16 ms·

Infinit announces Project Dropboxe

830 points by winta 10y ago

kempe 10y ago
So when the train needs to break it generates energy for storage that can be used later uphill etc. Simple and interesting, especially for regions with a lot of variation of heights.
- nekopa 10y ago
  Methinks your comment is misplaced. But I did have a moment of joy at the Monty Python-esque comedy it brought on :)
  - kempe 10y ago
    LOL yes it is, was supposed to go to another article.
- koluft 10y ago
  This is also how electric car brakes work, going back to the Prius.
  - maaku 10y ago
    The concept of a flywheel goes back much further than that.
sghi 10y ago
This is what they're (Infinit) are already doing, isn't it? I can see why they might be a little annoyed at the name Infinite, but it's not like infinite is an unreasonable name for Dropbox to pick for their project...
- wavefunction 10y ago
  With trademark, the test for a new name depends on whether the name can cause confusion with an existing trademark. When it's the same industry then it's pretty cut-and-dried in favor of the existing mark owner. Reasonability of the name has nothing to do with whether or not Dropbox can use "Project Infinite". That's the point that Dropboxe makes. Dropbox can either fight that name (which really, they must or lose their own mark meaning anyone can use "Dropbox") and lose their Project Infinite name as well.
  - TallGuyShort 10y ago
    I think they're being a little silly. If you use a relatively mainstream word from the language in which you do business (and which happens to be virtually identical in all languages anywhere near where you do do business), you don't (shouldn't) have a leg to stand on, IMO. You can't reasonably arrive at Dropboxe independently. But is everyone at Dropbox really supposed to tip-toe around being careful not to name a project after a common word if it's pronounced the same as a company that was accepted to a tech incubator just 2 years ago?
    - koluft 10y ago
      Parent was saying the "Dropbox" is also a generic word.
    - outworlder 10y ago
      > If you use a relatively mainstream word from the language in which you do business What about "Windows"? Or "Word"? Or "Office"? It's difficult to find words that are more "mainstream" than that. Yet, Microsoft does just fine.
      - TallGuyShort 10y ago
        Yeah and if Microsoft made tongue-in-cheek blog posts about IBM because they had something called "Project Officer" we'd all roll our eyes.
futuravenir 10y ago
Great marketing. I'd never heard of Infinit before. Now I have. Can anyone describe to me how it differs from MaidSafe? http://maidsafe.net/ http://maidsafe.net/
- edraferi 10y ago
  They have an excellent comparison FAQ: http://infinit.sh/faq?q=&hPP=20&idx=infinit_sh_faq&p=0&is_v=1 http://infinit.sh/faq?q=&hPP=20&idx=infinit_sh_faq&p=0&is_v=... Maidsafe isn't on there, probably because it hasn't really launched yet, but Storj, IPFS, Wuala and others are. Should give you a good feel for what Infinit is doing.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    Ceph is listed as "block" model when it's actually a distributed object store. Part of this is confusion because there has been both a block store and a filesystem built on top of Ceph (the latter named CephFS). But at its lowest level it's clearly an object store, not a block store.
tux3 10y ago
I have to admit the situation is a little funny, but Dropbox will probably have an easier time justifying their use of the word "Infinite" that Infinit justifying "Dropboxe".
- Sephr 10y ago
  Both infinite and dropbox are standard dictionary words. Dropboxes are also not limited to the physical world, as many online educational software platforms (that pre-date Dropbox the company) call their shared storage areas for assignment submissions a "dropbox".
  - curryhoward 10y ago
    I think the parent comment meant that Infinite is a word, and also a sensible name for Dropbox to name their product. Dropboxe is a silly neologism that only makes sense in the context of Dropbox's recent press, and not a good name for a product outside of this context.
    - ifdefdebug 10y ago
      I think it's a joke. They ain't going to actually use it for any product.
      - curryhoward 10y ago
        I think we all know the article is a joke. :) But people seem to be missing that tux3's comment was also tongue-in-cheek (at least, that is my interpretation).
    - criley2 10y ago
