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Joanna Rutkowska leaves Qubes OS, joins Golem

• wglb 8y ago
  You should use the proper title: * The Next Chapter: From the Endpoint to the Cloud
  • concernedctzn 8y ago
    Counterpoint: Joanna is a highly regarded security researcher and this is big news for the Qubes project. I wouldn't have clicked on this link if it was presented with the generic title
    • Tomte 8y ago
      Your counterpoint doesn't matter, this site's rules are very clear. If you wouldn't have clicked the link, that's a pity, but that's something the article's author brought on himself.
      • luckyorlame 8y ago
        rules are only useful when they serve their intended purpose.
      • delroth 8y ago
        herself
      • voltagex_ 8y ago
        Herself.
    • sidkshatriya 8y ago
      I agree. A name sometimes conveys more information than a generic title.
• wanderfowl 8y ago
  Joanna's brilliant, and this Golem project is fascinating. The idea of a secure remote compute arrangement is sort of a natural extension from Qubes, and this is a pretty unique approach. May she (and Qubes, and Golem) find great success.
  • wanderfowl 8y ago
    Reading the Golem website, I'm no longer sure that I 'get it'. Is this just a decentralized AWS or supercomputing service which is payable using $ThisWeeksHotCryptocurrency? Her description made it sound less like a marketplace for spare cycles and more like a thin-client sort of thing.
    • hackermailman 8y ago
      It's a Graphene SGX fork running docker containers so far.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • jacoblambda 8y ago
      In the end it is supposed to be a decentralised AWS/cloud computing service with the benefits that computation is more or less private (limited to no snooping) and (the actually important bit) with market driven pricing that seems to be driving the cost below that of AWS. Sia and a number of other projects are trying to address hot and cold storage while Golem and company are addressing the compute. With some clever architecture design, these decentralised systems could be combined to make a decentralised remote server.
  • forapurpose 8y ago
    > a secure remote compute arrangement is sort of a natural extension from Qubes I see what you mean, but on the other hand it's a threat to the endpoint security she's worked so hard on. If Intel offered a solution that allowed remote users to run code on your machine, no matter how secure they claimed it to be the response here would rightfully be 'what could go wrong?' Can it be made secure enough? (I'm aware that Intel already offers such things, including via SGX which others in this discussion say is utilized by Golem.)
• StreamBright 8y ago
  From her new project: https://golem.network/ https://golem.network/ >> Ethereum-based transaction system Is this going to be fast enough for their use cases?
  • pjc50 8y ago
    Sounds like FileCoin for CPU rental. Could be legit, especially as they're not creating their own token for this purpose. Nonetheless, by using Ethereum they're still committing to burning a lot of electricity - would be interesting to know if it's more or less power than used in the actual computation they're selling.
    • Karunamon 8y ago
      Ether is planning on moving to proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work some time in 2019, which should help with the power consumption. https://www.mangoresearch.co/ethereum-roadmap-update/ https://www.mangoresearch.co/ethereum-roadmap-update/
      • linuxdude314 8y ago
        GNT is the ERC-20 token they use. Golem had an ICO last year. It would be really challenging to figure out how much power is used by a particular ERC-20 token given that mining is performed on the whole chain, not a token bybtoken basis.
    • ddtaylor 8y ago
      It's worth mentioning Ethereum has been planning to switch to proof-of-stake (PoS) mining instead fo proof-of-work (Pow) for a long while now. They even have a "time bomb" built into their PoW algorithm they have to "reset" every once in a while because these original plans were more aggressive. I'm not necessarily in favor of PoS, but it does "solve" the electricity concerns you are raising. Also insert here long winded explanation of how much power is used by existing banking infrastructure.
    • wycs 8y ago
      >Could be legit, especially as they're not creating their own token for this purpose. Maybe I am confusing them for another project, but I am pretty sure they do have a token model.
• AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Best of luck to her. It's sad to see her go; I still don't think Qubes OS is quite ready for prime-time yet.
  • jake_the_third 8y ago
    why?
• ddtaylor 8y ago
  Very interesting to see her joining Golem. I have been following them for many years and I'm excited to see what they produce, but they seem to have been in a holding pattern for a while unable to produce progress in some ways. I think she'll probably help solve that.
  • wycs 8y ago
    I'm not fond of the economics of Golem. I suspect they will not be able to compete with centralized solutions, as they have to support all sorts of redundancy to make things trustless. They could make it more federated, but then how is that better than AWS? And why do you need a token at all?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • ddtaylor 8y ago
      Most of those complaints could be said about cryptocurrency in general, such as Bitcoin, which by technical standards isn't very "efficient" compared to a centralized ledger. Just as there are a lot of people out there that are interested in banking but not interested in playing at the scale of being a bank I think there are a lot of people interested in contributing to a decentralized computing infrastructure without having to create a large dedicated data center.
    • vvillena 8y ago
      When you use AWS you're subjected to AWS pricing and AWS servers. A more open network where everyone can offer computing power has the potential to reduce the lock-in effect that all the big cloud vendors force upon their customers. The initial goal of Golem was to be so efficient that the best way for big cloud vendors to offer their services would be through the Golem platform. That's obviously a moonshot, but it helps us to see what the Golem team is aiming for.
