to get equivalent numbers to those advertised by B2, which claims 11 9s I'd need to buy over 10 contracts. Is this actually how bad i…

You are correct that the failure rate for contracts is somewhere around 9%, and you are also correct that you need over 10 contracts to get 11 9's of redundancy, however this doesn't translate to needing 10x redundancy on the Sia network to get high reliability. Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in a 10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of data…

> Data is uploaded to Sia (per-default, it's configurable through the API) in a 10-of-30 scheme using Reed-Solomon coding, which means that each piece of data is held by 30 hosts, and out of those 30 hosts any 10 of them are sufficient to recover the original data.

This sounds good - I'm just trying to understand how this is counted - are you establishing 30 separate contracts to achieve this?

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#129

Post by easymodex » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #106

tempsolution wrote: post #94

This reads like a typical blockchain non-sense hype article. Before you even go down the road of comparing sia to S3, what about some unbiased benchmarks? Show us the 99.999999999% durability, the pretty much unlimited bandwidth, the single digit milli-second latencies, the practically unlimited capacity. If you want to compare Sia to anything, compare it to Dropbox or OneDrive. S3 was made for an entirely different…

You are being deceived by Amazon's PR machine at its finest. The 11 9s of durability are a "design", not a guarantee. The official PR line at the time was "S3 is designed to provide 11 9s of durability". There's still no SLA on durability AFAIK.

Actually it is 11 9s of durability, but availability is a different story.

Re: Sia – Decentralized cloud storage network

#130

Post by gnode » Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 12:15 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #55

Taek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized computing is a challenge because unlike storage, it's very expensive to encrypt computation. You see something like 10,000x slowdowns. With storage, we can encrypt and checksum everything client-side in a cryptographically secure manner, and we can have full faith that even though we are giving our data to someone else, they have no way to view the data or tamper with the data. If techniques like homomo…

Unless SGX works.

This isn't what SGX is for. SGX is designed to add a layer of security to protect against malicious code on the same machine, encrypting memory at rest such that its contents aren't compromised if a vulnerability allows access to it. It's not intended to support an untrusted computing platform like homomorphic encryption.