      >I think the parent comment meant that Infinite is a word, and also a sensible name for Dropbox to name their product. Dropboxe is a silly neologism that only makes sense in the context of Dropbox's recent press, and not a good name for a product outside of this context. * Infinit is not releasing a product, this is a satirical post which "rebrands" their base service under a faux name. * Dropbox is releasing a service which directly competes with Infinit called Infinite If you think Dropbox can directly compete with Infinit using Infinite, then you should join me for my new Googl search engine!!
nashashmi 10y ago
Terrifically smart jab at Dropbox. If only more companies could take up this sort of attack, lawsuits would stop complicating life.
- dhimes 10y ago
  We've yet to see where this ends, however. Legal papers may be next.
  - mbrutsch 10y ago
    That will Streisand on Dropbox very quickly.
    - hobs 10y ago
      Except for that in the post the author acknowledges its basically a parody. It seems like a bit of salt from DB naming their new product in the same sort of space a very similar name, which is kind of a dickish move.
      - r0muald 10y ago
        A search engine spider may not be able to understand this kind of subtlety though, let alone parody.
      - koluft 10y ago
        When people name their company generic words about their product, that's what happens. Show some creativity if you want to be uniq.
    - zymhan 10y ago
      ITT: People not getting the joke
  - zymhan 10y ago
    You didn't read the post, did you? > Sorry Dropbox, we couldn't resist. It's quite an honor that you decided to use our name for something we've been building with our peer to peer file system over the last few years.
cranium 10y ago
Thanks to Infinit for this, it was right on my humour sweet spot!
mtrn 10y ago
Never heard of infinit.sh, but it looks great. The repo is almost empty, though (https://github.com/infinit/infinit https://github.com/infinit/infinit). Is the code completely open source? Could I setup infinit.sh inside my own infrastructure?
- cadeuh 10y ago
  We're open sourcing parts of our code as soon as we consider it modular and well documented enough. We started with our build system but the plan is to open source everything over the coming weeks! And yes, that's exactly why it was made for. Have a look at our examples of deployments: https://infinit.sh/documentation/deployments https://infinit.sh/documentation/deployments
  - mtrn 10y ago
    Excellent, thanks!
  - virtualritz 10y ago
    That sounds like I will be able to deploy infinit.sh on my NAS (QNAP 469), running some ARM Linux flavor?
    - ccrone 10y ago
      We don't build the FS for ARM just yet but since we use a lot of the same code we did for our file transfer application that runs on Android and iOS, it shouldn't be too difficult to do. Feel free to add and upvote what you'd like to see: http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com
  - urza 10y ago
    Hi, that is great. I've never heard of you before, so I am still trying to wrap my head around it, could you please help me understand it, I have some questions. If I have two servers, each with ZFS filesystem, could I use infinit.sh to connect them, create shared "disk" and expose it to clients on Mac/Win/Mobile so they can access the files? Will the ZFS advantages be maintained? E.g. if I set the Z2 raid on one server and mirror on another? Could I do snapshots on the server and later browse them? Will the ZFS data integrity prevent data corruption? Thanks.
Uberphallus 10y ago
It looks like Tahoe-LAFS, but without redundancy. Am I missing something?
- cadeuh 10y ago
  It's indeed similar to Tahoe-LAFS. The largest differences are that you can build hybrid infrastructures with Infinit (local storage and cloud storage) and that we try to make it really accessible and easy to setup. We made a comparison page that sums it up here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs
  - Uberphallus 10y ago
    Tahoe is listed as homogeneous, but there are arbitrary backends, including cloud ones like Dropbox.
    - rakoo 10y ago
      Note exactly, Tahoe only has Tahoe nodes chatting between each other; it can be the decision of a given Tahoe node to actually store content in the cloud rather than on the local file system, but that's a node-specific decision, not something that each Tahoe client has to speak.
Odenwaelder 10y ago
Such data. Many byte. Wow!
sickbeard 10y ago
"Project Dropboxen"
kempe 10y ago
Dropbox? No thanks, no integrity there. I'm looking forward to protonmails comming equivalent. Security and integrity for the win! It does not matter that I've nothing to hide, nsa etc has no right to prive in my personal life.
Amir6 10y ago
In reaction to Infinite's reaction to Dropbox's action, I announce my "Reaction".
davidwtbuxton 10y ago