• orliesaurus 8y ago
  Looks like Joanna left the project in good hands. She says Golem raised money but the challenge to me seems being able to verify whatever computation is being done as trustworthy/correct. Unlike in crypto transactions, it becomes hard to build a trustworthy network where computation can be verified, especially because there are so many different kinds of computations available out there
  • camjohnson26 8y ago
    Can't zkSnarks help with this? https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/05/zksnarks-in-a-nutshell/
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• agounaris 8y ago
  Who is Joanna Rutkowska and what is Qubes OS :S
  • lloeki 8y ago
    The first link of the top header is 'INTRO' leading to a page which literally has 'What is Qubes OS?' as the first h2. The third link of the top header is 'TEAM' leading to a page where Joanna Rutkowska is the most obvious topmost item, appearing above the fold on many devices (even my phone!), complete with her title(s). Sometimes comments make my day. This is not one of them. I am achingly speechless.
• lvh 8y ago
  FWIW: just over half of Latacora uses Qubes on a daily basis. We do that because "Xen VM" is a pretty great boundary; it allows me to have totally separate client environments with the convenience of a single laptop. (We've had a client have us use their endpoint before; while I generally like that client, we won't be doing that again :-)) It's not flawless. Sometimes switching to a big screen or moving USB devices between VMs is wonky... but the bottom line is I haven't booted my MacBook Pro for work in 2018. We stopped using MBPs because the then-current now one-minor-rev old generation is trash; all of them broke, and that was unacceptable, so I have a Lenovo (again). Happy to answer questions about Qubes. FWIW: not worried about Qubes' future. As Joanna herself points out in the blog post: Marek has been doing most of the technical day to day stuff for a while now, and Qubes has been doing just fine. I'm really thankful for the work Joanna has done in making Qubes happen and hope her new endeavors are everything she wants them to be :)
  • wanderfowl 8y ago
    What's hardware compatibility like? Did/do you struggle to find good portable machines to run Qubes on with solid wireless/bluetooth support? As somebody whose (trash) recently-current MBP just spent the weekend with Apple due to a display failure, I'm evaluating my options.
    • lvh 8y ago
      I have a T470 -- at the time the most recent T-series 14" Thinkpad. Everything pretty much worked fine? But that's just one data point. Perhaps if they're super new, you'll run into more issues. dom0 is hyperconservative with updates, so maybe you'll need to run testing-grade stuff to get all your hardware to work properly. I think I had an issue with WiFi + suspend/resume but that was easy to fix, and fixed by default now. (It involves reloading the driver after resume -- that's automatic now but the setting lives in a config file.)
      • storrgie 8y ago
        For what its worth the T4x0(s) series has been very good for Linux in general. We've been hopping the odd numbers every other year.
• fabricexpert 8y ago
  Golem has the potential to solve the Cloud Trustworthiness problem, and it's an interesting problem one with huge upside if it we ever get there. How do we verify that the the code we're running (e.g. the VPN we have set up on a VPS in the cloud, or the web server we're connecting to) is actually running the code it says it's running? Ethereum can do that (because it's just one giant computer running the same code and verifying it's state after every functional call), it's just really, really slow and insanely expensive. Perhaps they'll figure this out, if they do, it will be awesome.
  • cloud_man 8y ago
    Can solve it with TEEs (e.g. SGX). I think that's what they're working on.
  • AgentME 8y ago
    >Ethereum can do that (because it's just one giant computer running the same code and verifying it's state after every functional call), it's just really, really slow and insanely expensive. Also, everything on Ethereum is public.
• zapita 8y ago
  These ICO-funded research projects are turning into the next Xerox Parc, IBM Research etc. I doubt they will ever ship something practical directly, or that the investing public will ever get their money back, but they are spending the money by hiring great engineers and researchers and giving them free rein to have fun with no budget restrictions. I suspect that will result in fundamental advances that will benefit us in the long term, like Darpanet eventually gave us the Internet. I want to believe that something good will come of this, beyond incinerating cash building products nobody actually wants to use. (Yes, I’m saying that Golem as described is impractical and naive, and giving it so much funding so early makes it even harder for them to learn hard lessons and succeed as a product). In a way, they found a way to trick us into paying more taxes to subsidize public research and development! You’ve got to respect that.
  • jacoblambda 8y ago
    The difference is that unlike taxes, these research projects are 100% opt in and you get to pick which project to support.
    • zapita 8y ago
      I think most ICO participants expect something in return other than “lots of cool research that won’t be immediately practical, but might indirectly advance society in 20 years”. They expect either financial gain through speculation, or a successful launch of the product specified by the ICO whitepaper. They will most likely not get either of those things.
      • nostrademons 8y ago
        I wonder if this is really true. My understanding is that the majority of ICO funding actually comes from Bitcoin & Ethereum "whales" who got in early, own thousands of coins worth tens of millions of dollars, `and are looking for something cool to do with it that won't trigger a huge tax bill. (Well, technically investing in an ICO is a taxable event, but when you can just use your private key to send Ethereum from your pseudonymous address to a smart contract that exists everywhere and nowhere at once, enforcement is difficult.) Most of the newbie Bitcoin investors I've met at meetups have been very wary of ICOs. Too risky; they won't go near them. Occasionally they'll be someone who spreads maybe 5% of their crypto portfolio across a dozen ICOs, but they're the die-hard exceptions. If this is the case, the analogy really is more like Google X or YCombinator: an already-wealthy firm who spends money on passion projects because they can, with the potential added benefit of a small chance of an even bigger payoff down the road, and a nice PR boost in the meantime that increases the value of their primary holdings.
• floatboth 8y ago
  Oh no. From a serious OS project to a buttcoin startup. I guess these people are the ones that pay the big money these days…
• sdwisely 8y ago
  Another challenge is the trustworthiness of the x86 platform. I can only imagine that's incredibly frustrating. Knowing no matter how hard you work on Qubes, x86 isn't really deserving of trust right now.
• thyrsus 8y ago
  In case someone else is just learning about these folks: ITL is Invisible Things Labs.