arpitagarwal

Thanks for your comment, not sure what you're trying to imply, but don't you think DoorDash or Airbnb would be significantly more valuable if it told you what restaurants/Airbnbs your friends like as well? As compared to reviews from strangers.

[I see the irony as I ask strangers for reviews lol]

Built an SDK over the last few months, that can help bring back social experiences, without compromising user data security.

What do you think?

Hey HN - I'm riffing on an idea about having a dictaphone app for your desktop and mobile, where you can take notes by simply speaking into the microphone.

Above is the very first version (super simple right now). Would love to know the top challenges you face while ideating and dreaming of new thoughts.. What would you like to see, what would you like to add?

About business plan -- still playing around with it -- so put 10 Questions for free, and then will see how it goes.

Probably will do something like a $2 day pass and a $20/mo subscription. The monthly subscription would definitely have a lot of features in it. If you have any suggestions, would love to add them in!

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Hello HN

We built a tool to summarize and chat with with some of the most popular books [1], like The Book Thief [2]

The key features we felt that were necessary were:

- Quickly search your books

- Select the book and start chatting

- One click book summary

- Add link to buy on Amazon

--

Caveats:

The books library is currently very small, if we have enough interest we would be happy to source and grow the library.

--

What would you like us to add to this next?

[1] Search all books: https://www.sliksafe.com/books

[2] The Book Thief Summary: https://www.sliksafe.com/book/the-book-thief

I've built an AI Email Generator that helps you craft professional emails quickly and efficiently.

Key features include:

  - Context-aware email drafting based on your input
  - Multiple tone options (formal, friendly, etc.)
  - Adapts the email to your voice
  - Ability to directly send the email to the recipients
  - FREE to get started

Try it out for FREE: https://www.sliksafe.com/tools/ai-email-generator

I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. What features would you like to see in an AI email assistant?

Thanks for the great feedback Gary! We'll work on it. :)

That's a great point. However, in Slik's case, the data is first fragmented into small chunks and then distributed into a decentralized storage. Thus, for a bad actor to pose a problem, they'll also have to collect all the encrypted chunks, before making any sense out of it.

Yes, it can somewhat be done. The net storage costs could theoretically be tending to zero, but might never be zero because of fill-rate per node and maintaining system reliability.

That was simple, it is fast and scales as you need it. No logical consumer would like to pay gas prices of $120 on a transaction of $20.

super! :)

Looking forward to your feedback!

To ensure lifetime availability of data, we provide redundancy using Filecoin and Storj.

> I am not sure which parts are actually provided by Sliksafe.

The full end-to-end encrypted backup and sharing experience is provided by Slik. We use Storj only for storing the encrypted blobs, or simply as a replacement of S3.

> The website tells me I can pay by solana (or even by credit card!), but there seems to be no indication of how much I actually would have to pay.

Our detailed pricing page is currently available within our web/desktop apps. You can pay - 0.1 SOL for 10 GB lifetime storage (10 years), or

  - $4.99/mo for 500GB storage, and so on.. 

> That does not follow from the provided info. Simply leaking the keys in some form would already be enough as a backdoor, as the data is obviously not only stored locally.

This is similar to the problem of leaving your device accidentally open, which unfortunately is a much harder problem to solve. However, we do provide a way for you to remotely wipe a device in case of unauthorized access.

> There seems to be a lot of metadata on sliks side, or is it using some form of encrypted search?

All your metadata is encrypted on your device before it is backed up to Slik. We provide client side search experience so that Slik is unaware of even the keywords that the user is searching for.

That's some great feedback, trompetenaccoun. Slik's file storage is powered by Storj and Filecoin. About encryption, would love to hear what part you find missing in the 3 protocols for backups, sharing, and multi-device support, mentioned in our WhitePaper.

We're constantly improving our WhitePaper to provide as much clarity as possible about our systems and algorithms.

We had set lifetime storage for 10 years, and have clarified it on our website to prevent it from being misleading. Thanks a lot for your inputs! :)

Hey Arubis, I was pretty bummed about that acquihire too, but was inspired to build Slik. Please feel free to read through our WhitePaper (https://sliksafe.com/whitepaper.pdf), to learn how the technology works. We've tried to keep it simple and short.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at arpit@sliksafe.com. Happy to support your use case.

