skierpage
With each Ubuntu release Canonical made fewer changes to Unity 7 on the desktop (the one I remember is moving from a global menu to a menu in a program's title bar), because the new awesome was around the corner...
They do. If you run your own web or blog server you can provide resources at HTTP URLs forever. The server cost is dropping to zero either by running it on your home router or paying pennies/free for a small cloud instance. The biggest expense is owning and maintaining a domain name forever.
If Upspin takes off, you could provide resources at Upspin file paths forever without needing your own domain.
The problem is people like social sites, most of us now expect to be able to like and share and comment on resources. So although I will consider Upspin as a way to provide pictures to friends and family who aren't on Facebook, I'm unlikely to ever stop also putting them in the walled garden on Facebook for the upvotes. And building a social protocol in which Facebook will give a damn competing with other implementations seems vanishingly unlikely right now.
Yes it is. An Upspin file path like [email protected]/dir/file is not obviously part of any scheme. If Upspin takes off, all the automagic parsing of plain text (that makes [email protected] and news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc automatically turn into a clickable e-mail link and an HTTP URL) could be extended to turn [email protected]/dir/file into a link that fires up a GUI to the Upspin service. The problem is that the file path also looks like an HTTP/S URL for https://example.com/dir/file specifying the username ann, so copying it into your browser's location bar without a scheme is fundamentally ambiguous.
Even though Upspin uses HTTPS for its API (e.g. https://store.upspin.io/api/Store/Get/something), there doesn't seem to be an HTTPS URL for access to a particular file. Since [email protected] is by design just an email identifier disconnected from the directory server and storage server that ann uses to store her files, clients can't skip the root key server and talk to example.com to request ann's files, even though in some cases it will be the same server name.
Yes, if you store [email protected]/dir/file and share the file path publicly then the valid email address "[email protected]" leaks out. If you own your own domain then you could have one or more email address only associated with Upspin and store at [email protected]/dir/file. The downside is the username in such paths is less recognizable to your friends than your regular email.
The reality today is anyone who uses any Google service or who has a Facebook page has an exposed @gmail.com or @facebook.com email address that can be spammed, and if he or she signs up for Upspin it's another way for it to leak out. You can use any email address that can receive the confirmation email; I'm not sure if [email protected] is a valid email address, and there's no email address with your Twitter handle.
> What happens if you switch email providers?
You would execute a new `upspin signup -dir=dir.example.com -store=store.example.com [email protected]` command, keeping the same directory and storage servers. The question is whether you can tell your directory server and storage server to reuse or alias your directory and storage to those of your previous email address.