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Upspin – Another option for file sharing

security.googleblog.com

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Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#51

Post by enneff »

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?

Upspin users maintain their own storage servers, or use storage servers maintained by someone else. The Upspin project itself doesn't have any authority or control over the type of content stored or shared with the system.

> google drive for example has a list of known hashes of pirate files and you can't share links to files matching those

It's actually impossible for us to know what people have stored. It's all encrypted.

BTW, if you can find a way to "guarantee" that you cannot share a copy of a movie, you should talk to the movie industry and make a billion dollars. :-)

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#52

Post by acover »

austincheney wrote: post #34

What protocol does this use or does it require a specific application? Is it HTTP or something else? If I wanted to use Upspin to host files for my biddle project ( https://github.com/prettydiff/biddle ) how would I retrieve those files?

There is a client library for accessing the files.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#54

Post by getpost »

Numberwang wrote: post #48
getpost wrote: post #47

Wow, this is really brilliant, and there's the potential for high disruption. Only for file sharing? Not as I see it. I'll have to make time to try this out asap.

Please share your thoughts for other uses. I'm curious.

I will, once I've had a chance to look at it more closely. It's captured my imagination. I'd forgotten about ipfs.

And, not that it's the main idea, but merging the file paths and an email address is something 'everyone' can understand. Twitter built a whole business around @somebody.

edit: Many potantial uses are described in the overview. Read the whole thing. https://upspin.io/doc/overview.md

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#55

Post by sytelus »

Can this enable following scenario:

I've a 10 GB file I want to share with the world. But my bandwidth is usual cable modem and I certainly can't take on 100,000 simultaneous download. Does protocol in Upspin enable peer-to-peer file sharing so I can share large files with the world while still on limited bandwidth?

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#56

Post by bflesch »

vesinisa wrote: post #44
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...

I know this syntax from ssh. But up until now nobody framed this technicality into the "email" context where even my grandmother could understand the concept!

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#57

Post by sjs382 »

rakoo wrote: post #20
irontoby wrote: post #14

This sounds a whole lot like the Keybase filesystem (in intent, if not implementation): https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

big difference: Keybase hosts everything, all your data is belong to Keybase. In upspin only your public key is centralized; the data can be anywhere. Actually if you read the design document it sounds like they want you to provide some wrapper server to access, say, your photos on Google Photos through the Upspin protocol. Your photos would stay there, but authentication would be centralized on Upspin.

Keybase files are encrypted though, right? So if you provide your own PK, they can't read your files.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#58

Post by enneff »

sytelus wrote: post #55

Can this enable following scenario: I've a 10 GB file I want to share with the world. But my bandwidth is usual cable modem and I certainly can't take on 100,000 simultaneous download. Does protocol in Upspin enable peer-to-peer file sharing so I can share large files with the world while still on limited bandwidth?

In Upspin you typically store your files in a remote server somewhere on the net (our default implementation uses Google Cloud Storage as its storage backend), which is something you need to pay for.

The solution to the problem you describe is BitTorrent.

Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing

#60

Post by ipm42 »

> If one wants to post a Facebook picture on one’s Twitter feed, one does that by downloading the data from Facebook and then uploading it to Twitter. Shouldn’t it be possible to have the image flow directly from Facebook to Twitter?

How does my upspin file "ann@example.com/pub/hello.jpg" solve the problem here? I would have a single source for my image to share but still no way to describe an image hosted by FB as an upspin address.

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