Slashdot Mirror
Google Releases Open Source File Sharing Project 'Upspin' On GitHub (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: Today, Google unveiled yet another way to share files. Called "Upspin," the open source project aims to make sharing easier for home users. With that said, the project does not seem particularly easy to set up or maintain. For example, it uses Unix-like directories and email addresses for permissions. While it may make sense to Google engineers, I am dubious that it will ever be widely used. "Upspin looks a bit like a global file system, but its real contribution is a set of interfaces, protocols, and components from which an information management system can be built, with properties such as security and access control suited to a modern, networked world. Upspin is not an "app" or a web service, but rather a suite of software components, intended to run in the network and on devices connected to it, that together provide a secure, modern information storage and sharing network," says Google. The search giant adds: "Upsin is a layer of infrastructure that other software and services can build on to facilitate secure access and sharing. This is an open source contribution, not a Google product. We have not yet integrated with the Key Transparency server, though we expect to eventually, and for now use a similar technique of securely publishing all key updates. File storage is inherently an archival medium without forward secrecy; loss of the user's encryption keys implies loss of content, though we do provide for key rotation."
>With that said, the project does not seem particularly easy to set up or maintain. For example, it uses Unix-like directories and email addresses for permissions. While it may make sense to Google engineers, I am dubious that it will ever be widely used.
I, for one, am unable to find an example that is less to the point.
Well at least now they've open sourced it they can't wait till it's just on the cusp of popularity and then pull the plug
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
>While it may make sense to Google engineers, I am dubious that it will ever be widely used
Idiot. It's infrastructure, also known as engineer land. I'm sure it will make sense to plenty of non-google engineers.
It seems interesting but admittedly I stopped looking into it when I learned that it is written in Go. The problem is less with the language and more about the fact that it will radically reduce the number of people that will work on it, especially long term. I don't know what the future is but I think Go will go the way of Ruby: a language du jour.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This must be why Macs have a reputation of being so hard to use. No drive letters. /s
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Translation: Google does not want to be accused by the RIAA / MPAA of supporting piracy. This allows the usefulness of globally sharing files, but the extremely plausible deniability of creating a piracy tool.
As all good people know, any technology that allows files to be transferred over the internet can enable piracy and thus is evil. Any company that makes a technology which ends up being used for piracy must be shut down for the good of the global economy. Or terrorism. Or think of the children. (See: Grokster. Also see the attacks and rhetoric about bit torrent technology.)
If the project is only easy for nerds to set up, and most people won't use it, this is a blessing in disguise! It would be like Usenet before the great poisoning of AOL. Or like the Web before the great unwashed hoardes, and f***ing advertisers. But like most things, some moron will come along and spoil it all by making it easy for Windows users and RIAA users. Just an opinion.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
An upfront caveat: I haven't spun up Upspin yet, but I did look at the code for about 15 minutes on Github. So I guess I haven't launched it.
I do have to merely shit on Brian Fagioli at BetaNews here: stick with objective reporter and keep your less-than-technical biased opinion out of the article, FFS. All that wanking about 'Unix-like directories' and written in 'Go' just proves your ignorance in the world of tech in general. My advice is, for starters, stop being a tech reporter and referring to yourself as 'submersed in technology' because you are clearly a posing douchey idiot. What world IS NOT built successfully on a 'Unix-like directory structure' and using a bleeding edge language like 'Go'?
Go is a fantastic language for any sort of platform-friendly deployment; I'm been using it almost exclusively for very system-heavy development that I need to port seamlessly between lots of UNIX platform variants. What's the problem with that?
Well Brian, to wrap your head around things you can relate to, better toss that MacBook you authored your article on (BSD-variant and Unix-like directory structure), stop watching Netflix (hosted on Linux and some distributed POSIX-friendly Unix-like filesystem), don't put anything on Dropbox anymore (hosted on Linux and some distributed POSIX-friendly Unix-like filesystem). Get my point? Stop whining. Just because it's over your head, doesn't mean it's not over anyone elses.
This reads like a business product, but is clearly targeting "home users". No home user asked for this. It's unnecessary. Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox all provide near universal multiplatform support for file sharing and storage, and protocols like FTP, SFTP, DCC, BitTorrent, etc exist and are well supported for providing more direct transfer methods for home users.
Now, if you want a business product, sure, you could probably fit this in somewhere, the somewhere where people don't use network shares, VPNs, or have OneDrive already setup(so, non-Microsoft shops)
Drive letters are by and large a hangover from CP/M and DOS, and could have been eliminated, or at least deprecated as early as Windows NT 3.5. Frankly, driver letter are completely ludicrous, to the point of being outright annoying. I've had local storage devices knock out drive shares, as an example of how utterly stupid the system is. We're literally dealing with a 40+ year old file device paradigm that only exists because MS seems completely unwilling to accept that Unix does it better.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Historically the A: drive was the floppy drive (not really floppy, but don't get me started on that).
When the "A:" terminology was invented, the disks and their containers really were floppy.
This looks like a set of services which others can build on to provide consumer friendly applications, hiding the scary Unixy stuff. Maybe Google won't do it themselves because they're afraid of the copyright monsters.
Considering the enterprise use of GMail, no, it's not going anywhere. But way to exaggerate. Welcome to the Newest Epoch of Humanity, where, if you can't make an argument well, you can at least make it hyperbolically, which is the same thing, right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well Brian, to wrap your head around things you can relate to, better toss that MacBook you authored your article on (BSD-variant and Unix-like directory structure), stop watching Netflix (hosted on Linux and some distributed POSIX-friendly Unix-like filesystem), don't put anything on Dropbox anymore (hosted on Linux and some distributed POSIX-friendly Unix-like filesystem). Get my point? Stop whining. Just because it's over your head, doesn't mean it's not over anyone elses.
Also, try using the web with URLs like http:\\backslashdot.org\ to avoid the Unixy feel.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Another vanity product from Google. Yay!
This looks like it's an attempt to resurrect the 9P philosophies, bolting on a wider security framework.
A quick look at contributors confirms Rob Pike and Dave Presotto among them, who was among the key personalities at Bell Labs working on Plan9, all but confirming the lineage. As I recall, some of the same folks are behind Go.
What are the odds this has a different future than Plan9?
even WebTV users could manage a directory structure.
Before OSX, Macs did have one root per file filesystem, but users referred to them by name (roughly equivalent to volume labels), and internally the OS dynamically assigned them positive 16-bit IDs as they were mounted.
Drive letters are by and large a hangover from CP/M and DOS, and could have been eliminated, or at least deprecated as early as Windows NT 3.5. Frankly, driver letter are completely ludicrous, to the point of being outright annoying. I've had local storage devices knock out drive shares, as an example of how utterly stupid the system is. We're literally dealing with a 40+ year old file device paradigm that only exists because MS seems completely unwilling to accept that Unix does it better.
I suspect it would break a lot of shit built in to Windows, including Microsoft's failed mobile version. The problem is, a ton of developers (including Microsoft) doesn't use relative paths in many cases, so I suspect these things would never change just like how Microsoft skipped version 9 of Windows for compatibility reasons. That, and path separators should be a front slash instead of a back slash (though Powershell seems to interpret either one just fine) and CRLF should go away, both of which are CP/M holdovers as well and no longer serve a practical purpose, but again, compatibility.
Every other OS in existence (including Android and iOS) no longer use drive letters, and that both makes it less confusing for ma and pa type users while being more powerful for power users.
No, just mountpoints.