Ha! Reminds me of Nick Lowe's reaction to David Bowie's Low. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/a2/a1/f6a2a1ca47c79fc0f0f7a2f38a0ff5f2.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/a2/a1/f6a2a1ca4... https://tomhuntington.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/bowi-and-record.jpg https://tomhuntington.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/bowi-and-r...
- nocman 10y ago
  or the band "Green"'s response to the R.E.M album "Green": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(band) (look under the heading "Singles") xD
jorangreef 10y ago
What are Infinit using for the Windows file system? Dokany? How is it working?
- ccrone 10y ago
  Yep, we're using FUSE for OS X on Mac and Dokany for Windows
  - jorangreef 10y ago
    Thanks, will you be open sourcing your FUSE and Dokany bindings? Are you getting any blue screens of death with Dokany? Is it stable enough?
    - ccrone 10y ago
      We're planning on open sourcing our implementation for the FS. We want to do it responsibly (i.e.: not a giant code dump) so it's going to take a little time. You can see our build system here: https://github.com/infinit/drake https://github.com/infinit/drake We haven't publicly released our Windows client yet but our internal build hasn't had stability issues.
      - jorangreef 10y ago
        Thanks, looking forward to learning from the source.
- patates 10y ago
  Wow, didn't even know something like Dokany[0] was even possible on Windows, let alone being already available! [0]: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany
jug 10y ago
This is really interesting for my growing photo archive where syncing isn't important (and even potentially problematic) but where covenience is! I need to take a look at this, thanks.
- amluto 10y ago
  For uses like this, I really want the ability to prevent any user (myself included) from deleting or modifying preexisting files: no matter how a client screws up, I want to be able to get old data back. I wonder how Infinit handles this.
  - ccrone 10y ago
    We plan to add versioning for exactly this. It's on our roadmap which you can find here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap
    - amluto 10y ago
      Fantastic! I hope it allows rollback to an earlier version of the entire filesystem, too. I know people who have lost large amounts of data on Dropbox because some client-side issue (malware or just plain error) deleted everything. I think they also had some online backup service that could roll back files but only if the file was still there, which is useless. Will you also support deduplication (files, blocks, context-aware blocks, or otherwise)?
      - ccrone 10y ago
        We already offer replication so that if a node goes down (or loses data) clients can still get their files. We could add deduplication to our system but it's not a priority for us just yet
Jemmeh 10y ago
You could do this all day. Like an infinite loop. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
tschellenbach 10y ago
This is hilarious :) Also, it's a terrible thing for our friends at Infinit.
lispython 10y ago
Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike. And Rob Pike once said[2]: > When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html [2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
- pjc50 10y ago
  everything was connected and uniform I've never been entirely clear whether this referred to 'everything within the Plan9 organisation' or 'everything visible from a Plan9 machine including external independent systems'. The former is much easier to achieve. So much of the nonuniformity is because of competing administrative domains.
  - knorker 10y ago
    "Everything that was on my machine was uniform because I wrote it from scratch to work the way my brain works" Yeah… that doesn't scale, no matter who you are, mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".
    - koluft 10y ago
      You seem so angry for such a bizarre reason.
mark-r 10y ago
Reminds me of the time back in 1977 when David Bowie came out with an album called "Low", and Nick Lowe followed with an EP called "Bowi".
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amelius 10y ago
Online (cloud) storage seems to be a pretty silly business to operate or invest in, given the amount of solutions available and also the "threat" of open solutions that will inevitably become popular (such as IPFS). Also, essentially, storage is a commodity product. It is ready for a race to the bottom.
- programLyrique 10y ago
  They compare Infinit with IPFS: http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs "Note however that IPFS does not focus on providing high-level file system functionalities such as access control, POSIX compliance "
