By Andrew Gerrand, Eric Grosse, Rob Pike, Eduardo Pinheiro and Dave Presotto, Google Software Engineers
Existing mechanisms for file sharing are so fragmented that people waste time on multi-step copying and repackaging. With the new project Upspin, we aim to improve the situation by providing a global name space to name all your files. Given an Upspin name, a file can be shared securely, copied efficiently without "download" and "upload", and accessed by anyone with permission from anywhere with a network connection.
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I don't see much that's compelling yet - it's supposed to be targeted at normal users - *Our target audience is personal users, families, or groups of friends* but as soon as you talk about keys etc most of them would switch off, so that's going to be a hard sell.
Feels like they need a killer app which then drives adoption, because this sort of thing requires people to adopt it for something useful to make it thrive.
There's an announcement blog post about this here:
https://security.googleblog.com/2017/02/another-option-for-file-sharing.html
There's some interesting discussion over on HN with some of the authors chiming in.