| I've thought that we could potentially build an end to end encrypted datastore within Polar and possibly add IPFS support to potentially help with this issue. Here's a blog post about our datastores for some background. https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p... ... essentially Polar is a PDF manager and knowledge repository for academics, scientists, intellectuals, etc. One secondary challenge we have is allowing for sharing of research but I'd like to do it in a secure and distributed manner. Some of our users are concerned about their eBooks being stored unencrypted and while for the majority of our users this will never be a problem I can see this being an issue in countries with political regimes that are hostile to open research. In the US we have an issue of researchers being harassed over climate change btw. Having a way to encrypt your knowledge repository (ebooks) would help academic freedom as your employer or government couldn't force you to give them your repository. But what if we went beyond this and provided a way to ADD documents to the repository from a site like LibGen? Then we'd have the ability to easily, with one click, encrypt the document (end to end) and added it to our repository. If we can add support for Polar to allow colleagues to share directly, this would be a virtual mirror of LibGen. Alice could add books b1, b2, b3 to their repo, they could then share with Bob, only he would be able to see b1, b2, b3, then they would generate a shared symmetric key to share the books. No 3rd party (including me) would have any knowledge what's going on. I'm going to assume our users are not going to do anything nefarious or pirate any books. I'm also certain that they're confirming to the necessary laws ... The challenge though is that while we'd be able to have a mirror of LibGen and more material, it would be a probabilistic mirror - I'm sure we'd have like 60% of it but the obscure material wouldn't be mirrored. Right now our datastores support just local disk, and Firebase (which is Google Cloud basically). While we would encrypt the data end to end in Google Cloud I can totally understand why users might not like to use that platform. One major issue is China where it's blocked. Something like IPFS could go a long way to solving this but it's still very new and I haven't hacked on it much. |