  - amelius 10y ago
    Yes, IPFS was just an example. Also IPFS is being developed as a basic layer. Since it is open, we may expect many independent developers to provide things like access control, and a POSIX API on top of it.
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vikeri 10y ago
Exactly what I've been looking for! Does anyone know if I could run this on a couple of Rasberry Pi 3?
- ccrone 10y ago
  We don't do any ARM builds yet. It uses the same C++ backend we built for our file transfer application which runs on iOS and Android so it shouldn't be too hard for us to get it working on a Raspberry Pi.
  - vikeri 10y ago
    Alright, good to hear that it is within reach. In our startup what we want that we can't get from Dropbox/Google is privacy. I've been looking at owncloud which would give us privacy but redundancy seems complicated and therefore my excitement about you guys. The possibility to start out super cheap with two RasPi3 and external drives and in the future migrate to more scalable solutions like S3 would make this product pretty awesome for everyone from home tinkerers to enterprises.
olavgg 10y ago
This is seriously a big deal for the storage industry! Basically what you have created is something in high demand, yet lacking in the storage industry because of its complexity. What I've read so far is that this is a storage solution that seamlessy integrates several storage technologies, including your own. This storage layer will have cross platform clients, using Fuse and Dokany with user sessions per client managed by your Infinit Storage Service. The end-users do not have to learn a new technology/user-interface and just get an external hard drive. Very similar to how Bitcasa works, with the exception that you give the power of the actual storage architecture to the system administrators. This mean we can freely choose our own storage cluster, for example Ceph or Infinit's own. And as you plan to release this has open source, you allow a lot of new businesses to grow which together will manage to challenge Dropbox, Amazon, Azure and so on. For the last few months I have been working on building a Dokany client that used Ceph Rados-GateWay with Erasure Coding. Where I live we have really fast fiber internet with extremely low latency. Dokany is really performant and can easily manage to read/write 30-80MS/s between two clients living in Norway and Denmark(same ISP). It's a lot of work though, and there are several corner cases that causes issues. However if I scrap mine and start using your technology, I can take advantage of your great work and I can contribute back mine to make it even better. My final point being, with this it should possible to offer high performance "remote drives" to end-users. In some cases maybe even faster than an external hard drive. A partnership with a local ISP could offer them a great incentive to use this technology to sell even faster internet access to their existing customers. The best part, this traffic is inside their own network which means less money has to be paid for internet bandwidth. I know my ISP is desperate for something like this, and I guess a lot of other ISP's around the world is highly interested in offering something similar too.
- ccrone 10y ago
  Thanks, we think the same :) You can join us on Slack or IRC so that we can chat more!
kylec 10y ago
In a similar vein, I'm disappointed RedTube didn't launch something called "RedTube You" in reaction to "YouTube Red"
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  "In Soviet Russia..."
tedmiston 10y ago
The real question is which one will win on HN. /best right now: 12. Dropbox Project Infinite (dropbox.com) 741 points by maguay 3 days ago | flag | 288 comments ... 17. In Reaction to Dropbox's Project Infinite, Infinit Announced Project Dropboxe (infinit.one) 693 points by winta 5 hours ago | flag | 92 comments
NamPNQ 10y ago
Base on FuseFS
fizzbatter 10y ago
This is really, really cool. Anyone know where they prefer to post issues/requests? Looks like Github is mostly dead[1], but there is a uservoice[2]. I'm debating replacing Camlistore with this - i prefer Camlistore, but this appears to have better tooling, and easier for me to peer with nontech people [1]: https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues [2]: https://infinit-sh.uservoice.com https://infinit-sh.uservoice.com
- ccrone 10y ago
  We're still working to open source the code and put in place the infrastructure to manage a community. I'd encourage you to chat with us on IRC (freenode #infinit) or on Slack (see bottom of our homepage https://infinit.sh https://infinit.sh)

