From the company that doesn't offer Linux support to their "drive"...
Upspin – Another option for file sharing
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#72> 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 a…
I remember when OAuth was first announced, and the use case was basically this - although this was before social networks became unanimous so it was more like sharing your Flickr photos with a photo printing site. It was a nice idea 10 years ago before everyone built their walls.
To describe the content, the idea was everyone would use microformats:
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#73It's a bit unclear how email-based identifiers should work when publishing long-lived, public files. In particular, which email address should you use? Will the general public learn your email address? What about people who want to post publicly and keep their email addresses private? What happens if you switch email providers? Also, there is there any provision for actually making public files available via https? H…
Is their hope or stated objective to move all file sharing to this format? My takeaway was that this was designed for the use case of "trivial day-to-day sharing without hassle" (or at least that's their focus on the consumer case), i.e. taking the "another option" at face value.
Long-lived public files seem like a different use case, and one that is already generally handled okay by traditional hosting or file sharing.
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#74Sounds 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?
After a quick read, to me the difference vs. something like IPFS+IPNS seems to be the quasi-"federation" angle, such that Upspin acts like a protocol you can retrofit into an existing content store instead of self-hosted software with its own "captive" private datastore.
For these reasons, I find it conceptually most akin to BitTorrent when combined with Magnet Links that are shared by strongly-authenticated identities than to any other distributed content store project.
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#75> 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 a…
also, I probably don't want to share a url/uri that contains my email address on Twitter...
(I guess it depends if Twitter would _then_ ingest the image to their servers or simply continue to reference the upspin url/uri publicly - which was the original use-case)
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Dat just put out a desktop application. unlike BT it supports mutable archives. https://datproject.org
Awesome! Mac only for now though :(
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#77It's a bit unclear how email-based identifiers should work when publishing long-lived, public files. In particular, which email address should you use? Will the general public learn your email address? What about people who want to post publicly and keep their email addresses private? What happens if you switch email providers? Also, there is there any provision for actually making public files available via https? H…
Is their hope or stated objective to move all file sharing to this format? My takeaway was that this was designed for the use case of "trivial day-to-day sharing without hassle" (or at least that's their focus on the consumer case), i.e. taking the "another option" at face value. Long-lived public files seem like a different use case, and one that is already generally handled okay by traditional hosting or file shari…
They used the example of sharing on Facebook or Twitter, which are archived indefinitely, so it seems like someone should be thinking about link rot and how to avoid it?
(Should a link be shared or the data copied?)
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#78If enneff is still listening...
How many files per directory has this been tested on?
I work on a very similar system with similar goals (global file namespace which will return a list of physical file locations and a collection of software based on that), but for scientific data and we've been trying to scale to millions of files per directory. It'd be great to have a baseline.
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#79This looks really interesting. I will play around with it, but I'm curious if there's any sense of how much this would add to an existing command-line tool? For example if all I want to do is get an upspin file, make changes, and put a (possibly new) upspin file back, would it entail significant configuration and/or a much larger executable?
Re: Upspin – Another option for file sharing
#80> 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 a…
I think it's heavily implied ("its real contribution is a set of interfaces, protocols, and components from which an information management system can be built") that given enough buy-in, existing content stores could hook into the Upspin namespace, but that's of course a strategic decision that such content stores must evaluate.
Aside from the content-addressed bit, it sounds to me like in many ways this idea is similar to OAuth or even SAML both in purpose and ambition, prescribing a standard way one can punch a delegated-access hole into restricted space. Upspin would then act like an overlay network to locate files, then hand the authorization decision down to the implementing system.
Back in the day, lots of people bought into OAuth because not doing so offered no competitive advantage, but rather resulted in an explosion of tools and integrations that greatly benefited all those services. This believes that others would be tempted as well.