Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Upspin – Another option for file sharing

security.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 170 posts

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#21

Post by enneff »

inconshreveable wrote: post #19

Seems to be very much in the space of kbfs and IPFS. For the folks who are building this: can you compare and contrast this to both kbfs and IPFS? Why have you chosen to start another project in an already crowded space instead of contributing to either of those projects? They are both open source and much further along in development . . .

We are aware of kbfs, ipfs, and several other systems. There are many trade-offs one can make in this space, and I think Upspin's set of tradeoffs is somewhat unique.

One reason we started this project instead of contributing to others is that it's not clear that the trade-offs made by extant systems are really working for users, at a fundamental level. Maybe Upspin's will, maybe they won't. We'll see.

We wrote a bit about this in https://upspin.io/doc/overview.md but there is still more to say. I filed an issue a while back to write a substantial document that compares Upspin to other systems. Hopefully the community can help us flesh it out in time: https://github.com/upspin/upspin/issues/177

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#22

Post by franciscop »

comex wrote: post #8

Sounds a little like IPFS: a global file system based on end-to-end cryptographically verified files distributed through untrusted nodes. Anyone want to compare the two?

This seems to focus on the human part (you can just type it) while the tech is underneath and IPFS seems to focus on the machine availability while the devs would have to create a front-end for humans when needed; I think that it would be better compared to IPNS

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#23

Post by pg_is_a_butt »

enneff wrote: post #21
inconshreveable wrote: post #19

Seems to be very much in the space of kbfs and IPFS. For the folks who are building this: can you compare and contrast this to both kbfs and IPFS? Why have you chosen to start another project in an already crowded space instead of contributing to either of those projects? They are both open source and much further along in development . . .

We are aware of kbfs, ipfs, and several other systems. There are many trade-offs one can make in this space, and I think Upspin's set of tradeoffs is somewhat unique. One reason we started this project instead of contributing to others is that it's not clear that the trade-offs made by extant systems are really working for users, at a fundamental level. Maybe Upspin's will, maybe they won't. We'll see. We wrote a bit…

why would the community help you when they could better spend their time helping out projects that are further along?

you seem oblivious.

you're all idiots.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#24

Post by cyberferret »

enneff wrote: post #12
cyberferret wrote: post #4

I noted the disclaimer: "Upspin is not an official Google product". Yet it is announced on the Google Blog? Is it a separate "skunk works" team effort? Also, I note that they can set access levels based on email addresses, but I am unsure how that would work? Would those emails have to be linked to a Google account so that Upspin could check the currently logged in Google account to allow/disallow access to the files…

Upspin is one of Google's many Open Source projects. It's not really skunkworks, per se, just something that we wanted to work on and were lucky enough to be supported by Google in doing so. The email addresses are Upspin user names whose public keys are registered with a central server, key.upspin.io. To act as an Upspin client, you need to sign up: https://upspin.io/doc/signup.md Requests made by Upspin users are s…

Gotcha, thanks for the extra info. So you still have to sign up with the Upspin service to be able to consume shared files? I was under the impression from the post that it was an 'account free' type of service, in as much as you can publish a URL where people can grab files, but still provided a level of access control, and I was having a hard time reconciling that in my head.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#25

Post by [deleted] »

inconshreveable wrote: post #19

Seems to be very much in the space of kbfs and IPFS. For the folks who are building this: can you compare and contrast this to both kbfs and IPFS? Why have you chosen to start another project in an already crowded space instead of contributing to either of those projects? They are both open source and much further along in development . . .

[deleted]

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#27

Post by enneff »

cyberferret wrote: post #24
enneff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upspin is one of Google's many Open Source projects. It's not really skunkworks, per se, just something that we wanted to work on and were lucky enough to be supported by Google in doing so. The email addresses are Upspin user names whose public keys are registered with a central server, key.upspin.io. To act as an Upspin client, you need to sign up: https://upspin.io/doc/signup.md Requests made by Upspin users are s…

Gotcha, thanks for the extra info. So you still have to sign up with the Upspin service to be able to consume shared files? I was under the impression from the post that it was an 'account free' type of service, in as much as you can publish a URL where people can grab files, but still provided a level of access control, and I was having a hard time reconciling that in my head.

You need to register your public key with key.upspin.io in order to speak to any Upspin servers, so in that sense it is not "account free". You need to prove to others that you are who you say you are.

There is an "all" permission that shares with the world (see https://upspin.io/doc/access_control.md) but in most cases we expect people will share with a specific set of named users.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#28

Post by alexcroox »

> Our target audience is personal users, families, or groups of friends. Although Upspin might have application in enterprise environments, we think that focusing on the consumer case enables easy-to-understand and easy-to-use sharing.

This definitely does not look "easy to use" unless the target audience of families only includes families where all have technical backgrounds. If I gave anyone in my family that list of instructions they would stare at me blankly. There is a reason Dropbox does so well, its simple and doesn't require you do any manual fiddling.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#29

Post by bflesch »

I think it is a brilliant idea to merge file paths with email addresses. In hindsight it feels like a logical next step from services such as Dropbox, where everything is about sharing files. You share a file and the other person gets sent an email notification that you've shared that file with them.

It's great to see that they try to think outside the box and actually innovate on something that the Dropbox engineers also could've (and now also "should have") thought of.

Post reply on HN