830 points by winta 10y ago

kempe 10y ago

So when the train needs to break it generates energy for storage that can be used later uphill etc. Simple and interesting, especially for regions with a lot of variation of heights.

nekopa 10y ago
Methinks your comment is misplaced. But I did have a moment of joy at the Monty Python-esque comedy it brought on :)
- kempe 10y ago
  LOL yes it is, was supposed to go to another article.
koluft 10y ago
This is also how electric car brakes work, going back to the Prius.
- maaku 10y ago
  The concept of a flywheel goes back much further than that.

sghi 10y ago

This is what they're (Infinit) are already doing, isn't it? I can see why they might be a little annoyed at the name Infinite, but it's not like infinite is an unreasonable name for Dropbox to pick for their project...

wavefunction 10y ago
With trademark, the test for a new name depends on whether the name can cause confusion with an existing trademark. When it's the same industry then it's pretty cut-and-dried in favor of the existing mark owner. Reasonability of the name has nothing to do with whether or not Dropbox can use "Project Infinite". That's the point that Dropboxe makes. Dropbox can either fight that name (which really, they must or lose their own mark meaning anyone can use "Dropbox") and lose their Project Infinite name as well.
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  I think they're being a little silly. If you use a relatively mainstream word from the language in which you do business (and which happens to be virtually identical in all languages anywhere near where you do do business), you don't (shouldn't) have a leg to stand on, IMO. You can't reasonably arrive at Dropboxe independently. But is everyone at Dropbox really supposed to tip-toe around being careful not to name a project after a common word if it's pronounced the same as a company that was accepted to a tech incubator just 2 years ago?
  - koluft 10y ago
    Parent was saying the "Dropbox" is also a generic word.
  - outworlder 10y ago
    > If you use a relatively mainstream word from the language in which you do business What about "Windows"? Or "Word"? Or "Office"? It's difficult to find words that are more "mainstream" than that. Yet, Microsoft does just fine.
    - TallGuyShort 10y ago
      Yeah and if Microsoft made tongue-in-cheek blog posts about IBM because they had something called "Project Officer" we'd all roll our eyes.

futuravenir 10y ago

Great marketing. I'd never heard of Infinit before. Now I have. Can anyone describe to me how it differs from MaidSafe? http://maidsafe.net/ http://maidsafe.net/

edraferi 10y ago
They have an excellent comparison FAQ: http://infinit.sh/faq?q=&hPP=20&idx=infinit_sh_faq&p=0&is_v=1 http://infinit.sh/faq?q=&hPP=20&idx=infinit_sh_faq&p=0&is_v=... Maidsafe isn't on there, probably because it hasn't really launched yet, but Storj, IPFS, Wuala and others are. Should give you a good feel for what Infinit is doing.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  Ceph is listed as "block" model when it's actually a distributed object store. Part of this is confusion because there has been both a block store and a filesystem built on top of Ceph (the latter named CephFS). But at its lowest level it's clearly an object store, not a block store.

tux3 10y ago

I have to admit the situation is a little funny, but Dropbox will probably have an easier time justifying their use of the word "Infinite" that Infinit justifying "Dropboxe".

Sephr 10y ago
Both infinite and dropbox are standard dictionary words. Dropboxes are also not limited to the physical world, as many online educational software platforms (that pre-date Dropbox the company) call their shared storage areas for assignment submissions a "dropbox".
- curryhoward 10y ago
  I think the parent comment meant that Infinite is a word, and also a sensible name for Dropbox to name their product. Dropboxe is a silly neologism that only makes sense in the context of Dropbox's recent press, and not a good name for a product outside of this context.
  - ifdefdebug 10y ago
    I think it's a joke. They ain't going to actually use it for any product.
    - curryhoward 10y ago
      I think we all know the article is a joke. :) But people seem to be missing that tux3's comment was also tongue-in-cheek (at least, that is my interpretation).
  - criley2 10y ago
    >I think the parent comment meant that Infinite is a word, and also a sensible name for Dropbox to name their product. Dropboxe is a silly neologism that only makes sense in the context of Dropbox's recent press, and not a good name for a product outside of this context. * Infinit is not releasing a product, this is a satirical post which "rebrands" their base service under a faux name. * Dropbox is releasing a service which directly competes with Infinit called Infinite If you think Dropbox can directly compete with Infinit using Infinite, then you should join me for my new Googl search engine!!

