7 ms·

Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbo

by ipnon 1y ago

Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbox but I imagine it's there.

poly2it 1y ago
??? For the equivalent of $500 in credit you could self host the entire thing!
- haiku2077 1y ago
  You're not joking. If you're like most people and have only a few TiB of data in total, self hosting on a NAS or spare PC is very viable. There are even products for non-technical people to set this up (e.g. software bundled with a NAS). The main barrier is having an ISP with a sufficient level of service.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    Sure, hardware is cheap. However if you actually follow the 3-2-1 rule with your backups, then you need to include a piece of real estate in your calculation as well, which ain’t cheap.
    - bcraven 1y ago
      I keep a small backup drive at my office which I bring home each month to copy my most sensitive documents and photos onto. All my ripped media could be ripped again: I only actually have a couple of Tb of un-lose-able data.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      FHE is so much more expensive that it would still be cheaper.
    - palata 1y ago
      If you self-host your NAS, then your server has access to the data in clear to do fancy stuff, and you can make encrypted backups to any cloud you like, right?
    - haiku2077 1y ago
      Some people I know make a deal with a friend or relative to do cross backups to each others' homes. I use AWS Glacier as my archival backup, costs like 3 bucks a month for my data; you could make a copy onto two clouds if you like. There are tools to encrypt the backups transparently, like the rclone crypt backend.
    - dismalpedigree 1y ago
      I have true 3-2-1 backups on a server running proxmox with 32 cores, 96gb of ram, and 5TB of ssd disks (2TB usable for VMs). Cost me $1500 for the new server hardware 2 years ago. Runs in my basement and uses ~30w of power on average (roughly $2.50/mo). The only cloud part is the encrypted backups at backblaze which cost about $15/mo. Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest match on AWS is ~$1050/mo and I still have to back it up. The only outage in 2 years was last week when there was a hardware failure of the primary ssd. I was back up and running within a few hours and had to leverage the full 3-2-1 backup depth, so I am confident it works. If i was really desperate i could have deployed on a cloud machine temporarily while i got the hardware back online.
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        Only $1500? How much would this setup cost today?
        haiku2077 1y ago
        Each 2TB of SSD is like $85, double it if you want local redundancy in your software RAID. The rest is basically a nice custom PC minus a cool case and a high end GPU. A 9950X is $500, a 2x48GB kit is maybe $200. A few hundo more for a mobo, PSU and basic case.
        dismalpedigree 1y ago
        Some quick checking on Newegg and I came up with this. https://newegg.io/64113a4 https://newegg.io/64113a4 About $1200. I didn’t look into the power draw for this setup. Added bonus there is space for a GPU if you want to do some AI stuff.
    - dinosaurdynasty 1y ago
      You don't need homomorphic encryption for a backup, normal encryption suffices.
  - hoppp 1y ago
    But if you have a lot of data, self hosting is still cheaper. Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.
    - ralferoo 1y ago
      It can be quite high, but it doesn't have to be. For instance, I have a 7TB storage server from Hosthatch that's $190 for 2 years. That's $7.92 per month, or £5.88 at today's exchange rates. That's under 20p per day. Just on electricity costs alone, this is good value. My electricity costs are 22.86p/kWh which is pretty cheap for the UK. That means that if having that drive plugged in and available 24/7 uses more than 37W, it's more expensive to self host at home than rent the space via a server. Also, I've not needed to buy the drive or a NAS, nor do I have to worry about replacing hardware if it fails.
      - crtasm 1y ago
        Do they offer deals like that often? List price is "from $24/month" for 6TB (no further details provided without registering an account).
        ralferoo 1y ago
        They tend to do promotions, typically only valid for 24h and only advertised on certain forums like LET, a couple of times per year - typically at least around their company anniversary date or Black Friday. There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        > There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round. I don’t understand the logic here so I’m going to assume I’m being obtuse. Doesn’t that just mean that’s their standard price? Why or how would you ever pay more?
- drcolly 1y ago
  The statements made in the linked description of this cannot be true, such as Google not being able to read what you sent them and not being able to read what they responded with. Having privacy is a reasonable goal, but VPNs and SSL/TLS provide enough for most, and at some point your also just making yourself a target for someone with the power to undo your privacy and watch you more closely- why else would you go through the trouble unless you were to be hiding something? It’s the same story with Tor, VPN services, etc.- those can be compromised at will. Not to say you shouldn’t use them if you need to have some level of security functionally, but no one with adequate experience believes in absolute security.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 1y ago
    > The statements made in the linked description of this cannot be true, such as Google not being able to read what you sent them and not being able to read what they responded with. The beautiful thing is: they are :-)
    - throwaway478484 1y ago
      If Google’s services can respond to queries, they must be able to read them. If A uses a cereal box cipher and B has a cereal box cipher, B can can make sense of encoded messages A sends them, A can ask about the weather, and B can reply with an encoded response that A can decode and read. B is able to read A’s decoded query, and B knew what the weather was, and responded to A with that information. Security is not magic.
      - NoImmatureAdHom 1y ago
        The thing that you find magical is not only actually possible but implemented and in use! What a day for you! Enjoy it, this is a rare event :-D
      - eynsham 1y ago
        What do you think fully homomorphic encryption is, then?
      - 1y ago
mahmoudimus 1y ago
there is, it's called governments. however this technology is so slow that using it in mission critical systems (think communication / coordinates during warfare) that it is not feasible IMO. the parent post is right, confidential compute is really what we've got.
landl0rd 1y ago
For LLM inference, the market that will pay $20,000 for what is now $20 is tiny.
oakwhiz 1y ago
For most this would mean only specially treating a subset of all the sensitive data they have.
bawolff 1y ago
If we are talking 1000x more latency, that is a pretty hard sell. Something that normally takes 30 seconds now takes over 8 hours.
- hoppp 1y ago
  Its like, python can be 400 times slower than C++, but people still use it.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Yeah, because people use python when it doesn't matter and c++ when it does (including implicitly by calling modules that are backed by c implementations). That is not an option with FHE. You have to go all in.
    - hoppp 1y ago
      Yes but with FHE it also depends on the use-case and how valuable the output is and who is processing it and decrypting the final output. There are plenty of viable schemes like proxy re-encryption, where you operate on a symmetric key and not on a large blob of encrypted data. Or financial applications where you are operating on a small set of integers, the speed is not an issue and the output is valuable enough to make it worth it. It only becomes a problem when operating FHE on a large encrypted dataset to extract encrypted information. The data extracted will need to offset the costs. As long as companies don't care about privacy, this use-case is non-existent so its not a problem that its slow. For military operations on the other hand, it might be worth the wait to run a long running process
    - reactordev 1y ago
      And people will use FHE where it matters and plaintext where it doesn’t…
  - klabb3 1y ago
    For compute, which is a small part of things computers do. Many things are I/O and network bound. I’m not at all a fan of Python, but perf is the least of my concerns with it.
taeric 1y ago
Honestly, no? Unless you get everyone using said services, then a market that is only viable to people trying to hide bad behavior becomes the place you look for people doing bad things? This is a large part of why you have to convince people to hide things even if "they have nothing to hide."
PeterisP 1y ago
FHE solves privacy-from-compute-provider and doesn't affect any other privacy risks of the services. The trivial way to get privacy from the compute provider is to run that compute yourself - we delegate compute to cloud services for various reasonable efficiency and convenience reasons, but a 1000-fold less efficient cloud service usually isn't competitive with just getting a local device that can do that.

