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Gopherfest 2017 | Upspin with Rob Pike

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2017–2025 score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited as the talk that introduced Upspin, and called fascinating and really good by commenters.

Rob Pike presents Upspin at Gopherfest 2017, an experimental framework for naming and sharing files and data securely and uniformly across a global namespace. It is a project written in Go rather than about Go.

“It's a fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it.” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 3 citations · Talks · intermediate · partly dated

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@bngybmgrglflps Apr 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work
"Encrypt, store, share [files] on your own terms" is elegantly handled by (Rob Pike's) Upspin. Practically: upspinfs fusermounts a cloud storage bucket. (TCO: $0.01/GB/mo.) Transparent public-key crypto. Sharing is built into the protocol. Sane defaults. [link] [this video] Building notes on top feels almost too straightforward to monetize. (For that matter: 1password, any number of small-scale B2C things, ...)
Upspin as example of encrypted sharing on own terms
@jd3 Jan 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Willow Protocol
other commenters have mentioned ipfs, dropbox, syncthing, etc. but this most closely resembles [link] with the caveat that willow is p2p and upspin uses a centralized key server [this video]
Compared to Willow Protocol as similar system
@pbohun Feb 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Turning Down Upspin Infrastructure
This saddens me because I think the concept behind Upspin is powerful. Is it really that much of a resource drain to drop the key server? I imagine it could run on a $10/mo VPS. This is the talk that introduced Upspin: [this video]
Talk that introduced Upspin

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