nashashmi 10y ago

Terrifically smart jab at Dropbox. If only more companies could take up this sort of attack, lawsuits would stop complicating life.

dhimes 10y ago
We've yet to see where this ends, however. Legal papers may be next.
- mbrutsch 10y ago
  That will Streisand on Dropbox very quickly.
  - hobs 10y ago
    Except for that in the post the author acknowledges its basically a parody. It seems like a bit of salt from DB naming their new product in the same sort of space a very similar name, which is kind of a dickish move.
    - r0muald 10y ago
      A search engine spider may not be able to understand this kind of subtlety though, let alone parody.
    - koluft 10y ago
      When people name their company generic words about their product, that's what happens. Show some creativity if you want to be uniq.
  - zymhan 10y ago
    ITT: People not getting the joke
- zymhan 10y ago
  You didn't read the post, did you? > Sorry Dropbox, we couldn't resist. It's quite an honor that you decided to use our name for something we've been building with our peer to peer file system over the last few years.

cranium 10y ago

Thanks to Infinit for this, it was right on my humour sweet spot!

mtrn 10y ago

Never heard of infinit.sh, but it looks great. The repo is almost empty, though (https://github.com/infinit/infinit https://github.com/infinit/infinit). Is the code completely open source? Could I setup infinit.sh inside my own infrastructure?

cadeuh 10y ago
We're open sourcing parts of our code as soon as we consider it modular and well documented enough. We started with our build system but the plan is to open source everything over the coming weeks! And yes, that's exactly why it was made for. Have a look at our examples of deployments: https://infinit.sh/documentation/deployments https://infinit.sh/documentation/deployments
- mtrn 10y ago
  Excellent, thanks!
- virtualritz 10y ago
  That sounds like I will be able to deploy infinit.sh on my NAS (QNAP 469), running some ARM Linux flavor?
  - ccrone 10y ago
    We don't build the FS for ARM just yet but since we use a lot of the same code we did for our file transfer application that runs on Android and iOS, it shouldn't be too difficult to do. Feel free to add and upvote what you'd like to see: http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com http://infinit-sh.uservoice.com
- urza 10y ago
  Hi, that is great. I've never heard of you before, so I am still trying to wrap my head around it, could you please help me understand it, I have some questions. If I have two servers, each with ZFS filesystem, could I use infinit.sh to connect them, create shared "disk" and expose it to clients on Mac/Win/Mobile so they can access the files? Will the ZFS advantages be maintained? E.g. if I set the Z2 raid on one server and mirror on another? Could I do snapshots on the server and later browse them? Will the ZFS data integrity prevent data corruption? Thanks.

Uberphallus 10y ago

It looks like Tahoe-LAFS, but without redundancy. Am I missing something?

cadeuh 10y ago
It's indeed similar to Tahoe-LAFS. The largest differences are that you can build hybrid infrastructures with Infinit (local storage and cloud storage) and that we try to make it really accessible and easy to setup. We made a comparison page that sums it up here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs https://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/tahoe-lafs
- Uberphallus 10y ago
  Tahoe is listed as homogeneous, but there are arbitrary backends, including cloud ones like Dropbox.
  - rakoo 10y ago
    Note exactly, Tahoe only has Tahoe nodes chatting between each other; it can be the decision of a given Tahoe node to actually store content in the cloud rather than on the local file system, but that's a node-specific decision, not something that each Tahoe client has to speak.

Odenwaelder 10y ago

Such data. Many byte. Wow!

sickbeard 10y ago

"Project Dropboxen"

kempe 10y ago

Dropbox? No thanks, no integrity there. I'm looking forward to protonmails comming equivalent. Security and integrity for the win! It does not matter that I've nothing to hide, nsa etc has no right to prive in my personal life.