by ipnon 1y ago

Don't you think there is a market for people who want services that have provable privacy even if it costs 1,000 times more? It's not as big a segment as Dropbox but I imagine it's there.

poly2it 1y ago

??? For the equivalent of $500 in credit you could self host the entire thing!

haiku2077 1y ago
You're not joking. If you're like most people and have only a few TiB of data in total, self hosting on a NAS or spare PC is very viable. There are even products for non-technical people to set this up (e.g. software bundled with a NAS). The main barrier is having an ISP with a sufficient level of service.
- kube-system 1y ago
  Sure, hardware is cheap. However if you actually follow the 3-2-1 rule with your backups, then you need to include a piece of real estate in your calculation as well, which ain’t cheap.
  - bcraven 1y ago
    I keep a small backup drive at my office which I bring home each month to copy my most sensitive documents and photos onto. All my ripped media could be ripped again: I only actually have a couple of Tb of un-lose-able data.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    FHE is so much more expensive that it would still be cheaper.
  - palata 1y ago
    If you self-host your NAS, then your server has access to the data in clear to do fancy stuff, and you can make encrypted backups to any cloud you like, right?
  - haiku2077 1y ago
    Some people I know make a deal with a friend or relative to do cross backups to each others' homes. I use AWS Glacier as my archival backup, costs like 3 bucks a month for my data; you could make a copy onto two clouds if you like. There are tools to encrypt the backups transparently, like the rclone crypt backend.
  - dismalpedigree 1y ago
    I have true 3-2-1 backups on a server running proxmox with 32 cores, 96gb of ram, and 5TB of ssd disks (2TB usable for VMs). Cost me $1500 for the new server hardware 2 years ago. Runs in my basement and uses ~30w of power on average (roughly $2.50/mo). The only cloud part is the encrypted backups at backblaze which cost about $15/mo. Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest match on AWS is ~$1050/mo and I still have to back it up. The only outage in 2 years was last week when there was a hardware failure of the primary ssd. I was back up and running within a few hours and had to leverage the full 3-2-1 backup depth, so I am confident it works. If i was really desperate i could have deployed on a cloud machine temporarily while i got the hardware back online.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Only $1500? How much would this setup cost today?
      - haiku2077 1y ago
        Each 2TB of SSD is like $85, double it if you want local redundancy in your software RAID. The rest is basically a nice custom PC minus a cool case and a high end GPU. A 9950X is $500, a 2x48GB kit is maybe $200. A few hundo more for a mobo, PSU and basic case.
      - dismalpedigree 1y ago
        Some quick checking on Newegg and I came up with this. https://newegg.io/64113a4 https://newegg.io/64113a4 About $1200. I didn’t look into the power draw for this setup. Added bonus there is space for a GPU if you want to do some AI stuff.
  - dinosaurdynasty 1y ago
    You don't need homomorphic encryption for a backup, normal encryption suffices.
- hoppp 1y ago
  But if you have a lot of data, self hosting is still cheaper. Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.
  - ralferoo 1y ago
    It can be quite high, but it doesn't have to be. For instance, I have a 7TB storage server from Hosthatch that's $190 for 2 years. That's $7.92 per month, or £5.88 at today's exchange rates. That's under 20p per day. Just on electricity costs alone, this is good value. My electricity costs are 22.86p/kWh which is pretty cheap for the UK. That means that if having that drive plugged in and available 24/7 uses more than 37W, it's more expensive to self host at home than rent the space via a server. Also, I've not needed to buy the drive or a NAS, nor do I have to worry about replacing hardware if it fails.
    - crtasm 1y ago
      Do they offer deals like that often? List price is "from $24/month" for 6TB (no further details provided without registering an account).
      - ralferoo 1y ago
        They tend to do promotions, typically only valid for 24h and only advertised on certain forums like LET, a couple of times per year - typically at least around their company anniversary date or Black Friday. There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.
        Forgeties79 1y ago
        > There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round. I don’t understand the logic here so I’m going to assume I’m being obtuse. Doesn’t that just mean that’s their standard price? Why or how would you ever pay more?
