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Upspin – Another option for file sharing

security.googleblog.com

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Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#41

Post by teabee89 »

bradfitz wrote: post #32
Scaevolus wrote: post #5

Does anyone have more context to compare this to Camlistore, which is made by another member of the Go team?

Hi, Camlistore author here. Andrew Gerrand worked with me on Camlistore too and is one of the Upspin authors. The main difference I see is that Camlistore can model POSIX filesystems for backup and FUSE, but that's not its preferred view of the world. It is perfectly happy modeling a tweet or a "like" on its own, without any name in the world. Upspin's data model is very much a traditional filesystem. Also, upspin ca…

Would it make sense to provide an upspin server interface to Camlistore?

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#42

Post by david-given »

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?

As far as I can make out, this isn't distributed --- while there may be multiple file servers, each piece of data is stored on exactly one file server, and you need to use the directory service to allow you to identify which file server stores the data. Then you contact that file server and it's a perfectly ordinary remote file system.

It sounds like it ought to be nigh-trivial to bolt IPFS support onto it, so that the file server is replaced by IPNS (can't be IPFS because Upspin is mutable). So, you look up elvis@theking.com/fnord and the directory server hands you '/fnord', and the client library then goes and looks up the data via IPNS. No file servers required.

Of course, this means that the only way of doing ACL enforcement is via encrypted data which is unlocked via ephemeral keys handed out by the keyserver, which as a solution is pretty terrible, but ACL enforcement in a decentralised system is practically impossible anyway.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#44

Post by vesinisa »

bflesch wrote: post #29

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…

To be fair, the way to reference remote files like this is hardly novel. For example the Unix rcp(1) command has supported a very similar username@example.com:path/to/file syntax since at least 4.3BSD-Reno (1990): https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rcp&sektion=1&manp...

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#45

Post by jbarham »

rakoo wrote: post #13
symlinkk wrote: post #3

Rob Pike is the 2nd biggest contributor to this project: https://github.com/upspin/upspin/graphs/contributors

Looks like someone wants to bring plan9 into the 21st century !

Yeah, I noticed that David Presotto, another major Plan 9 developer, is contributor #4.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#46

Post by rakoo »

Scaevolus wrote: post #5

Does anyone have more context to compare this to Camlistore, which is made by another member of the Go team?

bradfitz has already replied, I just wanted to add what seems to me to be the focus of both projects, because they are different:

Camlistore aims to be your repo of all your stuff that you may want to share with other people at a later time. It wants to be the repository of all your life and everything that happens.

Upspin aims to be a unified protocol for all applications to access (and possibly modify) data, wherever it is: maybe it is your website on your server, maybe it's a NASA dataset on some S3 tenant, maybe it's an imgur gallery, maybe it's an OpenStreetMap dump of their DB; the goal AFAICS is to give any application access to data regardless of where and how it is stored, so that applications can do what they're best at.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#49

Post by Asooka »

How do you deal with the piracy problem? What steps guarantee that I cannot share a copy of e.g. a movie I do not own via the service?

Edit: google drive for example has a list of known hashes of pirate files and you can't share links to files matching those. I imagine something similar will be in effect here?

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#50

Post by StavrosK »

Asooka wrote: post #49

How do you deal with the piracy problem? What steps guarantee that I cannot share a copy of e.g. a movie I do not own via the service? Edit: google drive for example has a list of known hashes of pirate files and you can't share links to files matching those. I imagine something similar will be in effect here?

Why do they have to deal with the piracy problem?
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