Amir6 10y ago

In reaction to Infinite's reaction to Dropbox's action, I announce my "Reaction".

davidwtbuxton 10y ago

Ha! Reminds me of Nick Lowe's reaction to David Bowie's Low. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/a2/a1/f6a2a1ca47c79fc0f0f7a2f38a0ff5f2.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f6/a2/a1/f6a2a1ca4... https://tomhuntington.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/bowi-and-record.jpg https://tomhuntington.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/bowi-and-r...

nocman 10y ago
or the band "Green"'s response to the R.E.M album "Green": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(band) (look under the heading "Singles") xD

jorangreef 10y ago

What are Infinit using for the Windows file system? Dokany? How is it working?

ccrone 10y ago
Yep, we're using FUSE for OS X on Mac and Dokany for Windows
- jorangreef 10y ago
  Thanks, will you be open sourcing your FUSE and Dokany bindings? Are you getting any blue screens of death with Dokany? Is it stable enough?
  - ccrone 10y ago
    We're planning on open sourcing our implementation for the FS. We want to do it responsibly (i.e.: not a giant code dump) so it's going to take a little time. You can see our build system here: https://github.com/infinit/drake https://github.com/infinit/drake We haven't publicly released our Windows client yet but our internal build hasn't had stability issues.
    - jorangreef 10y ago
      Thanks, looking forward to learning from the source.
patates 10y ago
Wow, didn't even know something like Dokany[0] was even possible on Windows, let alone being already available! [0]: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

jug 10y ago

This is really interesting for my growing photo archive where syncing isn't important (and even potentially problematic) but where covenience is! I need to take a look at this, thanks.

amluto 10y ago
For uses like this, I really want the ability to prevent any user (myself included) from deleting or modifying preexisting files: no matter how a client screws up, I want to be able to get old data back. I wonder how Infinit handles this.
- ccrone 10y ago
  We plan to add versioning for exactly this. It's on our roadmap which you can find here: https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap https://infinit.sh/documentation/roadmap
  - amluto 10y ago
    Fantastic! I hope it allows rollback to an earlier version of the entire filesystem, too. I know people who have lost large amounts of data on Dropbox because some client-side issue (malware or just plain error) deleted everything. I think they also had some online backup service that could roll back files but only if the file was still there, which is useless. Will you also support deduplication (files, blocks, context-aware blocks, or otherwise)?
    - ccrone 10y ago
      We already offer replication so that if a node goes down (or loses data) clients can still get their files. We could add deduplication to our system but it's not a priority for us just yet

Jemmeh 10y ago

You could do this all day. Like an infinite loop. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

tschellenbach 10y ago

This is hilarious :) Also, it's a terrible thing for our friends at Infinit.

lispython 10y ago

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]: > all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike. And Rob Pike once said[2]: > When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon. [1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html [2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

pjc50 10y ago
everything was connected and uniform I've never been entirely clear whether this referred to 'everything within the Plan9 organisation' or 'everything visible from a Plan9 machine including external independent systems'. The former is much easier to achieve. So much of the nonuniformity is because of competing administrative domains.
- knorker 10y ago
  "Everything that was on my machine was uniform because I wrote it from scratch to work the way my brain works" Yeah… that doesn't scale, no matter who you are, mr "I refuse employment unless my employer gives me 'r' as login name".
  - koluft 10y ago
    You seem so angry for such a bizarre reason.

mark-r 10y ago

Reminds me of the time back in 1977 when David Bowie came out with an album called "Low", and Nick Lowe followed with an EP called "Bowi".

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amelius 10y ago

Online (cloud) storage seems to be a pretty silly business to operate or invest in, given the amount of solutions available and also the "threat" of open solutions that will inevitably become popular (such as IPFS). Also, essentially, storage is a commodity product. It is ready for a race to the bottom.

programLyrique 10y ago
They compare Infinit with IPFS: http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs http://infinit.sh/documentation/comparison/ipfs "Note however that IPFS does not focus on providing high-level file system functionalities such as access control, POSIX compliance "
- amelius 10y ago
  Yes, IPFS was just an example. Also IPFS is being developed as a basic layer. Since it is open, we may expect many independent developers to provide things like access control, and a POSIX API on top of it.