drcolly 1y ago
The statements made in the linked description of this cannot be true, such as Google not being able to read what you sent them and not being able to read what they responded with. Having privacy is a reasonable goal, but VPNs and SSL/TLS provide enough for most, and at some point your also just making yourself a target for someone with the power to undo your privacy and watch you more closely- why else would you go through the trouble unless you were to be hiding something? It’s the same story with Tor, VPN services, etc.- those can be compromised at will. Not to say you shouldn’t use them if you need to have some level of security functionally, but no one with adequate experience believes in absolute security.
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y ago
  > The statements made in the linked description of this cannot be true, such as Google not being able to read what you sent them and not being able to read what they responded with. The beautiful thing is: they are :-)
  - throwaway478484 1y ago
    If Google’s services can respond to queries, they must be able to read them. If A uses a cereal box cipher and B has a cereal box cipher, B can can make sense of encoded messages A sends them, A can ask about the weather, and B can reply with an encoded response that A can decode and read. B is able to read A’s decoded query, and B knew what the weather was, and responded to A with that information. Security is not magic.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 1y ago
      The thing that you find magical is not only actually possible but implemented and in use! What a day for you! Enjoy it, this is a rare event :-D
    - eynsham 1y ago
      What do you think fully homomorphic encryption is, then?
    - 1y ago

mahmoudimus 1y ago

there is, it's called governments. however this technology is so slow that using it in mission critical systems (think communication / coordinates during warfare) that it is not feasible IMO. the parent post is right, confidential compute is really what we've got.

landl0rd 1y ago

For LLM inference, the market that will pay $20,000 for what is now $20 is tiny.

oakwhiz 1y ago

For most this would mean only specially treating a subset of all the sensitive data they have.

bawolff 1y ago

If we are talking 1000x more latency, that is a pretty hard sell. Something that normally takes 30 seconds now takes over 8 hours.

hoppp 1y ago
Its like, python can be 400 times slower than C++, but people still use it.
- bawolff 1y ago
  Yeah, because people use python when it doesn't matter and c++ when it does (including implicitly by calling modules that are backed by c implementations). That is not an option with FHE. You have to go all in.
  - hoppp 1y ago
    Yes but with FHE it also depends on the use-case and how valuable the output is and who is processing it and decrypting the final output. There are plenty of viable schemes like proxy re-encryption, where you operate on a symmetric key and not on a large blob of encrypted data. Or financial applications where you are operating on a small set of integers, the speed is not an issue and the output is valuable enough to make it worth it. It only becomes a problem when operating FHE on a large encrypted dataset to extract encrypted information. The data extracted will need to offset the costs. As long as companies don't care about privacy, this use-case is non-existent so its not a problem that its slow. For military operations on the other hand, it might be worth the wait to run a long running process
  - reactordev 1y ago
    And people will use FHE where it matters and plaintext where it doesn’t…
- klabb3 1y ago
  For compute, which is a small part of things computers do. Many things are I/O and network bound. I’m not at all a fan of Python, but perf is the least of my concerns with it.

taeric 1y ago

Honestly, no? Unless you get everyone using said services, then a market that is only viable to people trying to hide bad behavior becomes the place you look for people doing bad things? This is a large part of why you have to convince people to hide things even if "they have nothing to hide."

PeterisP 1y ago

FHE solves privacy-from-compute-provider and doesn't affect any other privacy risks of the services. The trivial way to get privacy from the compute provider is to run that compute yourself - we delegate compute to cloud services for various reasonable efficiency and convenience reasons, but a 1000-fold less efficient cloud service usually isn't competitive with just getting a local device that can do that.