2025-02-11 announcement: Turning down Upspin infrastructure
Upspin, like Unix and Plan 9, was intended to foster communities of sharing, but has been less successful at that than we hoped. As a consequence, with regret, we have decided to turn down the central infrastructure such as the keyserver over the coming months
On March 4, we will turn off keyserver for a week. This warns even people not following this list that something is happening. Then on May 6, we will turn it off permanently. If this will cause more pain than we're aware, please email grosse@gmail.com and let's discuss options.
There is much about Upspin that still seems attractive compared to alternatives. The combination of strong end-to-end encryption with the convenience of upspinfs letting you run existing apps effortlessly has been great. Bringing the idea of automatic nightly snapshots from Plan 9 to modern systems also feels great in use.
Contributors have also proposed valuable improvements, and a backlog has developed on reviewing and installing these, which is part of what prompted this decision. Some examples are: switching from a central keyserver to ssh-like authorized_keys files in clients and dirservers, revised API for Block unpacking enabling parallel reads, a clearer model for permissions on Access and Group files, and post-quantum-cryptographic packing that can defend against future rogue governments. The question is whether the size of the community justifies the effort.
We thank all who tried out Upspin!
Andrew, Dave, Eric, and Rob
Documentation: upspin.io
Upspin is an experimental project to build a framework for naming and sharing files and other data securely, uniformly, and globally: a global name system of sorts.
It is not a file system, but a set of protocols and reference implementations that can be used to join things like file systems and other storage services to the name space.
Performance is not a primary goal. Uniformity and security are.
Upspin is not an official Google product.
Upspin has rough edges, and is not yet suitable for non-technical users.
The code repository lives at GitHub.
See the Contribution Guidelines for more information on contributing to the project.
Please report issues through our issue tracker.
All Upspin users should subscribe to the Upspin Announcements mailing list to receive critical information about the project.
Use the Upspin mailing list for discussion about Upspin use and development.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
The Upspin mascot is Copyright 2017 Renee French. All Rights Reserved.