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vikeri 10y ago

Exactly what I've been looking for! Does anyone know if I could run this on a couple of Rasberry Pi 3?

ccrone 10y ago
We don't do any ARM builds yet. It uses the same C++ backend we built for our file transfer application which runs on iOS and Android so it shouldn't be too hard for us to get it working on a Raspberry Pi.
- vikeri 10y ago
  Alright, good to hear that it is within reach. In our startup what we want that we can't get from Dropbox/Google is privacy. I've been looking at owncloud which would give us privacy but redundancy seems complicated and therefore my excitement about you guys. The possibility to start out super cheap with two RasPi3 and external drives and in the future migrate to more scalable solutions like S3 would make this product pretty awesome for everyone from home tinkerers to enterprises.

olavgg 10y ago

This is seriously a big deal for the storage industry! Basically what you have created is something in high demand, yet lacking in the storage industry because of its complexity. What I've read so far is that this is a storage solution that seamlessy integrates several storage technologies, including your own. This storage layer will have cross platform clients, using Fuse and Dokany with user sessions per client managed by your Infinit Storage Service. The end-users do not have to learn a new technology/user-interface and just get an external hard drive. Very similar to how Bitcasa works, with the exception that you give the power of the actual storage architecture to the system administrators. This mean we can freely choose our own storage cluster, for example Ceph or Infinit's own. And as you plan to release this has open source, you allow a lot of new businesses to grow which together will manage to challenge Dropbox, Amazon, Azure and so on. For the last few months I have been working on building a Dokany client that used Ceph Rados-GateWay with Erasure Coding. Where I live we have really fast fiber internet with extremely low latency. Dokany is really performant and can easily manage to read/write 30-80MS/s between two clients living in Norway and Denmark(same ISP). It's a lot of work though, and there are several corner cases that causes issues. However if I scrap mine and start using your technology, I can take advantage of your great work and I can contribute back mine to make it even better. My final point being, with this it should possible to offer high performance "remote drives" to end-users. In some cases maybe even faster than an external hard drive. A partnership with a local ISP could offer them a great incentive to use this technology to sell even faster internet access to their existing customers. The best part, this traffic is inside their own network which means less money has to be paid for internet bandwidth. I know my ISP is desperate for something like this, and I guess a lot of other ISP's around the world is highly interested in offering something similar too.

ccrone 10y ago
Thanks, we think the same :) You can join us on Slack or IRC so that we can chat more!

kylec 10y ago

In a similar vein, I'm disappointed RedTube didn't launch something called "RedTube You" in reaction to "YouTube Red"

TallGuyShort 10y ago
"In Soviet Russia..."

tedmiston 10y ago

The real question is which one will win on HN. /best right now: 12. Dropbox Project Infinite (dropbox.com) 741 points by maguay 3 days ago | flag | 288 comments ... 17. In Reaction to Dropbox's Project Infinite, Infinit Announced Project Dropboxe (infinit.one) 693 points by winta 5 hours ago | flag | 92 comments

NamPNQ 10y ago

Base on FuseFS

fizzbatter 10y ago

This is really, really cool. Anyone know where they prefer to post issues/requests? Looks like Github is mostly dead[1], but there is a uservoice[2]. I'm debating replacing Camlistore with this - i prefer Camlistore, but this appears to have better tooling, and easier for me to peer with nontech people [1]: https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues https://github.com/infinit/infinit/issues [2]: https://infinit-sh.uservoice.com https://infinit-sh.uservoice.com

ccrone 10y ago
We're still working to open source the code and put in place the infrastructure to manage a community. I'd encourage you to chat with us on IRC (freenode #infinit) or on Slack (see bottom of our homepage https://infinit.sh https://infinit.sh)