Dear Distributed Secure Storage fans, The time has come to shed our conspiratorial pretense of being nothing but small disparate bands of neighborly do gooders sharing storage with their friends. It is time to reveal to the world our true conquest of world domination and announce our intent to create The One Grid to Rule Them All!
What on earth is he talking about, you may be asking? I'm talking about extending the Boring Old Web (BOW) with the ossm-sauce that is Tahoe-LAFS so that we can spring our despotic vision of provider independent security on the unsuspecting subjects of our new world order! Capabilities should be universally shareable in the same contexts as URLs in general! This is our vision! Dissent on this manner is heretical (but we will still openly accept mailing list posts, ticket submission and herding, documentation help, patches, and any other contributions from such counter-revolutionaries). Ok, enough thespianism: I personally want to be able to email or tweet or inscribe on papyrus a URL containing a read cap, and anyone who sees that and has Tahoe-LAFS version Glorious Future installed should have a reasonable chance to retrieve the content. How could this be designed and implemented? There are myriad trade-offs to consider: Non-global use case: A fair number of users probably want a *non global grid* such as for their own enterprise or collective, so it would be nice to avoid dumping more complexity on them. On the other hand, if the features were opt in, that adds configuration complexity. Storage Management Policy: Some schemes would automate share placement using some fancy DHT related technology, but that would interfere with individual users and storage operators from deciding where their data lives. Efficiency / Latency / Reliability: Some schemes would add a separate global resolution system, but this adds round trips (latency), reliability. Incentives: A non-global grid often has "natural incentives" (same company, same friend group, etc..) A global system has different incentive issues. See [1]. Mental Models: Some schemes may be complex to understand, reducing the ability of many users to anticipate the effects of their choices or whom or what they are relying upon and for what features. Implementation Cost: Some schemes may be complex to implement, increasing the time to implement, the chance of bugs, etc... There are probably many other tradeoffs I fail to account for, I just want to get the ball rolling on this. Let's be really clear about the costs of various approaches. As a concrete step, I propose a new ticket keyword: "globalcaps" for any ticket related to making capabilities globally usable. Regards, Comrade Nathan Grid Universalist References: [1] The Tahoe-LAFS community has a great awareness of incentive issues. This is a good starting page: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Ostrom
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