Yes, to start out, we're providing 2GB of free storage. Beyond that our costs are inclusive of multi-device sync, egress, and storage.

Awesome! Looking forward to supporting your use case. Feel free to request any feature, would be excited to integrate it. :)

Thanks for the great questions!

Reliability, performance, and a scalable infrastructure were strong selling points of Storj for us, and hence, we decided to go with them to provide a more seamless experience in terms of data upload and fetch. We also use Filecoin for immutability of user data, and as another layer of global redundancy.

Currently, we pay for storage/egress to Storj. Users can pay using dollars/crypto on our platform and we convert it to relevant Storj tokens to pay for storage. It is not automated yet, but yes we plan to automate it soon. Also, Storj does accept Storj tokens as payments.

About interchangeability, we plan to provide the migration functionality on our end to users.

We started with Firebase/Google because it was easy to setup. However, our team has been experimenting with different blockchains to sync the different file-ids and file-hashes. This would provide even more dApp developers to develop apps on top of Slik. We have a potential fit, and expect that to be integrated in H1'2022.

Those are some great points, no_circuit. We have multiple storage pricing plans, however, none of them give out $'s to users, because that would be counterproductive for the team at this point.

There are parts of the system like the multi-device sync, encryption, cross-platform support, etc. that would need to be factored in. However, reducing $/TB is an area that we plan to explore when all other systems are stable and our unit-economics is net positive.

That sounds like a great idea, cdnsteve. Slik can very easily be integrated with any backend, and we have explored more than 5 different storage backends for the SlikSafe app. Though the current storage backends work pretty well, I'd be happy to connect with the Chia project team.

Do you know anyone in their team? and if so, could you connect me with them? Thank you!

Great points gtsop! We have a very similar understanding of decentralization. My co-founder and I are passionately working on making sure that we eventually reach that goal where Slik keep going, even if any one actor falls down.

Here were our goals when we started this out -

  - Prove and implement the encryption technology [completed],

  - Switch over from centralized storage to decentralized storage [completed],

The above two goals help us achieve a working solution that users can start adopting.

Next few near-term goals are -

  - Switch over from centralized compute to decentralized compute,

  - Make the code open-source so that the technology can be extended, forked, etc as the community needs.

Hope that gives you a reason to be stoked! :)

Those are some great requests. Thank you!

We currently have a macOS app available and are targeting January for a Windows launch and a Linux launch soon after. We also have an iOS and Android app with a few beta users, and will release it around Jan/Feb'22.

Slik’s desktop apps have the ability to automatically detect changes in your local connected folder and sync those changes.

About On-demand syncing - we built Slik in a way that, once backed up, no files are required on your local machine. This doesn't prevent you from searching through all your files, and you can selectively download files based on your need.

However, I have added an item on our roadmap that would selectively download folders for offline syncing and faster access. Thanks again!

Thanks for the support pketh! We forgot to mention on our current landing page that you can also pay with $ or your favorite currency using our Stripe integration. We'll update that on our website shortly! :)

We're using Storj and IPFS as the only storage layer behind user data, not as a CDN.

Great point! We integrated the QR-code and link based sharing into the app to provide a seamless experience for users.

However, we also have an email sharing solution already integrated into the app which uses public-key cryptography. This is protected from accidental leaks as you correctly pointed out.

Thanks for the feedback, we would update our WhitePaper with the details from above, and also indicate that to users in the UI - so that it scares people less! ;)

To explain this in detail -

The encrypted file metadata (and the search indices) are downloaded at once. It is then decrypted using the user's key on device. The user then performs a client side search to get the relevant file-ids. The file-ids are then used to retrieve retrieve the file from the decentralized storage.

We could definitely expand on the search protocol in our WhitePaper, thanks for the input! However, we provide client side search and not server side search, thus, our servers have no idea of what the user is searching.

The keywords (along with other file metadata) are also encrypted using the user's key, so analyzing access patterns of the chunks, would not be possible for us.

Great question - we just keep the encrypting keys on the user's device and in-memory. The keys are encrypted using the user's seed phrase that is only known to the user, and not to Slik.

Feel free to read more implementation details in our WhitePaper - https://sliksafe.com/whitepaper.pdf